2. Immigration and Settlement – Government Policy

Revitalisation of the community through immigration is the central theme of Australian Jewish history. As noted in Chapter 1, successive waves of ‘newcomers’ have reinforced Australian Jewry numerically and spiritually in the century and a half since the gold rush, most notably in the 1880s and 1890s, during the interwar years and after 1945.

Pre-1939 immigration policy

European antisemitism, manifested in the pogroms and discriminatory legislation of Czarist Russia, spurred hundreds of thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews to leave Russia and Poland for more hospitable shores (including Australia) after 1882. A small number of émigrés, disillusioned with the harsh realities of attempting to reclaim a barren wilderness in the Holy Land, similarly chose to come here from Palestine in the early 1900s.

The deteriorating state of European Jewry following World War I and, in particular, after the rise of Nazism, proved ironically to be the salvation of a dwindling and fast-disappearing Australian Jewish community in the interwar years. Substantial influxes of Jews from Eastern Europe in the 1920s and Central Europe from 1933 augmented communal numbers dramatically. The migration of Holocaust survivors to Australia after 1945 more than doubled the size of Australian Jewry. In addition, Jewish refugees from Egypt settled in Adelaide in the 1950s and, subsequently, small numbers of Hungarian, South African and Russian Jews have elected to emigrate here.

The National Archives has comprehensive and extensive holdings dealing with the immigration process, encompassing shipping records, passenger listings, migrant selection documents (including displaced persons files), ‘aliens’ registers, numerous indexes and policy documents. Augmenting these are large collections of naturalisation files. A detailed survey of such a huge volume of material is outside the scope of this guide, and readers should refer to the relevant information in the National Archives genealogy guide, Finding Families.

In this chapter, the evolution of Government policy on the immigration of non-British Jews into Australia is discussed. Related topics are also covered – such as the Evian Conference, the work of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, the issue of Jewish child migration, land settlement schemes (particularly the Kimberleys proposal) and the postwar ‘Are you Jewish’ debate.

As noted in Chapter 1, the arrival of sizeable numbers of Yiddish-speaking Jews from Russia in the late 19th century was a cause of some concern, both to sectors of the general public and to leaders of the Anglo-Australian Jewish establishment. This influx (and rumours that further hordes of ‘Cossacks’ were bent on immigrating here) has been cited as a catalyst for developing and implementing the White Australia Policy. On one occasion, the Sydney Bulletin averred that the ‘Hebrew’ was even less desirable as an immigrant than the ‘Chinese’.[18]

One of the first decisions of the new Federal Parliament was to enact the Immigration Restriction Act 1901. The Act specified that exclusion was to be on the basis of performance on a dictation test and was aimed at barring non-Europeans from settling in Australia. It remained in force until 1958. Unstated in its promulgation – and in the introduction of the dictation test – was the intense nationalist desire to keep Australia 98 per cent British.

Hilary Rubinstein has noted that ‘resistance to bloc settlement of foreign migrants, and negative stereotyping of Jews’ were key factors in Australian immigration policy from the turn of the century through to the interwar period, and that ‘xenophobic attitudes [which] intensified in Australia as a result of the First World War’ had a direct impact on that policy.[19] ‘Although initially directed against non-white immigration’, writes Michael Blakeney, ‘the dictation test was amenable to direction against other racial targets’. Blakeney notes that Egon Kisch, a Czech Jewish socialist seeking entry to Australia in the 1930s, was forced to undertake a dictation test in Gaelic.[20] Ethnic or national origin rather than mere ‘colour’ became a major criterion in immigrant selection, leading, for example, to the discriminatory classification of Syrians or Maltese as ‘coloured’, or of Jews born in Palestine (albeit to European parents) as ‘Asiatics’.[21]

It should be noted, however, that it was not until the 1920s that any official attempt was made to limit the immigration into Australia of Jews per se. An estimated 2000 Eastern European Jews settled here during that decade. The United States Government’s decision to restrict the flow of Jews from Russia and Poland provided the impetus for Australia to follow suit. Concerned about the possibility of large-scale influxes of refugees following devastating famine and pogroms in the Ukraine, the Government enacted its first restrictions on European migrants in 1924, insisting that intending entrants must possess either £40 landing money (as well as the fare to Australia) or a written guarantee of sponsorship.

More furtively, in response to official memoranda that intending Polish Jewish emigrants were generally ‘unsuitable’ men of ‘poor physique’ and possibly unsafe ‘political views’, liable to form ghettos here as they had in London, the Home and Territories Department bluntly recommended that the British consulates deliberately create difficulties with the language test. Notwithstanding his own reservations about the importation of poor, foreign Jews en masse, Rabbi Francis Lyon Cohen of Sydney’s Great Synagogue protested eloquently against such abuses of the selection process.[22]

In 1928, the Government initiated a formal quota on migrants from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Greece and the Balkans, ensuring that the limits were enforced with particular strictness in the case of Eastern European Jews.[23] A personal petition by prominent British Jew, Lucien Wolf, that the number of Jewish immigrants be increased was likewise rejected. Blakeney argues that the official response to Polish Jewish migration in the 1920s ‘set the scene’ for the response to immigration from Central Europe in the following decade.[24]

Refugees and the Evian Conference

In 1930, with the Great Depression severely affecting Australia’s workforce, the Scullin Government tightened up entry requirements for ‘aliens’, demanding that only those immigrants who had £500 landing money, or who were dependent relatives of aliens already living in Australia, would be permitted to enter the country.

Following the election of Adolf Hitler in Germany, a group of concerned Jewish spokesmen, led by Rabbis F L Cohen and Israel Brodie, went to Canberra and personally lobbied the Minister for the Interior to admit a limited number of skilled German-Jewish refugees. But it was to no avail. Two years later, and following Hitler’s promulgation of the notorious Nuremburg Laws, prominent Sydney leader Sir Samuel Cohen presided over the formation of the German Jewish Relief Fund, which tried to emulate similar initiatives in Britain by raising funds to assist young German Jews to escape to Palestine or other ‘safe havens’.

Simultaneously, Cohen, Brodie and Brigadier Harold Cohen (among others) continued to press Government members for an easing of immigration restrictions. The Lyons Government compromised by reducing landing money to £50 for those migrants guaranteed by family or friends. It also encouraged the formation of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society (AJWS) to coordinate migration processes. Australia House in London reportedly received 120 inquiries a day from would-be immigrants in March 1938, while the AJWS received 1200 pleas for assistance in the week following the Austrian Anschluss alone.

The AJWS has been subject to some criticism by historians for its reluctance to allow too large an ‘influx’ of refugees into the country. Analysis of its correspondence seems to suggest, however, that the AJWS was sensitive to Government and public sentiment and that its actions were determined by the canny presumption that any marked increase in migrant numbers would merely jeopardise existing, and already tenuous, concessions.

The AJWS was responsible for obtaining permits, organising transport and administering the technicalities of the voyage out, sponsoring individuals and families lucky enough to be chosen, caring for and accommodating them on arrival, assisting them to find work and generally ensuring as steady an integration process as possible. It faced an enormous and often heart-breaking task. Peter Medding argues that the AJWS was forced to sift through more than 70 000 applications in all, but it was able to accept only a fraction of them.[25] Viewed with the benefit of hindsight, the AJWS’s correspondence files contain some of the most touching and distressing documents in the National Archives holdings.

In July 1938, Australia followed Britain’s lead by agreeing to send representatives to Evian, France where a world summit was to seek solutions to the refugee problem. Dubbed officially the ‘Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees’, the conference – originally the initiative of US President Franklin D Roosevelt – brought together delegates from 32 nations. Although disappointing, the conference outcomes were hardly surprising. It was clear from the outset that none of the participating countries was willing to modify its existing migration restrictions.

Australia was perhaps more honest than other participants in this regard. Lieut Col T W White, Federal Minister for Trade and Customs and head of the Australian delegation, bluntly informed the conference that his country was committed to its policy of British migration. Pointing out that Australia’s current intake rate was (pro rata to its population) comparable to that of any other nation, White emphasised his Government’s reluctance to unleash a potential racial problem through the large-scale importation of ‘foreigners’.[26]

White was voicing what seems to have been a widespread national sentiment. According to a public survey conducted at this time, only 17 per cent of the Australian population was in favour of large-scale immigration of Jews. Correspondence in files reveals intense disquiet (at least in some quarters) about the reluctance of Jews to integrate or the possibility that refugees would ‘swamp’ some professions or take away jobs from ‘Australians’. For example, rigid quotas were imposed on the number of refugee practitioners able to enter the medical profession in Australia.

Paul Bartrop maintains that the Evian Conference ‘clearly demonstrated that the nations of the world – and particularly Australia – did not yet fully understand the implications of what was happening in Germany in any terms other than their own’.[27] Kristallnacht in November 1938 forcefully underlined the dire predicament facing German Jews. In response to increasingly urgent calls to increase its refugee intake, the Australian Government announced that it would accept 15 000 refugees (12,000 of them Jews) over the subsequent three years.

Bartrop argues that this apparent ‘liberalisation’ of policy was, in fact, nothing of the kind. Citing National Archives sources, which indicate that Australia was effectively already accepting 5100 refugees per annum (prior to December 1938), he notes that the new quota actually reduced the proposed intake.[28] Designed to advertise the Government as compassionate, liberal and ‘humanitarian’, in reality, the new policy ‘cynically used the opportunity... to curtail whatever trend there had previously been towards a growth in refugee admissions’.[29] As it was, a mere fraction of the first annual quota had reached Australia before World War II broke out. Hilary Rubinstein estimates that, in total, only some 7000 Jews settled in Australia between 1933 and 1939.[30]

Among those who did manage to reach these shores were small groups of child and adolescent migrants. According to Glen Palmer, who has examined the issue in Reluctant Refuge, approximately 100 Jewish children and adolescents (40 to 50 of them aged under 16) managed to surmount immigration hurdles and find a haven in Australia in the 18 months before war was declared. Included in the number were 20 Jewish boys and youths sponsored by the Welfare Guardian Society, a further 20 (aged 14–16) sponsored by the Polish Jewish Relief Fund, and 17 (aged 7–12) sponsored by the AJWS.[31]

Noting that the Federal Government facilitated the evacuation and emigration of around 570 British children in 1940, and that organisations involved with British child migration were unable to fill their quotas, Palmer has condemned the uncompromising official response to the plight of the young Jewish refugees.[32] Konrad Kwiet notes that the AJWS successfully negotiated with the Federal Government for permits to enable a further 450 Jewish children (some of them stranded in France) to enter Australia during the war. As it turned out, none of them arrived at that time, due to the difficulties of getting out of Europe, the limited transportation available, and ‘the decision of Australia to follow the example of the allies and afford the rescue of the Jews only a marginal significance’.[33] Although greater numbers of unaccompanied child survivors were permitted to enter Australia after 1945, these children also found themselves subject to considerable restriction.

Once war had been declared against Germany by Britain and its allies in September 1939, immigration effectively ceased, although it should be noted that small numbers of refugees did manage to come to Australia via the Orient in the early years of conflict. As former citizens of enemy states, quite a number of them were promptly (albeit temporarily) interned as ‘enemy aliens’ alongside a group of German and Italian refugees (many of them Jews) who were deported to Australia from Britain on the Dunera in 1940. Many of the Dunera boys, and other Jewish internees who stayed in Australia, contributed to the allied war effort by joining the Eighth Employment Company following their release. For more details about ‘enemy aliens’ and the Dunera affair, see Chapter 1.

Important files documenting Government policy on Jewish and other ‘alien’ migration in the 1930s, and continuing into the World War II period, include:

The Kimberley Scheme

The political Zionist movement evolved in the late 19th century as a response to the spread of nationalist fervour throughout Europe, and in reaction to accelerating antisemitism in Poland, Russia and elsewhere. Its goal was the ultimate establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Daunted by the seemingly insurmountable political and agricultural obstacles which confronted Zionist idealists, pragmatists like British novelist Israel Zangwill, head of the Jewish Territorial Organisation, believed that the foundation of a Jewish state in a more hospitable and less-contested part of the world was a more feasible objective. Accordingly, at different times the Jewish Territorial Organisation and the Jewish Colonisation Association explored possible sites in remote regions of Canada, Argentina and Uganda. Not surprisingly, in view of this country’s uninhabited vastnesses, several attempts were also made to establish Jewish settlements in Australia.

Inspired by Zangwill, Melbourne businessman and philanthropist Isaac Jacobs campaigned unsuccessfully in the early 1900s for a Jewish agricultural colony at one of several possible sites in northern Australia. Jacobs finally succeeded, on a small scale, by helping set up nine newcomer Russian-Jewish families on an orchard settlement in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley in 1913. In the late 1920s, a similar farming scheme was launched, in aid of recent Russian immigrants, at Berwick in Victoria.[34] Unlike the Shepparton project, which prospered into the 1950s, the Berwick settlement fell prey to the Great Depression.

In the 1930s, a number of organisations and individuals approached the Federal Government about the possibility of settling groups of Jewish refugees in unpopulated or under-populated regions of Australia – partly as a safeguard against the invasion of an unguarded north should hostilities break out. A proposal that 800 German and Austrian Jewish refugees be given permits to enter the country and establish an agricultural colony in South Australia won the tentative endorsement of South Australian Premier R L Butler but was vetoed federally.[35] Similarly, a bid by J H Catts, of Australian Business Services, to establish a Jewish national home in New Guinea (an area, according to Catts, larger than Palestine and having ‘better possibilities’ without the difficulties ‘besetting the Balfour experiment’) failed to find support.[36]

On these, as on other occasions, the Lyons Government stressed its unshakeable objection to the ‘block’ settlement of aliens.[37] Other visionaries advocated possible settlements on Melville Island or in the Barkly Tablelands and Victoria River regions of the Northern Territory, or in the Port Stephens area of NSW. The NSW proposal aimed at bringing together Jewish refugees, unemployed Australians and British immigrants.[38] Much more ambitious in scope and conception was the Kimberley Scheme.

Following the Evian Conference, the London-based Freeland League (founded in 1935) proposed the purchase of seven million acres in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia (encompassing the properties of Connor, Durack and Doherty) as a farming settlement for a potential 50 000 refugees from Nazism. The League envisaged that a vanguard party of 500 to 600 ‘pioneers’ would construct homes, a power station, irrigation works, etc, pending the arrival of the main body of colonists.

Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg (1888–1957) was sent out from London in 1939 to investigate the scheme’s feasibility and to enlist governmental and communal endorsement. A skilled emissary, he stayed in Australia throughout the war and later wrote a book on his experience, Australia: The Unpromised Land. Steinberg won the support of churches, leading newspapers, many prominent political and public figures (including Western Australian Premier J C Willcock) and a number of Jewish leaders.

The project came to nothing in the end, however, primarily because of concerns that the settlers would drift inevitably and in large numbers to the cities. Forty-seven per cent of the public opposed the scheme in a 1944 opinion poll and, in July of that year, Prime Minister Curtin formally rejected the proposal. Curtin’s decision had bipartisan political support.[39]

In the early years of World War II, Steinberg was also associated, albeit marginally, with another unsuccessful scheme, this one aiming to resettle Jews who survived the war in the remote south-west of Tasmania. The Tasmanian project was the ‘brainchild’ of Critchley Parker, a young Melbourne philosemite who died tragically in 1942 while reconnoitring the region he recommended.[40]

Records pertaining to the various land settlement schemes, in particular the Kimberley project, can be found in:

Post-1945 immigration policy

World War II dramatically underlined the vulnerability of an underpopulated Australia, and acting Prime Minister Frank Forde put forward the need for a scientific migration policy – speculating on a postwar goal of 70 000 a year – in August 1945. In response to a request from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) in that same month, Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell announced that 2000 close relatives of Jews already resident in Australia would be granted entry ‘on humanitarian grounds’. Permits were conditional on the applicants being Holocaust survivors.

The scheme was subsequently extended to include Jewish refugees currently stranded by the war in safe havens such as Shanghai, Manila and elsewhere in the Far East. Over 18 000 Jews had fled Europe to places as far away as Shanghai by the outbreak of war, and a further 1000 Polish refugees were sent there by Japan in 1940. As it had before the war, the Australian Jewish Welfare Society took on responsibility for processing applications and supporting the migration process.

In the light of public opinion at the time, Medding has termed the Government’s decision ‘particularly courageous’. Unsurprisingly, Calwell and his policy were subjected to a virulent campaign by the Returned Services League, sections of the press, a number of federal and state politicians including former Premier Lang of NSW and the outspoken Liberal MP Henry Gullett, and a vocal section of the public. Fifty-eight per cent of those surveyed in a 1947 opinion poll were against Australia being a sanctuary for dispossessed Jews.[41]

Revitalised pre-war accusations of special treatment surfaced as claims that refugees were taking priority on ships over Australian servicemen, or that Australia was to become a dumping ground ‘for people whom Europe had not been able to absorb for 2000 years’. As Suzanne Rutland has written: ‘the fears and prejudices which had frustrated a humanitarian approach to Jewish migration in the free world before World War II reappeared’.[42]

No doubt resentment against Jewish newcomers was reinforced by the turbulent final years of the British mandate in Palestine, including the bombing of the King David Hotel and other anti-British demonstrations by Jewish nationalists. As a result, and probably in a bid to safeguard his somewhat insecure position, in 1947 Calwell placed limits on the number of Jews entering Australia – a quota of no more than 25 per cent of Jews on any ship coming to Australia. In that same year, he ended the program of migration on humanitarian grounds.

Calwell’s policies were continued under Harold Holt, the Liberal Minister for Immigration. In 1952 an embargo was placed on migration of residents and former nationals of, or persons born in, Iron Curtain countries, and on migrants from Israel because of its open-door policy. Medding notes, however, that departmental policy after that time was ‘not steady’ – regulations were flexible enough to enable many thousands to enter Australia, sponsored by friends, relatives or the AJWS.[43] Several thousand Sephardi Jews, most of them Egyptians expelled in the aftermath of the Arab–Israeli conflict, managed to migrate to Australia in the 1950s. Most of them settled in Adelaide. An estimated 3000 Jews from the Soviet Union arrived here from the early 1970s.

Government policy towards refugee immigration into Australia in the 1930s and 1940s has been the subject of substantial debate among historians of the Australian Jewish experience. As noted above, Paul Bartrop has argued that the so-called ‘liberalisation’ of immigration policy after November 1938 was, in reality, a smokescreen for a slightly decreased intake of Jews. Rutland suggests that there was a ‘significant dichotomy’ between official and unofficial attitudes towards the refugees, and that investigation of the implementation of immigration policy in the late 1940s reveals ‘a picture of departmental subterfuge’ worthy of an episode of the TV classic Yes Minister.

Rutland has located in National Archives records evidence of active discrimination against would-be migrants. For instance, she notes that only 500 of the 190 000 displaced persons brought to Australia under the IRO work scheme were Jews; that the embargo on Iron Curtain migrants was aimed chiefly at Jews; that Sephardi Jews were subject to particularly rigorous restriction; and that would-be immigrants stranded in Shanghai by the war were classified as ‘thoroughly undesirable’ by the immigration officer responsible. As a result, no more than 1500 Shanghai Jews managed to enter Australia. She also cites as discriminatory the 25 per cent limit on Jews.

W D Rubinstein, on the other hand, argues that the vast majority of Jewish displaced persons were either completely out of the reach of western relief agencies or had no desire to migrate to Australia. For them, a Jewish homeland in Palestine was the only viable option. He stresses that, despite all claims of overt and covert discrimination, at least 17 600 Jewish survivors reached Australia between 1945 and 1954 – the largest single increase in Australian Jewish numbers in the country’s history. ‘Indeed,’ he argues, ‘Melbourne’s well-known post-war reputation as containing, proportionately, more Holocaust survivors than any Jewish community in the Diaspora plainly sits uneasily with a claim that severe restrictions on their migration did exist’.[44]

While conceding that Arthur Calwell bowed to public pressure over the question of Jewish migration, Richard Broome notes that the former Minister for Immigration ensured that Australia took in proportionally more displaced persons than any other nation in the 1940s.[45]

Typical of the debate has been the argument over the significance of the so-called ‘Are you Jewish’ clause on Immigration Forms 40 and 47. Introduced by the Lyons Government in 1939, ostensibly as a convenient way of allocating the quota of Jewish refugees and also, of course, as a way of keeping control on numbers of refugees, applicants for entry to Australia were asked specifically whether or not they were Jewish. Notwithstanding protests from the Jewish community, the offending question remained on the forms until 1953 when, as Rutland observes, Jewish immigration had ceased to be ‘a threat to the Government’s immigration policies’. Bartrop labels the use of the wording ‘a simple case of bureaucratic racism developed to identify Jews for the purpose of exclusion rather than admission’. Rubinstein argues (in defence of the Government) that the ‘Are you Jewish’ question actively discriminated in favour of Jews, ensuring that quotas were filled.[46]

Important files dealing with aspects of Government policy on Jewish migration in the years after 1945 can be located in the following series: