Unearthing details

A major contribution to humanitarianism

Andrew Markus

The Humanitarians: Child war refugees and Australian humanitarianism in a transnational world, 1919–1975

by Joy Damousi

Cambridge University Press

$141.95 hb, 360 pp

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Damousi’s work is a major contribution to the expanding field of humanitarianism, presented as an Australian case study focused on child war refugees. Through a historical lens, it explores complex, multilayered, and shifting meanings. It brings into focus the intersection of humanitarian concerns and broader political questions related to immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender in the era of White Australia.

The chapters are structured around four overlapping concepts: saving, evacuating, assimilating, and adopting. They encompass a range of activities including fundraising, aid and development schemes, child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, and inter-country adoption. The study is theoretically positioned within Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’, in which individuals and their collectives define the valuable and the harmful, ‘the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore’.

Spanning six decades, Damousi’s study traverses the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The transnational positioning follows the humanitarians on their travels to sites of conflict, the bringing to Australia of new ideas, languages, and causes, and the taking of Australian perspectives to the global community.

A distinctive feature of the study is its framing around biographies, primarily of women and with attention to less wellknown activists, some of whose roles in global movements have been inadequately recognised. These include Cecilia John, a left-wing activist during World War I, a supporter of Vida Goldstein’s electoral campaigns, and an attendee at the 1919 Women’s International Peace Congress in Zurich.Affected by images of starving children,John established an Australian branch of the Save the Children Fund.

In 1937, Esme Odgers, a member of the Australian Communist Party, travelled to Britain and then to Spain at the time of the Civil War. She worked to establish children’s hostels, managing a home near the French border with 300 children. She agitated for financial support, writing emotive accounts of the needs of the children for the Australian press.

Aileen Fitzpatrick, social worker, was involved in attempts to rescue Jewish children during and after World War II, alongside efforts to repatriate child refugees from the Greek Civil War in the 1940s and 1950s.

Margaret Watts, pacifist and Quaker activist, had an extraordinary career dating from World War I, when she helped form the Brisbane branch of the Children’s Peace Army, to the 1970s when she worked for the adoption of Vietnamese war orphans. Other activities included her reporting in the 1920s on the famine in Russia, her role as welfare officer for the NSW Society for Crippled Children, and advocacy for the admission to Australia of German orphans and teenage girls after World War II.

Arguably the one gap in the book relates to the forced removal of Aboriginal children, who could be considered as victims of war and within the scope of Damousi’s study. These removals link with themes of the book, including the limits of the humanitarian imagination.

While the treatment of Aboriginal children is not addressed at the conceptual level, there is passing mention of Indigenous issues. It is noted that Ernest and Mary Bryce, concerned with the plight of Armenian children, were distinctive among humanitarians in seeing parallels with Australia, referencing violence, displacement, and genocide. Ernest Bryce campaigned for investigation into the treatment of Australian Aborigines, commenting in 1926 that it is ‘dreadful to find such apathy amongst Australians about these unfortunate people’.

The one substantive discussion is in the context of the Save the Children Fund’s work with Aborigines in country Victoria. In the 1950s, the Fund, led by Sister Melba Turner and with full-time workers, sought to provide benevolent, assimilationist assistance. There is, however, no explanation for the focus on Victoria; no broad context to locate issues pertinent to Aboriginal children.

The book’s concluding chapter references relations between Indigenous and other Australians, and observes that the ‘devastating and violent removal of children from Indigenous families which was entrenched in government policy … resonated within Australia’. This is a surprising comment in a historical study that has not explored that resonance.

Despite this proviso, readers of The Humanitarians are treated to a book based on meticulous research, knowledgably positioned within the international literature. It will be recognised as an authoritative work and will stimulate local and international interest. The clarity and precision of its writing, the concise narratives which deftly navigate the wealth of unearthed detail, engage the reader, introducing activists and their changing perspectives. It is unfortunate that the high cost of this edition will limit access to this important study. g

Andrew Markus is Emeritus Professor in Monash University’s Faculty of Arts. His publications include the co-authored Struggle for Aboriginal Rights (1999) and Second Chance: A history of Yiddish Melbourne (2018).