A Secret Country Page 11

  A glimpse of Australia as it was begins to explain why. At the close of the Second World War, with a land mass roughly equal to that of the United States, Australia had a population of around seven million. On maps it appeared suspended between two great oceans, at the southern tip of Asia, ‘alone and vulnerable’, as school textbooks used to say. Japanese attacks against Darwin and Sydney had convinced most Australians that the Yellow Peril was intent on having its way with the Great White Virgin of the South. This did not happen, but it might have happened; and when Calwell launched his post-war immigration policy with the slogan, POPULATE OR PERISH, he exploited brilliantly the nation’s deepest fear. ‘We have twenty-five years at most to populate this country’, he declared, ‘before the yellow races are down upon us.’ With these words he set in train a process which, to some, was to justify his own warning.

  If Calwell had undisclosed motives, his own background put him beyond suspicion. During the 1930s he had opposed the admission of immigrants from anywhere, even refugees from Europe. In so doing, he had reflected dutifully the wishes of the Australian labour movement, which regarded ‘aliens’ as those who took a decent man’s job and worked for less pay. Chinese were barred from trade unions. The world’s first labour Government, formed in Queensland in 1899, saw as its ‘historic task’ the protection of white workers’ jobs from the ‘threat’ posed by bonded sugar-cane workers, the ‘Kanakas’, whom the plantation owners had shipped from the islands of the south-western Pacific. The federation of the Australian States in 1901 was founded on racial exclusion and included legislation which prohibited permanent settlement by non-Europeans. This was enforced by a bizarre dictation test, not in English but in a language deliberately chosen to ensure the applicant’s failure. Japanese war brides of Australian servicemen were to be ‘tested’ in Gaelic and lawfully denied entry. Not surprisingly, such a device originated in South Africa.

  ‘It is my hope’, said Calwell, even before the Japanese surrender in 1945, ‘that for every foreign migrant there will be ten people from the United Kingdom.’13 The hope was illusory, as Calwell must have known. There were not enough ships to bring that number of British people to Australia. At the same time he appeared to be preparing Australians to think of themselves as belonging to a ‘new America’. He extolled the ‘splendid specimens of American manhood walking the streets of Australian cities’ during the war and said that when he recalled that:

  America has been, for more than a generation, a melting pot for European nations, I am satisfied with the result of the amalgamation. We should lose nothing by adopting a similar policy. It would be far better for us to have in Australia 20 million or 30 million people of 100 per cent white extraction than to continue the narrow policy of having a population of 7 million people who are 98 per cent British.14

  The fact that the United States was an ‘amalgamation’ of many cultures other than European was conveniently suppressed.

  On July 21, 1947 Calwell signed the historic agreement for unlimited numbers of ‘displaced persons’. Prime Minister Ben Chifley and his Cabinet undoubtedly knew what this meant. The Australian people did not know, and were not told.

  On December 7, 1947 the first shipload of ‘DPs’ arrived in Melbourne and Calwell’s great ruse was unveiled. The passengers had been carefully chosen. They were all from the northern Baltic states and they were all young and single. None was a Jew. The press, radio and newsreel recorded the arrival of this smiling, waving group, among whom there just happened to be fluent English speakers who were delighted to effuse for the cameras on the ‘Australian way of life’. A young blonde woman was recorded for posterity proclaiming her appreciation of ‘your kookaburras, your lovely kookaburras’. Twenty-five years later Calwell remembered fondly his ‘beautiful Balts’. There were, he said, ‘a number of platinum blondes of both sexes. The men were handsome and the women beautiful. It was not hard to sell immigration to the Australian people once the press published photographs of that group.’15

  Having manipulated the media and, he hoped, public opinion, Calwell ensured that ‘less desirable’ categories followed quickly, almost stealthily – although the 400 Australian immigration officers sent to Europe were instructed to favour ‘European races’; Jews especially had to be ‘exceptionally good cases’.16

  Tom Stratton was one of the 400 directed, as he put it, ‘to find an entire population’. Having helped to select the shipload of ‘beautiful Baits’, he served in eastern Europe, Greece and Britain. A genial, kindly man from a traditional Sydney working-class background, he is retired and lives overlooking the Pacific at Manly. He described to me ‘an amazing period when all the excitement and guilt were part of the same dream . . . it was like standing at the gates, arbitrarily stopping one or two in a crowd that surged past you.’

  I asked him what was meant by the White Australia Policy.

  ‘Well, there never was one,’ he replied. ‘What we had was something verbal called a Non-European Policy under which a person had to be 60 per cent European in appearance and outlook.’

  ‘What did that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Mate,’ he replied, ‘Christ only knows . . . ’scuse my French.’

  ‘Did it mean, say, people with dark hair, dark eyes, dark complexion?’

  ‘Maybe it did. Nobody ever told me. So you played God. I still have regrets about people I turned down. There was this bloke I can never get out of my mind. I was on the Hungarian/Yugoslav border, where we were dealing with Hungarian refugees. Well, as you may know, Hungarians are normally fairish people or of fair appearance colourwise . . . you know what I mean . . . well, this bloke was a Hungarian gipsy and he was dark . . . very, very dark . . . and I rejected him. And he used to stand outside my open-door office for days on end and I’d look at him and think, “I’ve got to give him a go.” But then I’d think of the effect on him when he got to Australia.’

  ‘The effect on him?’

  ‘Yes, you see I visualised him walking down Martin Place in Sydney, and in 1956 if somebody coloured walked down Martin Place, he would be at the centre of all attention. So I rejected him for two reasons . . . one, for Australia’s sake and the other for himself . . . so he wouldn’t be embarrassed and treated badly when he got there.’

  I asked how he assessed a potential immigrant’s ‘outlook’.

  ‘A tricky one, outlook. Say, if you were working in Lebanon and a fellow turned up on a camel . . . and now I’m not joking, this happened . . . and shall we say he was wearing pantaloons, a fez and a big droopy moustache, etcetera. Well, here again you have to visualise him riding down Martin Place.’

  ‘That’s assuming he brought his camel with him.’

  ‘Correct. But camel or not, he had to be rejected. He just wasn’t right.’

  I asked Tom about the propaganda of the time, which depicted Australia as an immigrants’ paradise.

  ‘A paradise . . . that’s right. I suppose in the early days we did present a rosy picture, particularly in Britain. We wanted the British, you see. Now you may recall the whingeing Poms going back home, saying they had been brought out under a misapprehension . . .’

  ‘Who were the whingeing Poms?’

  ‘Well, most of the whingeing Poms – and I hate using that expression – stemmed from the wife who missed home and her mother. That was the basis for the whingeing Poms. And to stop whingeing Poms coming here, I was sent to Brighton in England in 1966. Well, in came this couple, and the husband was a typical fop . . .’

  ‘A typical . . . fop?’

  ‘Correct. Anyway, this fop had inherited a hundred thousand pounds from his father. The wife was an overbearing, domineering woman who said to me, “Oh yes, we’ll go out to Australia, we’ll show them.”

  ‘I thought, “You’re going nowhere, lady.” Reject!’

  ‘So their outlook was wrong?’

  ‘Definitely correct. No one would have spoken to the woman because of her overbearing attitude and, anyway, some Australian conma
n would have got his hands on the hundred thousand pounds within a month.’

  I asked Tom about the regrets he had. ‘In many ways it was a sad time,’ he replied. ‘The displaced persons were sad people. The poor devils would come to you with no papers, no background. They were doctors who couldn’t prove they were doctors. And these people weren’t popular simply because they couldn’t speak English. I tell you, I didn’t boast that I worked for the Department of Immigration because even my mother-in-law said, “What are you doing, bringing those reffos out here?”’

  The ‘poor devils’ and ‘reffos’ had to work where they were sent for up to two years. Australia wanted mostly labourers, so immigrants with skills had to lie and say they had none. The former New South Wales Labor leader, Jack Lang, called it ‘slave labour under the guise of immigration’.17 The newcomers were bonded to ‘dirty jobs’ which Australians would not do. ‘DPS TO HAVE ONLY UNATTRACTIVE JOBS’, said a headline in the Sydney Morning Herald and the story had a reassuring tone. The unnamed source was Arthur Calwell. Fear not, it said, doctors were to dig roads, engineers were to scrub public lavatories, musicians were to collect garbage and nurses were to work on assembly lines; and their qualifications would not be recognised. They were to work unsocial hours and if redundancies were required, they were to be the first to be dismissed. And if they objected, the unions would not protect them. Indeed, the unions had insisted on these conditions. That was the good news.18

  The suffering of the ‘DPs’, or ‘Balts’, was generally kept secret. It was not known that people lived in fear of petty, often punitive officials, who controlled their lives and told them little; that mental breakdowns were common; that children grew up not knowing parents who were forced to work the night shift at some distant factory.

  The policy then was ‘assimilation’. For the immigrants it was Catch 22. It meant that they were expected to become indistinguishable from the Australian-born population as quickly as possible, but that helping them to achieve this was anathema to the ideology of ‘sameness’. Hence the tortured logic that nothing was to be explained to people in a language other than English and that interpreter services and special programmes were ‘counter-productive’. The Government had invented a perfect foil against demands that it should meet the needs of people it had sponsored and labelled ‘New Australians’.19

  Apart from the departure home of a flock of ‘whingeing Poms’, or a shoot-out involving ‘gangs’ of ethnic origins, immigrants were not news. Like Aborigines, they were declared invisible; in this way traditional Australian life could proceed without its devotees being aware of or discomfited by the trials of the ‘New Australians’ and of the prospective seismic changes in their own society.

  Perhaps the seeds of future ‘acceptance by default’ lay in this almighty ignorance; for the majority, becalmed in indifference, perceived no threat. It is not surprising that some ‘old’ Australians today cannot grasp that those who now represent almost half the population bore their hardships and sometimes broke their dreams, unseen and unacknowledged, and are the nation’s modern heroes.

  In those days, had the term ‘Third World’ existed, much of Australia would have qualified. The population lived ‘off the sheep’s back’; the industrial and manufacturing base was tiny. Public works were often regarded as a national joke. Huge, unattended holes were left for so long that no one could remember why they were dug in the first place. In Sydney I grew up near a mysterious cavern that was said to mark an underground railway station. Similarly, the word ‘pot-holes’ became part of the Australian lexicon, denoting the state of the nation’s main roads which regularly disappeared from the map, beneath dust, mud and water.

  The arrival of the ‘New Australians’ changed that. One of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century is a monument to them. Begun in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme grew to a massive complex of tunnels, dams, bridges and power stations that turned the great east-flowing rivers of New South Wales away from the ocean and into the outback, realising the pioneer dream of irrigation in two States and enough electricity for Sydney and Melbourne. The builders of this were of sixty nationalities, an international brigade who fought on a subterranean battlefield, digging in, blasting, moving forward, looking out for each other, dying. For every dam they built, for every mile of tunnel they dug, at least one man would die. In Cooma, in the Snowy Mountains, there are many flags and a cenotaph with lists of ‘reffo’ names: Larchowski, Nagy, Sevegnano, Pizol, Sledowski . . .

  In 1949 Michael and Valentina Makeev were ‘DPs’ indentured to work on ‘the Snowy’. Michael’s parents were white Russian who had fled from Germany after the First World War. His wife, Valentina, also a Russian, lived in Yugoslavia but ended up in Germany where she met Michael in a displaced persons’ camp. ‘We could have applied for America,’ said Michael, ‘but Australia was interesting because we knew nothing about it, except that it had a lot of sheep. For us, coming from war, that sounded so wonderfully uncomplicated!’

  I met the Makeevs in the Snowy Mountains, which they never left. At No. 2 Alkoomi Place, Cooma, past beds of sweet-pea flowers and behind frilly curtains, they live surrounded by photographs of their forty-year odyssey as ‘New Australians’. In one photograph Valentina, a striking young woman in a finely tailored jacket, skirt and high heels, her hair in the fashionable braided style of the 1940s, poses, beaming, with a kangaroo against a landscape of bleached, ragged bushland.

  ‘In the camp in Germany’, said Valentina, ‘we sat across a table from this Australian official who didn’t say much, only that we’d have to be indentured. We didn’t know what this meant. And he said we’d have to be separated. Michael would have to go to the Snowy and me to a domestic job somewhere. This was terrible! I pleaded against it, but the man said, “Where will you live with him, Madam? There are no houses, just tents.” I thought, “Mister, I’m not being separated from my man. You wait and bloody see!”’

  Michael: ‘On the day we arrived in Sydney it was very hot. We were put on a train and sent west to Bathurst migrant camp, where there were sheets of ice on the ground. What sort of a crazy country was this? At Bathurst we lived in a camp of round tin huts; we waited; we didn’t know what was happening to us. Then someone came and said the train to the Snowy left in an hour and I’d better be on it.’

  Valentina: ‘We clung to each other. I didn’t mind a bloody tent!’

  A tent it was. Pitched on frosty ground on the rim of a valley near the Snowy Scheme camp at Jindabyne, it did not always withstand the wind that scythed down from the mountains. There was no running water, and power was one hurricane lamp. Valentina was alone for weeks at a time while Michael worked in the tunnels and slept at the base camp. She could speak only a few words of English. There was no transport and the weather often enclosed her.

  ‘I didn’t sit like a stupid woman,’ she said. ‘I was a dressmaker, so I went out and found sewing and I did it under a hurricane lamp; I guessed a lot where the stitches went. I was lonely, yes, but it was my life, my decision . . . I had one big complaint, though . . .’

  Michael: ‘My God, here it comes.’

  Valentina: ‘Cows! I am afraid of cows. I think I have cow phobia. I have nightmares about cows. Once upon a time a cow chased me in Yugoslavia and I can’t forget it. So you just imagine what it was like: every time I left the tent to get food, this cow would come up and stare at me, and I’d be terrified. I even learned to say, “Get lost, mate”, or something Australian like that to the cow . . . but no good . . . So I bought a cow.’

  ‘You were afraid of cows and you bought a cow?’

  ‘Yes. When you have one of these big fears, you should confront it; and it was better for me to be frightened of my own cow, than by somebody else’s cow. Anyway, we needed the milk.’

  The Makeevs progressed to a shack and put in a wood stove. The shack was next to a river where they bathed and washed their clothes, even in winter when it snowed. Still terrified of her own cow tethered o
utside, Valentina shared the shack with a kangaroo. ‘Someone shot his mum,’ she said. ‘His name was Richard and he sat between me and Michael and had everything we ate. He loved boiled eggs. He loved wine. We tried to drink a lot of wine, and so did Richard. He also had a schnitzel once.’

  ‘Did he like it?’

  ‘Loved it.’

  ‘With wine?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Michael shared a cabin on the site with two other men whom he seldom saw and who spoke languages he did not know. They would nod in the shadows at a change of shift, using the lingua franca of ‘Howyagoinorite?’ Each man worked a different eight-hour shift, so that work never ceased, except when a man was killed, usually crushed by a rockfall or machinery. Then all shifts would go into Cooma and drink through the day and night. ‘It was a ritual,’ said Michael. ‘The only time we ever got to know one another was when there was a death. It was like war.’

  Valentina: ‘We have never resented those bonded years. We wanted to forget Europe and be left alone. And Australia is where people leave you alone. No one ever called me a “reffo”.’

  The Displaced Persons Programme created almost 200,000 new citizens. But this was not enough. Australian officials now began to look south and east. The Korean War, in which Australia was an early and eager participant, reinforced the fear implicit in ‘Populate or Perish’. Although the Labor Party had lost power in 1949, Calwell’s policies were pursued by the conservative Government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies. So anxious was Australia for people, millions of people, white people, or as white as possible, that officials scoured the world for more ships that would bring waiting immigrants from Britain, Germany, Holland, Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Greece, Malta and Cyprus.