Picturing and Re-Picturing by Wodonga Council

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla BRUCE PENNAY

Author: Bruce Pennay OAM Design: Wodonga City Council Printing: Specialty Press ISBN: 978-0-9599885-2-9 Published by Wodonga City Council, PO Box 1040, Wodonga, Victoria 3698. ÂŠ Bruce Pennay 2016 Views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Wodonga City Council. Most of the images used in this publication have been drawn, with permission, from the National Archives of Australia, the Bonegilla Collection at the Albury LibraryMuseum and the Border Mail archives. Not all reproduce well. Nevertheless, they act as important memory or imagination prompts. We thank the people who have made them available. All reasonable efforts were made to identify the source and obtain reproduction permission. In some cases, copyright holders could not be traced. The publisher and author welcome information with regard to copyright or privacy concerns. Acknowledgments For their support, I thank the Department of Environment; Wodonga City Council and the Bonegilla Migrant Experience; AlburyCity Council and Albury LibraryMuseum; Border Mail and Fairfax Media; Museo Italiano and the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; Charles Sturt University School of Environmental Science and Institute of Land Water and Society. Michael Wenke at the National Archives of Australia, Stephen Bigelow at Albury LibraryMuseum, Howard Jones and John Pennay provided much-needed and appreciated help. This project has been supported through funding from the Australian Governmentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Community Heritage and Icons Grants programme.

Bruce Pennay

Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre In 1947, Bonegilla Army Camp was re-used as a reception and training centre for the first contingents of displaced persons that Australia admitted under an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation. Altogether, Australia took 170 000 of Europe’s displaced. Over half of them, 91 000, were received at Bonegilla. From 1952 to 1971, Bonegilla continued as a reception centre, taking in about 310 000 new arrivals – assisted migrants and refugees – almost entirely from non-British European countries. It proved to be the largest and longest-lived reception centre in post-war Australia.

Bonegilla Migrant Experience – a public memory place In May 1990, the remnant Block 19 of the 24-block centre was put on the Register of the National Estate. As a registered place of ‘special value to future generations’, it was protected from demolition or major change. In 2002, it was put on the Victorian Heritage Register and prepared as a ‘commemorative place and tourism venue’. In 2007, it was included on the National Heritage List as a place of ‘outstanding heritage value to the nation’. A two-metre plaque declared the former reception centre ‘a symbol of post-war migration which transformed Australia’s economy, society and culture’. Block 19 has been developed as a public memory place for as long as it operated as a reception centre.

Bonegilla is on the southern bank of the Murray River just above Hume Dam, about 9km from Wodonga in north-east Victoria and 12km from Albury in southern New South Wales.

Aerial photograph c.1960, A1200, L41006, National Archives of Australia (NAA).

Introduction .........................................................................................................................

Picturing the reception of Europe's displaced, 1947–1952 ......................................

Picturing the reception of migrant workers, 1960–1971 ......................................... 52

The 1961 riot – ‘another Eureka’ ......................................................................................... 54

In the immediate wake of the 1961 riot ............................................................................. 56

No longer a stark former army camp .................................................................................. 58

Feeding Bonegilla .................................................................................................................. 60

Filming Bonegilla .................................................................................................................. 62

Depicting the growing migrant presence ............................................................................ 64

Closing Bonegilla ................................................................................................................... 66

Introducing Bonegilla and the post-war immigration program ........................................ 10

Preparing to host a reception centre .................................................................................... 12

Boasting about Bonegilla, 1949 ........................................................................................... 14

The crush of many people, 1949 and 1950 ......................................................................... 16

A health scandal, 1949 .......................................................................................................... 18

Dispersing people to workplaces all over Australia ............................................................ 20

Getting work at Bonegilla ..................................................................................................... 22

Mixing with others in and beyond the centre ..................................................................... 24

Projecting public faces of Bonegilla and its residents ........................................................ 70

Challenging official representations .................................................................................... 26

Crafting place-based visual stories ...................................................................................... 72

Hailing Bonegilla as a successful reception and training centre, 1951 and 1952 ........... 28

Depicting place memory with pen, needle and brush ....................................................... 74

Australianising the newly arrived ........................................................................................ 76

Eating the past ....................................................................................................................... 78

Heeding earlier times at Bonegilla ....................................................................................... 80

Sharing personal memories at a public place ..................................................................... 82

The flicker of faces ................................................................................................................. 84

Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 86

References, endnotes and picture attributions ........................................................... 88

Index ...................................................................................................................................... 96

Picturing the reception of assisted migrants and refugees, 1951–1959 .............. 30

Failure – protests and riot ..................................................................................................... 32

Assuring the world about how newcomers were welcomed .............................................. 34

Assuring the world about the care given migrant children ............................................... 36

Attracting German migrants ................................................................................................ 38

Picturing a British Australia for the non-British ................................................................ 40

Making do at the reception centre ....................................................................................... 42

Staying on at the centre ........................................................................................................ 44

Centre–community encounters ........................................................................................... 46

Moving into the local community ........................................................................................ 48

From somewhere to somewhere .......................................................................................... 50

Re-picturing Bonegilla ...................................................................................................... 68

This publication is an illustrated history of the Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre, Australia’s largest and longest-lasting post-war migrant accommodation centre. Forty themed picture collages invite readers to see and consider how the place was perceived and represented by government, by the contemporary press, and by resident staff, migrants and refugees.

How did government publicists, centre administrators, and the national and local media portray Australia’s largest and longest-lasting post-war reception centre? What visual record did centre residents make of their arrival and early settlement experiences? What visual strategies are employed in representing and displaying Bonegilla as a public memory place? What kind of visual stories were and are projected on to or read from this place, both while it was operational and since it has become a public memory place?

Together, all three sets of pictures offer possible answers to the key questions that all place-based heritage prompts: What time is this place? What were ‘they’ thinking?

Prompts, inspirations, guides and challenges Prompted to examine hostel/local community engagement by Jean Martin’s study of a hostel in Goulburn, I undertook a study in 2001 of Albury-Wodonga newspaper records. Since then, I have published work on the resident photographs and memorabilia held at Albury LibraryMuseum and made a broader examination of official publicity photographs. More recently, I have used a film as a springboard to unravel local engagement with the place and in its memorialisation.2 Those efforts precede this attempt to compare, contrast and align different sets of visual evidence in a sourcecentred history.

I hold that Bonegilla was central to the prevailing rhetoric of assimilation, and I try to work through what that meant to the migrants and refugees,

To answer these questions I have drawn pictures from the three main archives of publicity, media and resident photographs. For a reader, official publicity photographs hold the promise of indicating not only physical changes at Bonegilla, but shifts in thinking about how best to receive strangers from overseas. Readers might expect picture stories in the contemporary press to confirm, and sometimes contest, official accounts. Via the media, they might expect to observe community responses to the mass immigration scheme. More particularly, via local newspaper picture stories, they might find something about interactions between the newcomers and their hosts. Residents’ photographs may yield multiple, untapped, bottom-up versions of how Bonegilla was perceived and experienced. They are likely to reveal the stories of individual migrants, helping readers to reconfigure any understandings they have of the place derived from top-down official publicists and the media. 2

INTRODUCTION

the nation, and the local community. There is, however, no one migrant or refugee experience, no one host community response, and no one memorial frame in which to consider Bonegilla. Like interpreters at Ellis Island, its American counterpart, I read Bonegilla as ‘a multi-vocal and fragmented heritage landscape’. That multi-vocality, I argue, is best visualised in collage.1 The moral compass I carry in exploring these large and varied sets of pictures has a past and present day bearing: How did/does Australia go about taking in strangers?

Contemporary pictures deserve critical attention. As Inga Clendinnen has observed, ‘Historians … are at once the custodians of memory – the retrievers and preservers of stories by which people have imagined their personal and civic lives – and the devoted critics of those stories.’3 Questions usually trouble the empowered. They may also disturb storytellers who, ventriloquist-like, seek confirmation of a particular position from the visual evidence.

I have throughout been inspired, guided and challenged by the approaches taken by other scholars working in historical, immigration, museum and critical heritage. I warm to several of the approaches Andrea Witcomb has outlined in analyses of museum exhibitions related to the history of migration to Australia.

First, Witcomb writes of a museum pedagogy in which curators structure learning, rather than teaching, materials for visitors. For her, exhibition designers enable visitors to work at actively constructing their own meanings of exhibitions. She looks at how exhibitions encourage visitor ‘analysis and participatory thinking’. They are involved in ‘seeking’, ‘probing’ and ‘telescoping’.4 Their critical engagement with the shards of the past ‘models the practice of critical historical inquiry’.5

Second, and closely related to that pedagogy, is the way exhibition designers involve artists. For Witcomb, creative works, arrangements, designs ‘build attentiveness’, ‘provoke unsettlement’, ‘leave space for the imagination’ and ‘encourage a critical engagement with history’. They may activate emotional responses. They may ‘provide room for a strong affective response of discomfort, which, in turn, may lead to some level of critical insight’.6 Visitors look, read, listen and feel. Third, and most recently, with Mary Hutchison, Witcomb has observed how exhibitions have shifted focus from the experiences of migrants to the experiences of all living in culturally diverse communities. Hutchison and Witcomb cite examples of exhibitions that focus on host and newcomer interactions at a locality level. They consider everyday life in a place over time.7 Hutchison has previously anchored representation of immigration in local contexts, rather than having it ‘floating around in a general idea of Australia’.8 Witcomb also suggests that the conversations museums start with their visitors could focus on how newcomers and the longer-settled rub shoulders with each other every day, and that this is most likely to be apparent in specific locations.9 Following Witcomb, I start with the ambition that pictures build attentiveness, convey feelings and suggest alternative stories that cut across the celebratory narratives of the official publicists. They invite consideration of local community engagement in the process of post-war immigration. They are, as she says, ‘triggers that engage the imagination in such a way that readers start to question what they know and understand’. Readers and visitors think not only with, but about, pictures.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Organisation The overall arrangement I have adopted is chronological, tracing physical and other changes at Bonegilla within three broad time frames – first as a reception centre for the initial post-war cohorts of displaced persons, then for assisted migrants and refugees during the 1950s, and finally for migrants more likely to be skilled and from a wider variety of donor countries through the 1960s. I have used the photographs taken in all three periods to show something of migrant experiences of arrival and early settlement; how government went about trying to keep the nation favourably disposed towards migration; and how a local community received and took in strangers. I finish with modern-day photographs that show how Bonegilla is represented as a public memory place.

Sources It is only reasonable to expect a source-centred history to make much of the sources consulted up-front so that readers might know what to expect of the distinctions drawn throughout. There is no shortage of photographs of Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre and its residents. Government photographers, the media and the former residents took many pictures of the centre and its residents. The National Library’s Trove lists 1 398 Bonegilla photographs of which 476 are in the Immigration Photographic Archive at series A12111 in the National Archives of Australia. Trove lists 280 family photographs donated to the State Library of Victoria. Albury LibraryMuseum has an even larger collection of 1 337 family photographs in its Bonegilla Collection. It feeds historical and modern-day images to Flickr, which has 895 pictures in all. The on-site Bonegilla Migrant Experience has a Facebook page with pictures of present-day events and visitors. There are, too, approximately 174 000 passport-sized portraits, stapled separately on the individual identification cards which were required by regulation for newly arrived aliens from 1947 to 1956. These collections can be broadly categorised and partly contextualised as official, media and resident photographs.

Official photographs The archive of the Department of Immigration at the National Archives of Australia contains the promotional images taken by government photographers, working first for the Department of Information, and then Australian News and Information, its replacement in 1950.

INTRODUCTION

The photographs were used within three related but similar publicity campaigns – to attract prospective migrants from overseas; to support and encourage newcomers to seek naturalisation; and to keep the electorate informed and not worried about mass immigration.10 These images were constantly plied to the national media and used in in-house departmental publications and displays. Still, now as then, the government publicity photographs are authoritative. They are part of an official documentation, giving a top-down account of what was. They are still widely circulated and frequently used in publications and exhibitions about the part post-war immigration played in building the Australian nation. Further, they have become easily accessible via the web.14 Consequently, they continue to shape and reflect public understandings of post-war immigration and of the Bonegilla Reception Centre, and are consequently open to challenge and reinterpretation.

Altogether, the official photographers visited Bonegilla a dozen times. They present a progressive story of the centre, growing from its rugged beginnings as a temporary staging camp for the displaced into an increasingly more comfortable place ‘with all the amenities of a country town’; an ‘uplifting’ environment for prospective skilled worker migrants.11 By 1965, Bonegilla was, they claimed, no longer ‘stark’.12 Ironically, while such improvements may have indicated an increasingly warm national cuddle, they also prod consideration of the rigours faced by the earlier cohorts.13 Further, the photographs in neither the media nor the residents’ collection always colluded in this progressive narrative.

Media photographs By and large, the government publicity campaign was successful. Generally, the press echoed the official explanation of the economic, social and cultural impact of the immigration scheme. Some commentators qualify that observation with the caveat that the media reinforced and legitimised structural discrimination against migrants.15 The press, as usual, kept a critical eye on what it thought might be the failings of bureaucracy. A health scare in 1949, and riots in 1952 and again in 1961, caught the eye of the national media. Newspapers were influential in reflecting and guiding public thinking about immigration and immigrants. This was particularly true of local newspapers given their reach within small communities. The Border Morning Mail was a large, progressive daily newspaper with a wide cross-border print community that almost doubled in circulation in the decades immediately following World War II, from 10 000 in 1947 to nearly 20 000 in 1971. Through picture stories it explored the local impact of the growing migrant presence. Its focus was the local community, rather than the nation. It provided a civic dimension to the experience of post-war migration.

Resident photographs The Bonegilla Collection at Albury LibraryMuseum is the largest archive of photographs taken by former residents, and it continues to grow. It has a rationale that is quite different from those that frame the official and the media photographs. It relies on uncommissioned works volunteered by the former residents or their families. The residents’ photographs are generally crudely captioned.

Retrieved from bottom drawers, they often omit names of people or places and are usually undated. They are presented as a jumble of personal memories, a clamour of voices, a vernacular confusion of images. For the immigrants themselves, some of their photographs capture moments related clearly to shifts in family fortunes or lives. For other viewers, it is

Generally free from an order of time, migrants’ photographs provide for readers, other than those pictured, little more than mood and feeling. For immigrants other than those who know who is being pictured, they nurture recall of arrival and early settlement experiences as a dreaming.16 Different motives fire those who gift material to a museum, and more research is required on donor intentions. Sometimes the donations have come in response to recruitment drives, but just as often they seem to have come on the whim of the donor, perhaps prompted by changing personal or family circumstances. The most common intent, I suggest, seems to be to participate in a commemorative activity by contributing a personal or family story. My or Mum’s/Dad’s migrant experience is part of a larger story which this site tells, perpetuates, perhaps enshrines. The photograph memories have been selected and given with family commemorative intent.17 The donated photographs have become externalised memories made available to others. In sharing them, the donors allow their personal memories to become public memories. Indeed, they sign a release allowing the museum to exhibit or publish them. With this, they admit the possibility of their all-too-clear bottom-up memories being transformed into differently focused top-down stories – which they may or may not endorse. They are not authorising tales of a homogeneous migrant experience; to the contrary, they seem to be ensuring that any story told is sufficiently differentiated to include their kind of migration. The donor sheets at Albury LibraryMuseum can be used to distinguish three broad kinds of former resident photograph donors. First and second are the migrants and refugees who divide readily into short- or long-term residents. For most of the transients, the place meant – and still means – little. If they had a camera, they did not bother to take photographs at what was simply another staging station. The longterm migrant residents, who were allocated work at the centre, have supplied the most photographs.18 For them, the arrival experience became an early settlement experience. Third, there are the non-migrant resident staff, whose photographs sometimes worried the migrant experience of Bonegilla.

difficult to establish the chronology needed for context.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Plainly resident oral and visual testimonies are highly valued. They show how direct witnesses imagined and remembered being there. It is in the grittiness of untidy individual lives that we can try to fashion something that makes sense of the chaos of turbulent times.19 All the same, memories and memory photographs are subject to scrutiny. However prized, first-hand memory accounts require some reckoning. Memories are nudged by each other, by present circumstances and by the interlocutor.20 The photographer’s intention is important. What lay behind shaping an image for a future self or family or for those left behind? A reader might expect to find in family albums photographs that allude to the migrant experience of being ‘out-of-country’, ‘out-of-family’, ‘out-of-language’ or ‘out-of-work’. However, they, too, tend to favour smiling faces. Indeed, the overall impression I gather is that resident photographers were set on showing others, their future selves and their children their resilience in acquiring Australia cheerfully.21

In bland terms, they simply list dates and family names. Others recite the jobs and places where they moved to: ‘I worked 32 years for the Water Board’; ‘we moved to Adelaide where we still are’. Still, about a quarter recall their sensory memories as a resident child: Bonegilla was hot/cold; had ants/possums; served mutton/cocoa/toast. The lake was close. ‘I was in hospital’; ‘I got sunburnt’.

The ex-residents and their children are grateful. About one in ten of the commentators thank Australia ‘for taking us (or them) in’. Australia provided ‘opportunities’ and a ‘new life’. They have no regrets about migrating. They name children and number grandchildren to indicate a successful migration. They declare how they ‘love Australia’.

Written memories For written memories, I have consulted self-published memoirs. But my principal source has been the visitor books at Albury LibraryMuseum and, more recently, the Quiet Room comment cards at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience, with which I have tried to establish something of visitor expectations of exhibitions and place.22 Nowadays, more than half the visitors have previously had no direct or family connection with the place. Of those with connection, it is not surprising there are as many children or grandchildren as ex-resident visitors. Accordingly, the remarks visitors make have gradually shifted from recording memories to paying tributes. My analysis of the 858 comment cards collected between 2013 and 2015 shows that about half of the ex-residents simply recorded a message validating their visit as a pilgrim visitor.

INTRODUCTION

Quite a few say they are grateful that the place has been memorialised. An early entry says, ‘Thank you for this homage to our humble life stories. It is quite moving.’ Only a few draw parallels with contemporary immigration policies and practices. Slightly more refer to escaping war-torn Europe and the ‘safe’ feeling of Bonegilla. Above all else, Bonegilla is about family history. Children and grandchildren now come to lodge a tribute, not share a memory. About a third directly express gratitude to their forebears who were ‘brave battlers’. They made ‘sacrifices’; endured ‘hard’ times, ‘loneliness’, ‘harsh’ and ‘tough’ conditions. Pilgrims say, ‘This trip is for you, Dad.’

Their messages are ‘from your granddaughter’ or ‘in memory of’. They add an ideograph of a heart. Several tell of family separation or remember ‘mother crying’, but overall they are more likely to say they recall or were told of fond rather than dark memories. About one in ten say they have an emotional response to the place. The visit is ‘moving’ or ‘humbling’. Whether visual or written, memories of Bonegilla jostle with each other and historians have had trouble making sense of them. Glenda Sluga said she had trouble mastering the material she had gathered from many interviews. John Murphy had difficulty in making sense of ‘a kaleidoscope of experiences’. Howard Jones asks, ‘Where do you start with 320 000 human interest stories?’23 A voice in the wall of voices through which visitors enter the ‘Beginning Place’ pavilion at Bonegilla declares, ‘My story was somewhat different to others.’ And so, indeed, they all were.

Here, then, is a book on the life and times of an institution and its afterlife as a heritage place. It is about assimilation and the ‘throwntogetherness’ of a regional city.2⁴ It shows how public attention and public memory are shaped/stabilised/unsettled by photographs.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

In the immediate post-war years, Australia launched a bold mass immigration program to increase the size of the workforce and the population. The country looked first to the United Kingdom for prospective migrants, but had difficulty in attracting sufficient people and in finding sufficient ships to bring them. In 1947, the Australian Government reached an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) to take in some of the many people who had been displaced by the war. Hundreds of thousands of people who had been brought to Germany as labourers to boost industrial production during the war were either reluctant or unable to return to their homelands, which had been occupied by the Soviet Union. They were accommodated temporarily in refugee camps. There was strong competition for the able-bodied among the displaced. Other countries, such as Canada, were just as anxious as Australia was to recruit the fittest, work-ready people. Consequently, immigration publicists used pictures and prose to sell Australia to the displaced, as a country with ‘jobs, homes, sunshine and happiness’.1 Selected refugees were promised free passage, but had to agree to work as directed for two years. On arrival in Australia, they were assured of low-cost temporary accommodation until an employment place was arranged. While waiting approximately four to six weeks for their guaranteed employment, they would receive ‘instruction in English and the Australian way of life’. They could expect to receive appropriate health-care arrangements and Australian social security benefits. Some 125 000 copies of the Department of Immigration’s pamphlet Happy in a New Homeland were distributed to European refugee camps with the aim of selling Bonegilla to those who wanted to come to Australia.

In amongst sunny fields and on the shores of Australia’s largest river, the Murray, lies Bonegilla, the reception encampment readied by the Australian Government for European Citizens. Here the new arrivals spend their first weeks in their new home country, to learn about local customs which will ease them into their transition into an Australian way of life …. The first arrivals at Bonegilla found their life there pleasant, interesting and varied. They found a carefree atmosphere, and the complete freedom of the individual was ensured. The inmates only have the duty, in return, to keep their rooms in order, and to attend short lessons in the English language, the Australian coin, weight and measuring systems and local customs – all the sorts of things a new arrival would be keen to pick up quickly anyway.2

There were complaints that pictures like that on the cover of Happy in a New Homeland focused too strongly on recreation, suggesting ‘a life of ease or in holiday surroundings’. Subsequent promotional pictures showed work situations.3 Paul Chimin (Ukraine, 1949), a signwriter and one of the displaced, was employed as a handyman to supply decorative pictures throughout the reception and training centre. Privately, he explained with sketches his wait for his acceptance into Australia at the Seedorf refugee camp near Hamburg and his expectations of the perils of Australia.4 A sketch in an introductory booklet indicated the even greater perils of assimilation awaiting him.5

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF EUROPE'S DISPLACED, 1947-1952

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Introducing Bonegilla and the post-war immigration program There were four sets of government publicity photographs produced to show Bonegilla’s reception of displaced persons. The first set, in 1947, was aimed primarily at an overseas readership. It simply located Bonegilla on the banks of the Murray River in inland Australia. A second set, in 1949, seems to have been intended to show the host society the reception and training centre facilities that were being used. Readers were shown an austerely furnished former army camp that had been re-purposed to provide simple, but sufficient, temporary accommodation. A third set of publicity photographs, in 1951, depicted a rare joint meeting of the Immigration Advisory Council and the Immigration Planning Council in Albury. At that meeting, immigration authorities proclaimed their satisfaction with the way the reception and training centre was working. They decided to continue to use Bonegilla for assisted migrants from nonBritish countries. A special portfolio of photographs with a limited circulation followed in 1952. It showed how Bonegilla was well placed to receive assisted migrants. The stage-managed arrival of the carefully selected first contingent of displaced persons in November 1947 was well reported. The first newspaper and magazine photographs introduced the public to the ‘Beautiful Balts’ which Arthur Calwell, the Minister of Immigration, had brought to Australia and to the lightly dusted-down former army camp turned into a reception and training centre. They showed handsome, pretty and cheerful newcomers as resourceful and adaptable future workers making-do with their temporary accommodation arrangements and good-humouredly taking advantage of the pleasant riverside location of the centre. Australia was plainly good at selecting the right kinds of immigrants it needed from the refugee camps of Europe. They would receive a good introduction to their new country at Bonegilla. So, for example, the Australian Women’s Weekly reminded readers that the immigration program was intended to increase the population as well as the workforce. It named those it photographed, but explained that the women said they did not want to shorten their unpronounceable surnames, as they would ‘probably change them soon’.6

The Melbourne Age personalised its story with the faces and names of pretty Irina and Galena Vasins on the train to Bonegilla where ‘they would learn simple English, reading and writing, Australian weights, measures and money’.7 Pix showed Irma Tammeray and Norbertas Simonelis from Latvia being baptised into Australianness in the Murray River.8 Pix also showed the pretty Tamar Upmalis (centre) and her friends settling into the simply furnished single-sex dormitories of the army camp. It assured readers that Tamar was good at English and had quickly got a job as a typist at the centre. The Melbourne Herald pictured the new arrivals walking arm-in-arm ‘beneath the gum trees’ and in the ‘wide open spaces’ of Bonegilla. It declared ‘New Australians like Camp Life’. They were destined for jobs where labour was in most demand.9

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF EUROPE'S DISPLACED, 1947-1952

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Preparing to host a reception centre The Border Morning Mail, the newspaper serving the two-state border district where Bonegilla was located, reassured its readers that the arrival of a large number of strangers should be of little concern and, indeed, might help the local economy. The immigrants were destined for jobs all over Australia and would soon be gone: they would come and go, ‘with local residents being scarcely aware of their presence and with increased prosperity for the Bonegilla district’. Nevertheless, the newspaper, and the community it served, remained anxious about the impact of a large influx of people on local jobs, housing, health and way of life.10

The immigrants were less sure of the warmth of the hospitality they received. They resented the expectation that they should not speak foreign languages in public. They observed that they most commonly only met up with Australians, even those proffering welcomes, in structured, formal situations. Many had minimal personal contact with Australians.14

When the first contingent of immigrants arrived, they were invariably described as 'particularly good types'. All the young men and women were anxious to work: the men as farmers, and the women as 'typists in Canberra', or as domestics in hospitals or other institutions. In appearance they were nothing short of ‘splendid’. The men had 'splendid physique': they were 'suntanned, strong, and particularly good humoured'. The women were 'attractive': ‘healthy, handsome with surprisingly good complexions and figures’; they created a ‘splendid impression’; they were 'neatly clad', and had 'splendidly formed white teeth'. Both men and women were ‘courteous and very keen to work’; they were energetic and adaptable.11 The Border Morning Mail congratulated the local church and service organisations that arranged welcomes for the newcomers. Albury and Wodonga, it proclaimed, were good at taking in strangers. Local branches of the Country Women’s Association (CWA) offered immigrant women a cup of tea with sultana cake or scones ‘at their place or ours’. Apex provided Santa Claus at the first and subsequent Christmases. The YWCA focused on welcoming youth. It arranged dances and carefully chaperoned social excursions.12 The Border Morning Mail conveyed something of the immediate host community’s curiosity, rather than any wariness or hostility. When some immigrants remained in the district as centre staff, the newspaper noted the appearance in Albury streets and shops of continental dress styles and haircuts, and a greater variety of foods. Perhaps ‘they were influencing us’.13 Nevertheless, after the first contingent, the new arrivals pictured in the Border Morning Mail were almost invariably never named. Perhaps the linguistic challenge of getting and reproducing names was too much for local reporters. Perhaps the community did not need to know ‘these people’, as most of them were to be transient.

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF EUROPE'S DISPLACED, 1947-1952

An unknown immigrant pictured Bonegilla residents in a group on an outing, as most locals most commonly saw them.15 The caption on one newspaper photograph greeted ‘ATTRACTIVE GIRLS FROM BALTIC COUNTRIES, who declared on arrival “everything in Australia is grand”’. Another showed ‘LATVIAN GIRLS WILL BE TYPISTS AT CANBERRA’.16 Apex Santa Claus distributing gifts.17 Patricia Downs, a member of the YWCA, pictured at a chaperoned outing with a group of young men in the Botanic Gardens. On the back of one photo, she noted that a young man had been ‘earbashing’ her. In donating the item to the museum, she apologised for the ‘words written a long time ago’.18

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Boasting about Bonegilla, 1949 On a visit to Australia in late 1948, staff from the IRO in Geneva inspected Bonegilla. They reported very positively on what was being achieved. The staff were ‘capable’. The education, employment and entertainment arrangements were ‘more than satisfactory’. The food was of a ‘very high standard’. ‘Good quality clothing’ was available for those who needed it. ‘Everything which seems possible to [make] the reception of the new comers into [a] sincere welcome is being done. Here, every individual is a recognized human being with human rights, and never was there an impression of collective or mass disregard for personal problems.’ The term ‘DP’ (displaced person) had been replaced with ‘New Australian’. ‘The overall impression gained was one of complete confidence in the efforts being made by the Commonwealth of Australia for the best possible reception and absorption of their New Australians.’19

‘nowhere in the world was better care given to displaced persons than at Bonegilla’ Major Alton Kershaw - Centre Director

Calwell told parliament he was well pleased with the report: ‘No other country was offering such training and facilities to ensure that their life in their new land began propitiously.’ Major Alton Kershaw, the centre director, used the report to claim that ‘nowhere in the world was better care given to displaced persons than at Bonegilla’.20 Official photographers visited Bonegilla early in 1949 to portray how well the centre was operating. They showed the centre located in paddocks in an attractive part of country Victoria. The accommodation was army-style with communal eating, ablution and laundry facilities. However, a start had been made in improving the camp. Dormitories were being divided into small private cubicles. Trees were being planted. Gardens were established and edged with painted stones. Taxpayers were reassured about the thrift of the operations: the accommodation was ‘only reasonably comfortable’; the food ‘though plain was nutritious and plentiful’; there was neither luxury nor squalor; all expenditure was carefully monitored. After all, the refugees were only at Bonegilla for about three weeks.21

Unused army huts suited the purposes of the centre. Furnishings in the unlined sleeping quarters were spare. Food was served cafeteria style and residents washed their own utensils. The ablution blocks were basic. Boys looked happy enough scrambling midst the T-bar taps, water pipes and wash troughs in the washroom. Plainly, the facilities provided for fit young service men and women were deemed sufficient for the refugees and their children. Children welcomed the newly installed playground equipment, while the photographer tried to draw attention to a barely discernible newly planted tree in the foreground.22

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF EUROPE'S DISPLACED, 1947-1952

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

The crush of many people, 1949 and 1950 The years 1949 and 1950 were challenging ones. As more transport ships from Europe became available, the number of arrivals in Australia increased markedly. Additional reception centres were opened, and Bonegilla was expanded so that it could house 7 700 people with an additional 1 600 in tents, if required. Up to 40 employment officers were kept busy processing and dispatching as many as 100 people per day. In one period of 24 hours, 3 000 temporary residents left and another 5 000 arrived. There was not only a surge in numbers, but the nature of the intakes changed also. The pool of employable young men and women that Australia and other nations sought as a priority was soon exhausted. More families, many with non-worker dependants, began to arrive. To ease the pressure on reception centres, a network of holding centres was established in 1949, successively at Cowra, Uranquinty, Greta, Rushworth, Parkes, Somers, Benalla, West Sale and Mildura. Women and children dependants might expect to stay in these temporary camps for four to six months, while the breadwinner looked for alternative family accommodation. Family dependants were shuffled between holding centres according to work demands, but at what seemed like bureaucratic whim. Women complained that at the holding centres they were doing no more than ‘waiting for their lives to begin’. One said: ‘[The camp authorities] controlled everything, where to go, where to work, where to live, where your husband should live’. Another observed that ‘after years of living in camps many women had no spirit left. They didn’t really do anything – just sat around with “empty eyes”.’23 The more spirited made their dissatisfaction known noisily at, first, Benalla, then Uranquinty and Cowra in 1950. The media insisted that all was going well. Migrant photo stories, on the other hand, point to the difficulties of family separation and the rapid expansion of Bonegilla.

By 1950, a network of three reception centres and 20 temporary holding centres had been established to relieve the pressure of increased numbers. The Department of Immigration let the public know of its endeavours to spread the migrants through Australia in the New Australian, one of its in-house news publications.24 Pix pictured the young at Uranquinty Holding Centre adapting to Australian ways. Images of cheerful children at play in the holding centres obscured the difficulties family separation imposed on non-British newcomers.25 Richard Urbanivicius was allocated work with the army at Bandiana. He was one of many who rode a bicycle each weekend to the Uranquinty Holding Centre, 120km to the north, to visit family.26 Department photographers ignored the tent accommodation, but residents show rows of tents in the backgrounds of their photographs.27

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A health scandal, 1949 Arthur Calwell began a concerted campaign to ensure Australians appreciated the value of receiving not only single workers, but also families with dependants. The immigration program, he said, had population-building as well as labour supply aims. Immigrants with young children, he pointed out, obviously shared family values that were also important to Australians. Further, the young were likely to be more malleable than their parents: they could be easily absorbed. Accordingly, the department’s promotional media published and supplied to other outlets images of Calwell welcoming newly arrived children with an embrace.28 Publicists, who had been keen to portray the first non-British arrivals as fine types and had promoted ‘Calwell’s Beautiful Balts’, now shifted their attention to ‘Calwell’s Kissable Children’. Unfortunately for the new campaign, Bonegilla made the national news in September 1949, when there was a health scandal. Thirteen young children died from the effects of malnutrition in four months. By the start of the next year, 21 had died. Immigration authorities were quick to blame the shipping agents. Shipboard outbreaks of gastroenteritis led to the young being placed on boiled water diets for six or seven weeks.29 The newspapers based in all the state capitals took up the story of what seemed a national health scandal.30 The most sensational stories reflected poorly on the parents rather than on immigration authorities. The focus on attributing blame shifted attention from the severity of migrant health problems.31 The Border Morning Mail found its usual access to the reception and training centre suddenly barred with an ‘iron curtain’ of secrecy. Its reporters and photographers broke with their close liaison with centre authorities and looked elsewhere. Such pictures and stories pushed Calwell to accuse the ‘ghouls’ of the press of ‘making noise’ about the deaths of under-nourished children.32 He insisted that the deaths were a tragic reminder of conditions in Europe. He disclaimed any responsibility for conditions on the ships and explained the good conditions in Australian immigration centres. In response to the health scandal, the Bonegilla centre authorities divided Block 13 into family units. Families with very young children were supplied with bassinettes, access to hot water, and a block refrigerator. The Block 13 kitchen received supplementary supplies of eggs and milk. A special infants’ feeding room with flexible hours was opened. Publicists began boasting of the kind of care Australia gave the young.

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On a visit in May, Arthur Calwell spoke highly of the children he met as possible future defenders of Australia and took time to visit the hospital.33 The Border Morning Mail showed Albury cemetery’s growing number of new ‘tiny heaps of small mounds’, each no bigger than ‘a child’s sandcastle’. One had broken biscuits, a pile of barley and a handful of raisins sprinkled on it – things that ‘the hungry child might have craved’.34 At Albury Base Hospital, Sister Shirley Frost obligingly unwrapped one-year-olds Zdenko Elinger and Theresa Baumdern for a local photographer. The picture, which showed their ‘cadaverous limbs’, was circulated nationally.35 The Sun reassured its readers about the care being given the young at Bonegilla hospital.36

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Dispersing people to workplaces all over Australia Personnel dossiers were generated at the Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre for each of the assisted migrants and refugees that arrived there between 1947 and 1971. The card dossiers relate to the central work-dispersal function of the centre. Nearly all have a forwarding address that suggests or defines the designated place of work. The Bonegilla cards indicate how each individual began his or her Australian work history. The cards were plainly one of the control mechanisms that government used to reassure itself and the Australian people that it was actively managing reception and work placement processes related to a large number of people. They were stored as records and represent an administrative achievement. They carry a sense of uncaring officialdom, with each photograph pierced by two staples to attach it to its card. Yet, policy documentation at the time indicates that the record-keeping system was not to be officious. Commonwealth Employment Service officers who compiled and used the cards were advised: ‘These DPs have been through too many vicissitudes to want to be thought of or referred to in terms of numbers.’37 The IRO inspection team had been satisfied that attention was given to individual needs. Melbourne’s Sun showed male workers dispatched to work from the centre as labourers and female workers destined for jobs as domestics waiting at Spencer Street station.38 It also expressed disquiet that Miss Apolonia Sopalis was allocated kitchen work at a hospital, even though she was a fine opera singer. Calwell explained to parliament that all the displaced persons had agreed to work as directed for two years.39

‘These DPs have been through too many vicissitudes to want to be thought of or referred to in terms of numbers.’ 37

The Bonegilla cards show the faces of men, such as Bruno Rutigliano (Yugoslavia, 1950) and Dinko Vodaric (Yugoslavia, 1949) dispatched from Bonegilla to serve two-year contracts as labourers at such places as Port Kembla steelworks and the South Australian rocket ranges. Most of the women, such as Katerina Novosel (Yugoslavia 1948), and Hannah Rutkowski (Poland 1949), were dispatched to factory work or to work as domestics in hospitals and hotels. Some men, such as George Cimpoero (Romania, 1949) and Nickolas Chebnikowski (Ukraine, 1949), were found ‘emergency work’ at an army base when, during the 1949 and 1950 surge in numbers, the number of arrivals outstripped the ability to place them in jobs elsewhere. Many women and children were sent to holding centres until the family breadwinner could find suitable family accommodation near his place of work.40

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Getting work at Bonegilla For the immigrants, Bonegilla was about work. Dmytro Chub observed that his fellow immigrants ‘mostly talked about jobs’ and the practicalities of where they were going to live.41 Ingrid S, another new arrival, thought the most important event in life at Bonegilla was the job interview. For her, the most persistently voiced concern was: ‘Do you know what kind of job you are going to get?’42 It is not surprising that so many residents had photographs taken of themselves working at their new jobs. One of the simplest ways to employ the new arrivals was to have them care for each other. In 1950, the Department of Immigration advised that 90 per cent of the 4 637 people employed at its accommodation centres were New Australians. At any one time, about 400 immigrants were employed at Bonegilla in a variety of occupations. Employment at the reception centres was always a good option. Public Service conditions ensured reasonable security, pay, working conditions, prospects of overtime and promotion. Staff had privileged accommodation and rations. Many stayed at Bonegilla for years beyond their first contract. Resident photographers showed their friends at home and their later selves how they had found work and a place to live. This was how they were making a beginning in their new country. At the centre itself, they were making friends and actively participating in meaningful work. They were taking up opportunities to win advancement and status, which was otherwise difficult to establish. Their personal work histories were, and still are, important to them.

Robert Mark recalled how his first job at the centre was as a hygiene man, cleaning latrines, chopping wood and tending boilers. As he spoke English and four other languages, he was moved to the Social Security office, where he could explain procedures to the applicants. Some migrants, like the Vasins sisters, were allocated work as cleaners, general hands and kitchen hands. At first they worked alongside members of the army, who provided transport, security and catering services until 1949. Trained medical officers such as Eva Makay and Valerie Skowronska, who were prevented from practising their professions, were employed as orderlies and nurses.43

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Mixing with others in and beyond the centre Resident photographers showed how they were developing new networks of friends. Many friendships were formed among the passengers during the long sea voyage to Australia. The close acquaintance of shipboard life continued when language class groups were formed based around time of arrival at Bonegilla. Fellow countrymen and women often provided personal support – and at least spoke the same language. Parents’ involvement in activities related to children acted as a social ‘glue’, broadening their circle of acquaintances .

Nevertheless, the performers thought the displays important enough to include in a public archive. Some obviously enjoyed bonding with other performers. They and members of their family were representing the newly arrived and starting a public life in their new country. However, engagement in stage shows did not necessarily establish meaningful personal links with members of the host community. Some felt they were treated like animals in a zoo. During the first years of the scheme, the mixing between townspeople and newcomers was rarely at the personal level. There were few opportunities to socialise in a meaningful way.48

Bonegilla was densely populated and many residents must have recoiled from the forced intimacies that followed. Resident photographs, however, suggest that some residents tolerated sharing spaces with others in a similar situation. They seem to have been keen to show their social life and their family life developing ‘as it ought to be’ in their new country.44 The Border Morning Mail had declared that one of the functions of the reception centre was to help ‘these people … take their place in the community’.45 One publicist maintained: ‘The displaced persons “sold themselves” to Australia with their smiles, their willingness to work, their music and their arts …. [They ] are their own publicity agents’.46 However, it seemed to Egon Kunz, a displaced person and later a historian, that the media was quick to rush to a stereotype of community expectations of displaced persons.

In the media the DPs were to be depicted as intelligent, educated, cleancut and appreciative, not at all the feared foreigner who threatened to lower Australian trade union, health, housing or mateship standards. These intelligent, accommodating people were to be seen as cheerfully accepting the worst jobs, arriving in endless shiploads to man public utilities, break labour bottle-necks, and generally help the war-tired economy recover. After a week of hard and lowly toil, they were encouraged to dress up at weekends in national costume and enrich their new homeland culture by performing dances as an expression of their gratitude for being permitted to settle in Australia.47

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Boys waved Union Jacks and Australian Ensigns at a concert.49 Family memories of parenting and growing up would always be well served by photographs of the children – for example, at a Mitta Junction School function.50 Immigrants made and kept a visual record of their involvement as dancers and instrumentalists in a folk ballad based on ‘Waltzing Matilda’ for the Jubilee Citizenship Convention held in Canberra in January 1951.51 Migrant caterers posed proudly with food prepared for the visit of Harold Holt, the Minister for Immigration, as guest of honour at an International Ball in 1952.52 There were convivial functions shared in the spare surrounds of the centre – for example, a christening party with fellow Bonegilla workers in the new mixed-sex staff club in Block 19.53 Less elaborate functions involved simply mixing with each other in recreation huts.54

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Challenging official representations Resident staff photographed themselves, their work companions, friends and family. Some also took photographs of unnamed groups of immigrants in uncomfortable situations. Several of these images subvert the welcoming sense of place conveyed, for example, by the well-circulated publicity photograph showing the cheerful train passengers leaving Port Melbourne for Bonegilla in 1947. Resident photographers illustrated what at least two of the immigrants recall as the daunting appearance of the Bonegilla railway platform: ‘No railway station, nothing, just open space, only knee deep in dry yellow grass.’ ‘The train did not stop at a station but somewhere in a paddock.’55

It suited the publicists to circulate widely a picture of new arrivals looking forward and a cheerful laundry scene with newcomers ‘sharing a joke’.56 George Nacholinski, the first displaced person recruited as a language instructor, showed new arrivals disembarking into the long grass adjacent to the short Bonegilla platform ‘in the middle of nowhere’. He and other resident staff depicted something of the confusion of people and luggage after they disembarked from buses at the centre itself. 57 Keith Dobbins, an employment officer, showed the newly arrived huddled around a forlorn parade ground waiting for instructions.58 A photograph of the Vasins sisters contested the cheerful publicity laundry scene.59 For Lois Carrington, a resident language instructor, interaction in the laundries proved vital to a happy period of residence. She remembered, as only a resident might, the negotiations involved in and hassles caused by disappearing plugs and pegs and having to explain the presence of frogs, spiders and possums. In her book, she included a picture of the laundry where she learned so much ‘DP Deutsch’.60

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Hailing Bonegilla as a successful reception and training centre, 1951–1952 As the Displaced Persons Resettlement Scheme neared its end with the mandated winding up of the IRO, Australia decided to keep growing its population with large-scale migration from Europe. The Immigration Planning Council and the Immigration Advisory Council had a rare joint meeting in Albury and at Bonegilla in December 1950, where it was decided to continue to use Bonegilla as a reception centre for assisted migrants from Europe. It seemed that the Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre could assure prospective donor countries, as it had the IRO, that new arrivals would receive appropriate care and support. It would continue to assure the host society that newcomers were prepared for life in Australia and would be dispersed to jobs efficiently and economically. Further, the meeting was satisfied that improvements could be made to the centre to make it more comfortable for the assisted, who – unlike the displaced – had not previously lived in temporary accommodation camps. Twelve months later, the administration at Bonegilla was charged with producing a promotional portfolio of photographs to show how Bonegilla was now ready to receive assisted migrants. The portfolio was nicely presented with a distinctive matted cover and images laced together. R.G. Dawson, the centre’s director, however, had little imagination and used half of the 32 images to show unpeopled ex-army buildings, one with a flagpole. Even so, seven of his images boasted of the child-care arrangements.61 There are two significant gaps in the official photographic records of Australia’s reception of the displaced at Bonegilla. There were no official photographs of the job allocation process, even though the allocation of men to jobs as labourers and women as domestics ‘left its imprint on the lives of the majority of those who passed through [Bonegilla]’.62 Perhaps the would-be immigrants might be deterred by the prospect of job direction, rather than job negotiation on a one-to-one basis. Similarly, before 1955, there were no photographs related to the assistance provided in learning English. Perhaps, again, would-be immigrants might be deterred by the prospect of having to acquire a new language. Or perhaps the administration did not consider that particular support service as a central one.63 The transition from receiving displaced refugees to taking in assisted migrants was gradual, rather than abrupt – and was not easy. Bonegilla still housed displaced people while it took in its first intakes of assisted migrants during 1951 and 1952. The last contingent arrived in September 1953. 28

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Photographs celebrating the joint meeting as a milestone event showed visiting dignitaries and senior departmental officials being greeted by migrant residents in folk costumes. Members of the Councils and their wives watched the children perform in the theatre. They visited the hospital to see the care given children. Some of the immigrant women serving guests at a specially prepared meal listened from a kitchen doorway to the formal speeches.64 The image in Dawson’s promotional album that came closest to capturing the migrant experience of the reception centre was that of a young woman learning about coins at the canteen.65

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It made good economic sense to continue with a vigorous immigration program and more people were sought through the 1950s from both the United Kingdom and Europe. An energetic ‘Bring out a Briton’ campaign was launched in 1957. Australia became a founding member of the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), which was set up to provide assistance for Europeans in overcrowded countries to move to under-crowded countries. Through and with the ICEM, Australia made migration agreements in the early 1950s with the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece. By 1961, it had similar agreements with Malta, Spain, Belgium, and Nordic countries.

As the rapid rate of arrivals slowed in 1952 and 1953, temporary migrant accommodation centres closed and Bonegilla re-assumed its role as the principal east coast reception centre. To cater for what seemed the different needs of assisted migrants, the centre was altered progressively through the 1950s. Facilities and services were improved. Official photographers visited almost annually to show that the former army camp was being transformed into a comfortable reception centre ‘with all the amenities of a country town’.2 The publicists hoped that the provision of comfortable short-term family accommodation on arrival might help make Australia attractive to the skilled workers the nation needed.

In 1956, the Department of Immigration celebrated the arrival of the millionth migrant. By 1959, the nation had reached a population of 10 million, of which 17 per cent had been born overseas. The number of migrants received from the United Kingdom roughly equalled the number from non-British Europe. At Bonegilla it was evident that recruitment had shifted from eastern to southern, then, northern Europe. There was a sudden influx of Hungarians in 1957, in the wake of the Hungarian revolution of the previous year. There remained throughout a fairly constant stream of people from the former Yugoslavia. As a result of tighter economic times in 1952, Australia took a temporary ‘breather’ from its mass migration program. Several assessments of how the program was working at the national level showed shifts in thinking.1 The notion of migrants readily disappearing into an Australian melting pot did not seem to be working. The migrants retained their differences. Further, they insisted that they were not all from a single place called ‘Europe’ and expected their national differences to be acknowledged and adjusted for. Locally there was a growing awareness that Bonegilla arrivals were not all going to be transient. Some were staying in Albury-Wodonga. Assimilation was going to take at least a generation. The local community was not just expected to host changing groups of new arrivals temporarily accommodated at Bonegilla and to watch their migrant displays, but also to take in and live with those of the strangers who chose to stay locally.

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Colonel Henry Guinn, the director, welcomed Bonegilla’s 150 000th arrival, Helmut Brahler, a skilled worker from Dusseldorf, at a time when special efforts were being made to attract skilled Germans to Australia.3 The Immigration Minister, Athol Townley, welcomed Hungarian refugees in the theatre, 1957.4

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Failure – protests and riot The system of dispersing new arrivals to jobs within a month or so failed with the economic recession in 1952. Mid-year, employment officers could not readily find jobs beyond the centre for the first of the three groups of assisted migrants from the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Italy, and for the 280 displaced people still in residence.

Italians were placed. Kitchens in those blocks received special supplies of fish, macaroni, spaghetti, salt, tomato puree, olive oil, garlic and coffee. Dutch families were housed in blocks separate from those used by the young single men from Italy. The Dutch, too, were able to access food specially prepared to their liking.12

The British arrivals had complained about the standard of accommodation when work was not found quickly for them, and the decision to send British assisted migrants to Bonegilla was promptly reversed. Only three or four contingents arrived between July 1951 and October 1952. Bonegilla was unsuitable for the British.5 Like the British, Dutch assisted migrants complained loudly. After the novelty of a luxury-liner voyage, they found they were provided with a style of accommodation they had not expected. Many felt they had been lured to Australia with false promises.6 Nevertheless, the Dutch continued to be allocated to Bonegilla.

Not surprisingly, there were no official and few media photographs that attested to any difficulties. Immediately after the 1952 riot, the Border Morning Mail was quick to reassure its local readers that all was well at Bonegilla. It produced a photo essay of peaceable Italians hunting rabbits and playing table tennis, cards and toss-the-coin. It reminded readers there were immigrant families at Bonegilla, not just excitable young Italian men.

The first shiploads of Italians were comprised principally of young men who had paid some passage to come to work in Australia. They hated waiting for a job for three or more months in temporary camp conditions. In July 1952, the Italians staged a protest demonstration and demanded, ‘Give us work or repatriate us to Italy.’ Their protest attracted the notice of both the local and the metropolitan press when troops from the adjacent army camp at Bandiana were armed and readied for dispatch to Bonegilla in armoured vehicles to quell a riot and protect Commonwealth property.7 Government officials worried about communist involvement in fostering the unrest.8 Unemployed Italians were dispatched to ten-week emergency work positions specially created within defence force establishments.9 Trade tests for Dutch tradesmen to prove their qualifications were fast-tracked. No special arrangements were made for the displaced, however. They remained at Bonegilla, where they were at least ‘better off’ than they had been back in Europe.10 Many had found meaningful work at the centre and remained there for years afterwards. Almost immediately after the Italian riot, Harold Holt, the Immigration Minister, announced a reduction in immigrant numbers. For the program to resume, he said, there needed to be employment opportunities and good accommodation arrangements for newcomers.11 The reception centre would have to be adjusted to cater for different national needs. So, for example, Italian cooks were appointed to the blocks in which

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Frank Sciulli’s photographs indicate that the Italians baulked at the restrictive atmosphere of camp life.13 The Age, 25 July 1952, blamed boredom. The Border Morning Mail showed the newly arrived children of the Van Dyken family from the Netherlands waiting patiently with baggage. It told how the Dutch arrivals included much-needed skilled workers such as Piet Drommel, who was pictured with his family unpacking their possessions at Bonegilla.14

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Assuring the world about how newcomers were welcomed By mid-1954, Australia was again actively recruiting large numbers of migrants. It was important to explain to would-be newcomers that excellent arrangements had been made for their reception. In 1957, photographs of Bonegilla were central to two of 26 large display boards prepared for the Australian Citizenship Convention in Albert Hall, Canberra. A display panel titled ‘Settling In’ showed the reception centre, ‘where [new arrivals] settle into comfortable accommodation, have all meals provided, continue English lessons and register for employment’. Professional social workers and teachers were on hand to help. There was an excellent hospital and well-organised kitchens.15 There was ‘more of a family atmosphere’ at Bonegilla.16 Even though there were improvements, which were pictured and displayed many times, Bonegilla remained a military-style camp with communal eating, washing and toilet facilities. It was situated in a military zone, up-river and isolated from Wodonga, adjacent to and approached via Bandiana, a large and active army logistics centre.

Gradually the messes were furnished with tables to seat four to six, tubular steel chairs and ‘washable plastic top tables’. The windows were curtained. The walls were now lined and freshly painted.17 Other publicity photographs not used in this display also point to the now well-established gardens as well as the pleasant surrounds.18 Skilled migrants were assured that an individualised interview with an employment officer and interpreter would precede an appropriate placement.19

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Assuring the world about the care given migrant children Another display board at the 1957 Australian Citizenship Convention showed how Australia took good care of pre-school migrants. Photographs from Bonegilla showed the ‘well equipped and expertly staffed pre-school centres, where young migrant children combine healthy, supervised play with “painless” lessons in the Australian way of life and easy English’. The department was proud of the way Bonegilla was child friendly. Indeed, two-thirds of the 69 photographs taken by publicists on their 1954 and 1956 visits to Bonegilla featured the ‘special facilities’ for children, where ‘they enjoy all the fun a youngster needs’.20 Photographs unused in the 1957 publicity display pointed beyond the newly provided pre-schools. Since the start of the school year in 1952, Bonegilla had its own state school to cater for the children of staff. Transient children might attend their own separate class with the language instruction unit to help learn English, but otherwise they had no schooling. The Dutch baulked at the lack of schooling and organised their own classes, with the assistance of money from the amenities fund, raised from canteen sales and cinema admission tickets. At Bonegilla, childhood ended abruptly at 16 when the young were expected to take up jobs and to pay a higher tariff. Employment officers complained of their ongoing difficulty in placing young immigrant workers, especially if they were to avoid unskilled positions with few prospects of learning or advancement.21

Don Edwards, a Department of Immigration official photographer, found there were ample opportunities for the young to practise being grown-up.22 Teachers visited parents to encourage them to bring their children to the kindergarten.23 With amenities fund backing, the Dutch equipped two children’s hobby huts, thus anticipating a centre-wide boys’ club and girls’ club for the primary school-aged.24

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Attracting German migrants In the latter part of the decade, the Australian Government conducted a vigorous recruiting campaign in Germany, where many people had become uncertain of the future with the tightening of Soviet influence over East Germany. The campaign was successful, with 77 000 Germans recruited by 1960.25 In 1956, two publicity photographic vignettes, or mini-essays, traced the arrival of Hans Georg Mint with his wife and family of three children, and Jules Schreibenref with his wife and family of two sets of twins. The photo stories showed the Mints arriving by ship and the assistance they received from the Red Cross on the train journey between Melbourne and Bonegilla.

Both families were shown through the bureaucratic procedures of processing, such as being tested for their English skills. The younger set of the Schreibenref twins attended a professionally staffed crèche. Jules Schreifbenref hovered anxiously over the older set, Ava and Ingrid, as they were interviewed and assessed for jobs. The Schriebenref family photo essay ends with a shopping excursion on Albury’s main street. The Mint family photo essay ends with an outing to Hume Dam.26 Publicity within Australia was just as positive. Colonel Guinn, the centre director, optimistically promised that a party of German and Austrian workers arriving in 1959 would be at Bonegilla ‘no longer than a fortnight’. However, the newspaper picture that accompanied the story suggests that even that short stay could be a daunting experience.27

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Picturing a British Australia for the non-British The non-British new arrivals at Bonegilla were introduced to a British Australia. Union Jack flags and, after 1953, portraits of the Queen in schoolrooms and meeting places were silent graphic attestations of imperial loyalty.28 Annual Empire Day celebrations and the regular playing of the anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ at social functions also clearly indicated Australia’s links with Great Britain. Immigration authorities encouraged the migrant accommodation centres to involve newcomers in the ‘mass demonstrations of loyalty’ that marked the coronation of the Queen in 1953 and, then, the Royal Visit to Australia in 1954. The newly arrived Laszlo Makay (Hungary, 1951) was keen to record the part his friend and fellow resident, Danko Martek, played in providing decorations for both celebrations at and beyond Bonegilla. Celebrations for the coronation included a ball held in the theatre, at which there was ‘a full dance orchestra and an excellent supper’. For the transients, there were free films, church services and a sports afternoon. All the recreation huts were festooned with red, white and blue decorations. The Border Morning Mail thought the decorations and celebrations of the coronation at Bonegilla ‘[show] how ready these people are to accept British traditions and institutions’.29

The decorations for the coronation were temporary installations in the theatre. For the Royal Visit, Danko Martek and Wladimir Dubrowo created signs and portraits of the Royal Family and their royal progenitors at Benalla Railway Station.30 The Border Morning Mail pictured the Bonegilla children taken by five buses to Benalla to see the Queen and noted that they had sung the national anthem ‘lustily’ about 30 times on the bus trip.31 The decorations for the Royal Visit were retrieved and placed on permanent display in a recreation hut themed and renamed ‘Tudor Hall’. There, they continued as reminders of Australia’s British heritage.32

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Making do at the reception centre Unlike most of the displaced, the assisted had made a voluntary decision to come to Australia. They could decide to stay or to return home. Almost invariably the photographic record comes from those who were insistent on showing themselves and others that their decision to migrate had been a good one. Bonegilla resident photographers were frequently keen to show how they made do in tough conditions. In adapting and adjusting, they demonstrated their resilience and sometimes their camp cunning. Bonegilla offered a ‘protective’ environment, ‘a safe haven for individuals living in a protracted condition of insecure legal status and economic marginality’. It was ‘a space of exception’, which made its residents invisible, segregating them from the host community. What the community perceived as an all-embracing collective of ‘DPs’, ‘Reffos’, ‘Balts’ or ‘New Australians’ was geographically and socially distant from Albury and Wodonga.33

Bonegilla resident photographers were frequently keen to show how they made do in tough conditions. In adapting and adjusting, they demonstrated their resilience and sometimes their camp cunning.

From 1958 on, the centre was consolidated and improved. Attention focused on a few blocks, and eight were no longer used. With the closing of all holding centres except Benalla, Bonegilla had to cope with migrants who were not transient. Kitchens and dining areas were improved. Toilet blocks were sewered. The average maximum number in a sleeping cubicle was reduced from 2.4 to 2.0 persons.34

The Dutch anticipated sunburn.35 Italian women coped with the unexpected cold of Bonegilla.36 Italians cheered each other with music.37 Greeks enjoyed rabbit hunts.38 Lubjica Babic (Croatia, 1952) showed how she varied monotonous kitchen menus with her subterfuge cooker.39 The more resourceful among the Dutch, like the De Wolf family, brought their bikes and even erected makeshift fences.40 The Zoenigseder family showed how they made Bonegilla homely.41

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES, 1951-1959

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Staying on at the centre Most of the migrants allocated work at Bonegilla were pleased to leave as soon as they found other work at the end of their two-year contract. They wanted to make their life in the ‘real Australia’.42 Others were content to stay with their first job allocations at the centre, continuing at Bonegilla for several years beyond their initial contract. The long-stayers or ‘timid centre huggers’ became a problem. Many were very good at their jobs and the administration wanted to keep them, but the Immigration Department wanted their jobs for subsequent new arrivals.43 The long-term resident employees took pride in their achievements and those of the centre. They tended to become Bonegilla champions, loyal to what they saw as worthy and realisable goals. One visiting city journalist saw them as ‘shining examples of integration’.44 Their place memories were deep and often affectionate, as their photographs show. Not all were congratulatory about the centre, but they have not left visual evidence of how they saw its inadequacies.45 Staff enjoyed privileges. They had separate and more comfortable staff accommodation blocks supplied with a richer diversity of food rations. In the staff messes there were tablecloths, iced water on the table, and urns nearby for diners to make their own hot drinks. The weekly menu for staff messes included dishes not available to transients: casseroled chops, steak and kidney pie, corned silverside, curry and rice, and scrambled eggs.46 Block 19 was particularly important to staff, for it contained the Hume Public Service Club. The club building had a cosy fireside lounge and bar, even though alcohol was otherwise barred from the centre. It had billiard tables and a fancy side-lit dance floor. Nearby was a floodlit tennis court and newly developed bowling green for club-organised competitions. The club also organised basketball, soccer and angling clubs and competitions. It held an annual ball and family picnics. It became a place where the centre workforce of men and women from a variety of nations mingled. Through it, immediate workplace camaraderie was extended centre-wide.47 The Department of Immigration went to some lengths to explain that the migrant reception centre would not disrupt life in the nearby local communities. Bonegilla had its own churches, banks, sporting fields, cinema, hospital and police station. As a result, some newcomers felt that at Bonegilla they were not quite in Australia.48 For many locals, Bonegilla was not quite in Wodonga.

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES, 1951-1959

Official photographers showed how staff personalised their quarters.49 So did Laszlo and Eva Makay, long-term centre employees from Hungary.50 Josef (Jim) and Gerda Schymitzek (Germany, 1955) had jobs at the centre. They tended a garden where they planted and grew flowers as well as vegetables beside their hut.51 Alex Lyras (Greece, 1956) boasted of beginning life in Australia as a ‘garbologist’. He was taught to drive a truck and enjoyed the company and friendship of workmates drawn from different nationalities.52 Anne Verloop (The Netherlands, 1953) and Zac Vogiazopoulos (Greece, 1953) were among the many who enjoyed the jollity of Hume Public Service Club functions.53

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Centre–community encounters Three panels in the Australian Citizenship Convention display of 1957 spelt out expectations of newcomers and the host society: ‘They Succeeded’, 'The Keys to Assimilation’ and ‘A Goal Achieved’. First, it was necessary for the newcomer to learn the language, be willing to work and to adjust to Australian ways. Success involved getting a job, a house and a car. The ultimate goal was naturalisation. Photographers were dispatched Australia-wide to gather numerous images to reinforce these messages not only to the migrants but also to the Australian public.54 Assimilation was something that required effort from the immigrants. But, there was also a local community responsibility to help newcomers assimilate.55

Almost hidden from visual record are the most common informal first encounters between the longer settled and the new arrivals as fellow-shoppers on the streets of Albury and Wodonga. Michael Cigler reports how he and his fellow Czechoslovakians would while away the time window-shopping, always on the lookout for items that had been made in Czechoslovakia.60

It was left to the local newspaper to decipher how Bonegilla newcomers and the longersettled encountered and adapted to each other. With its picture stories, the Border Morning Mail showed how ‘these people’ were ‘taking their place in the community’.56 The assisted migrants, like the displaced, were keen to trace their involvement with the local community, even if only at an organisational level. Community engagement continued to be fairly impersonal, almost nameless, except on the sporting field. The newspaper, but not the migrants (or the official publicists), tended to ignore the achievements of the Bonegilla United football team, which was undefeated in 1954.57 This was Australian Rules country, and soccer did not attract close press attention. Still, achievement in any sport was important to the participants and the spectators. A hotly contested nil-all football game in 1959 had the acting director declare in triumph: ‘Here [is] assimilation at its best.’ Basketball, too, he added, was ‘playing a most important part in promoting good relations between centre teams and those from the neighbouring districts’.58 Like the official publicists, the local newspaper gave a great deal of attention to formal declarations of allegiance. Arrangements were introduced in 1953 for naturalisations to be conducted by local governments. The Border Morning Mail reported an increasing number of naturalisation ceremonies. It noted the names of the new citizens, the presence of community support groups, and the speeches of local politicians congratulating the new citizens for expressing their ‘loyalty to the Throne’.59 The functions were newsworthy, but were not, until the 1960s, deemed of sufficient interest to require evening duty by a staff photographer. The new citizens, however, thought they were photo-worthy.

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES, 1951-1959

Greek immigrant pictures of Bonegilla United and Bonegilla basketballers.61 Immigrants recorded their naturalisation ceremonies.62 Residents were proud of the float that the reception centre entered in Albury’s annual Floral Festival procession in 1956.63 The Border Morning Mail observed there were more immigrants than other locals participating in Australia Day celebrations in 1959.64 Luciano Limoni and his Italian friends were pleased to find on their first outing to Albury an Italian ‘motor scooter’. Here were tangible links with home.65

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Moving into the local community Archivists with the Department of Immigration grouped the official publicity photographs taken nation-wide into several categories, each with about 11 000 images. As might be expected, there were those selling the new arrivals – for example, ‘Migrants in sports, the arts and entertainment’. There were also those intended to allay community concern, such as ‘Migrants in housing’, ‘Migrants in employment’ and ‘Migrants in the community’.66

support visits to the newly arrived at Bonegilla. The Dutch were naturalised and intermarried with the native-born at higher rates than other nationalities. They shared a not dissimilar past. Dutch ex-servicemen participated in the local Anzac Day services. Further, they organised events in 1957 and 1959 that revived memories of an earlier connection between Albury and the Netherlands. In 1934, townspeople had helped rescue a Dutch plane that became lost during an air race, a story held in fond local memory.69

The local newspaper was similarly intent on presenting the positives of the immigration program. It reassured the local community about the impact of a large number of people from overseas on local housing and local jobs. It showed the newcomers gradually moving into local neighbourhoods, families and community life. Housing remained a problem, but the newcomers built their own homes. In Wodonga, the newspaper reported complaints in 1950 about the unsightly huts springing up on Mullins Flat, beside the Kiewa River, not far from Bonegilla. Mullins was a sympathetic landholder and sold small blocks where people might make a start. In 1953, the newspaper showed how the huts in what it called ‘Little Russia’ had developed more than one room, and now had gardens and wells. Such developments were proof of the group’s ‘capabilities and industry’.67 These people were battlers prepared ‘to have a go’. They were plainly on an assimilationist trajectory. The newcomers did not displace the native-born from their jobs. They took jobs the locals shunned or invented their own. For two months in mid-1957, the paper’s weekly ‘World of Women’ social pages featured stories of ‘Our New Australians’. Each report traced the background story and challenges facing an immigrant woman, usually coping with family duties and paid work. A congratulatory story title explained that Elizabeth Paikoukis (Poland, 1949), for example, was ‘NATURALISED AND A BLOOD DONOR’; Mrs Marie Mezulis (Latvia, 1959) worked at the hospital laundry; and Mrs Athina Kovruisianos (Greece, 1953) was a housewife and offered readers a recipe. A portrait accompanied each article, but there was no depiction of work as a domestic or hospital laundress. There was no mention of the workers at Albury’s Adelyn or Wodonga’s Greatorex clothing factories.68 In spite of an oft-expressed preference for British migrants, the Border Morning Mail warmed to Dutch immigrants who settled locally, particularly in Lavington. The Dutch were admirable in that they helped each other become self-reliant. They even organised

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES, 1951-1959

In Wodonga and Lavington, other migrants were proud of their self-made half-houses and humble cottages, even though Wodonga Shire Council was beginning to worry about the growing number of ‘garage houses’ by 1959.70 The paper showed the Dutch helping with local charities, such as the Murray Vale Home for children in Lavington.71

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

From somewhere to somewhere 72 For locals, the newly arrived continued to be transient and of fleeting interest. According to the Border Morning Mail, they were all ‘fine types’ and the women were always ‘pretty’. But throughout the 1950s, the newspaper typecast the new arrivals as members of distinctive national groups. Those from Northern Europe, such as the Swedes, Danes and Norwegians, were ‘in search of jobs and, above all, sunshine’. The fair-haired and light-complexioned Finns had come ‘from Arctic wastes to century heat’ at Bonegilla. They were here to enjoy our sun.73 When the first Spaniards arrived, the Border Morning Mail anticipated ‘clicking castanets and fancy fandangos’ at Bonegilla.74 The newly arrived Dutch families, especially those with unusually large families, were boosting Australia’s population.75 The immigrants were now something other than ‘Balts’, ‘DPs’ and ‘Reffos’ from a place called ‘Europe’. They were referred to generally as ‘New Australians’, until, by 1959, that term had become disparaging. Immigration authorities preferred ‘new settlers’.

The immigrants were now something other than ‘Balts’, ‘DPs’ and ‘Reffos’ from a place called ‘Europe’. They were referred to generally as ‘New Australians’, until, by 1959, that term had become disparaging.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, large numbers of newcomers were directed to seasonal harvesting jobs in wine or sugar districts. Some, like George Tzikas and Gabriel Gabrielidis, were sent to perform factory work in Port Kembla, or railway or dam construction work.76 The official records of the employment officers tracked where the assisted immigrants headed after Bonegilla.77 Giovanni Ciminell and Felice Cirillo and were among the many young Italian men who found ten weeks’ emergency employment at a defence force establishment in 1952. Konstintinos Alikoussis and Dimitrios Vaviadelis were among several Greek rural workers who found employment in country town cafes. Families such as this Greek one were separated, with the mother and children sent to a holding centre while the father took up work elsewhere on railway construction, for example.

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANTS AND REFUGEES, 1951-1959

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

The 1960s brought new challenges for immigration authorities still anxious to attract migrants, especially those who were skilled. They found it difficult to recruit from Europe, where economic conditions were improving. The competition for skilled migrants from Canada was strong. Fewer people were emigrating from several countries, such as the Netherlands. Further, and perhaps even more worrying, departure rates were alarmingly high, especially among the British, Germans and Dutch. Approximately one in four or five of those who had migrated to Australia had left. The numbers arriving at Bonegilla slowed. The annual intake slumped by half in the immediate aftermath of a riot in 1961.

Nor were all groups depicted generously. White Russian refugees fleeing Communist China reminded immigration officers of the early DP arrivals: they were ‘generally rural in appearance, English weak, a little bewildered and forlorn, here and there a brown almond eye hinted at traces of the oriental’.6 The White Russians were put into quarantine when there was an outbreak of typhoid among them in 1962. There were modifications to the White Australia policy, with the Immigration Minister exercising his discretion to accept non-Europeans according to their ‘general suitability’ and ability to be integrated.⁷ In May 1966, provision was made for families of mixed race to be sent to Bonegilla, rather than directly to worker hostels.8

Still, the Department of Immigration persisted in promoting what had become Australia’s only reception centre. It hoped that improvements to Bonegilla and to the worker hostels might make a better first impression and encourage newcomers to stay. Reception facilities and procedures had improved gradually through the 1950s to provide an ‘uplifting’ environment for prospective skilled worker migrants. They were even further improved and were now portrayed in colour photographs.1 Bonegilla became more diverse. From 1959 and through the 1960s, the most numerous new arrivals were Greeks, Germans and Yugoslavs (especially Croatians). Recruiting officers cast a wider net, taking in migrants from a greater diversity of countries, among them Ireland, Sweden, Finland, France, South Africa, Turkey, Syria and Armenia. The Border Morning Mail depicted families from the United States becoming accustomed to the ‘simple and frugal life at Bonegilla’.2 Norwegians were ‘in search of steady employment and above all, sunshine’.3 Refugees fleeing Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia were ‘beautiful’ and ‘young intellectuals’. It reported that the Czechs and Slovaks found Bonegilla a ‘Botanic Garden’. Fleeing communism, they were favourably impressed with Australia: it was ‘beautiful that people can own a home of their own with a yard about it’.4 However, not all national groups were complimentary. A small group of Maltese, misdirected to Bonegilla, objected to being placed with the non-British and ‘herded like cattle’.5

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

Bonegilla took on a new look. It was officially relabelled ‘Reception Centre’, thus losing the former ‘Training Centre’ tag that might deter the skilled. The blocks were renamed with alpha labels and allocated distinctive Australian wildlife emblems. These were visible signs that ‘assimilation’ was softening into ‘integration’. By the mid-1960s, 50 per cent of the migrants were arriving by air rather than by sea. They were better dressed than earlier cohorts. The Sun pictured the arrival of White Russian refugees sponsored by the World Council of Churches in 1962. They were comparatively impoverished.9

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

The 1961 riot – ‘another Eureka’ On 17 and 18 July 1961, unemployed migrants held a noisy protest procession. In a variety of languages, they chanted ‘We want work’ and paraded ‘ugly signs’ with similar messages.10 The demonstration became worrying when the participants attacked and damaged the Employment Office, which had not provided them with work. Police were rushed to the centre. There were scuffles. One policeman was hospitalised with a dislocated shoulder. Later that evening, the demonstrators reassembled and threw stones, breaking windows in the canteen and street lights. Police launched a baton charge to disperse the crowd and imposed a curfew. The next day, more police were mustered. Migrants booed the police and threw stones at police cars. That evening, police raided Block 13, where further mischief was allegedly being planned.11

been voicing their discontent for three or four months.16 Churchmen and consular officials had made representations about the distress of what were becoming longterm unemployed migrants.17 Little was done, but the Minister had written asking the unemployed to be patient. The media was generally sympathetic to those unemployed migrants who felt they had been lured to Australia with the promise of work being available within three or four weeks. Many of them were skilled and had left jobs in their home countries. As in 1952, the economic recession meant that they were having to wait three or four months, not one month, for work.

The protests attracted the attention of the metropolitan, ethnic and even the international press. Charges of riot, assault and damage to Commonwealth property were issued against a total of 11 men.12 Ahead of a pending election, Labor Party luminaries Jim Cairns and Clive Holding visited Bonegilla. Cairns declared the protest by would-be workers as being in the tradition of Eureka.13 No one expected assisted passage migrants to behave this way. The Sydney Morning Herald declared their actions ‘un-Australian’. The Immigration Minister, Alex Downer, stressed that ‘such behaviour is not tolerated in this country’.14 He said that the demonstrators had caused hundreds of pounds worth of damage and that was an abuse of Australian hospitality. Centre officials blamed ‘expert outside organisers’ for inflaming a small group of disgruntled hotheads. With Cold War relish, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officers descended on the centre and used their usual ruses to identify migrant leaders and to investigate Communist Party involvement. They tapped telephones. They arranged for a young police constable of Italian background to pose as a migrant and act as an undercover agent. Among the 11 people arrested, ASIO found a German and an Italian of particular interest. Officers also identified four reception staff members who were either Communists or sympathetic towards communism, but concluded that they were unconnected to the incident.15 Newspapers covering the incident were not at all sure that the protests were the work of a few. They almost invariably agreed there was a general discontent about not getting jobs among all the resident nationalities, of which Germans, Italians and Yugoslavs were the most numerous. Unemployed residents had

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

Disaffected migrants alerted the Border Morning Mail to their proposed protests and a frontpage picture followed by a full-page collage appeared the next day.18 The protests won newspaper attention, but the tone of the visual coverage was censorious. Scenes of the wrecked employment office depicted vandalism. A picture of a hospitalised policeman, Constable Besford, showed sympathy for the law rather than the rioters.19 Friedrich Drehlich, a German migrant, took and kept his own photographic record.20

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

In the immediate wake of the 1961 riot The Immigration Minister arranged for the unemployed at Bonegilla to be moved to city-based worker hostels, where there was a greater range of work opportunities. Following the riot, Downer temporarily reduced the migrant intake for the rest of the year. With an election looming, both the Opposition and the media read the policy change as an open admission that the economy was not faring well in an election year.21

your wife sitting idly on the step of your hut and your young child scrabbling in the dust outside it.’ It was, as residents (warming to the vernacular) said, ‘boring Boneybloody-gilla’.25 The official files show that subsequent incidents of migrant unrest were not disclosed to the media.26

Downer moved quickly to refute and to counter criticism of Bonegilla. He suggested that the government might augment the amenities fund, as Harold Holt had done after the 1952 riot. This time, the increased funds could be used to provide better school transport services for the secondary school children. Women with newborn babies might be issued with soft towels, napkins, and other useful items. Dentists might be permitted to perform fillings as well as extractions.22 As always with Bonegilla, the changes draw attention to the conditions that prompted them. On the day of the trial, the police prosecutor prudently withdrew the charges of riot and assault. He was satisfied that the men before the court had not intended harm or hurt. Moreover, they had apologised. This prompted the magistrate to adjourn the remaining charges of damaging Commonwealth property, while at the same time rebuking those charged for their behaviour.23 The government was relieved. It was better not to proceed and have gaoled migrant martyrs who would inevitably draw further unfavourable attention from the national and international press to the difficulties facing the Australian immigration program through an economic recession. Australia did not want to impede future efforts to recruit migrants. Newspaper interest in the story and in the reception centre petered out once the trial was over. The 1961 riot prompted the national media to investigate living conditions at the reception centre.24 Almost invariably, journalists found Bonegilla to be uninviting, but bearable for short stays of a few weeks. Boredom was the major problem causing unrest. Writing for the Bulletin, Desmond O’Grady was impressed with the brave pretence of ‘men walking along the road side looking as if they had somewhere to go’. German and Italian newspapers, he feared, would carry stories of their nationals stagnating in a former army camp. O’Grady observed: ‘Even in the best of weather it is no fun getting up each morning with nothing to do, to be an able-bodied man without work and see

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

As in 1952, the metropolitan press blamed the riot on boredom, while the local newspaper reassured its readers that all was calm and under control at Bonegilla.2⁷ The Border Morning Mail featured a photograph of newly arrived families sitting down to a ‘merry meal’. The men were skilled workers who would quickly find employment. The families came from Holland and ‘Northern Italy’; ‘they settled into the camp without incident’.2⁸ Within a week or so, it carried four pictured human interest stories which presented former migrants in a positive light.2⁹ Gijsbert Visser, a Dutch migrant, noted the wry humour of the closed employment office.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

No longer a stark former army camp In spite of the 1961 riot, the Department of Immigration persisted in declaring Bonegilla an appropriate reception centre. It had beautified the surrounds, better equipped the accommodation and reorganised the provision of food. The changes fitted with what was to become a formal shift in policy from ‘assimilation’ to a gentler ‘integration’ in 1964. In 1965, the Immigration Department’s in-house publication, Good Neighbour, featured a supplement boasting that Bonegilla was no longer drab: ‘The first settlers in the post-war period would find it hard to recognise the centre now. Stark outlines have gone for today there are some 15 000 trees, both Australian and European. Banks, churches, a school, hospital and leisure centre are among the facilities.’30 It indicated that many of the staff were recruited from among former new arrivals and spoke several languages. To counter boredom and to help newcomers equip themselves for lives in their new country, P.R. Heydon, the new Secretary of the Department, pushed in 1961 for redesigned adult education and children’s leisure units. Heydon wanted better use to be made of film as a learning medium. A weekly film program and a well-stocked library would help those waiting for employment to learn English and find out more about their adopted country. The aim of what had been renamed the ‘Film and Study Centre’ was ‘broader than teaching English’. Classroom furnishings were improved. Air conditioning was installed. A reading–writing room was accessible day and evening. In the best traditions of adult education, the director supplied biscuits for morning and afternoon teas.31 Shipboard education officers were home-based at Bonegilla, where they were language instructors between trips. They complained that their accommodation did not match that on the ships. Further, men and women were not treated equally: the men’s cubicles were serviced; women’s cubicles had refrigerators and a small stove.32 Other resident employees developed a rich variety of social and sporting activities centred on the Hume Public Service Club. Membership was open to former employees who ‘promote the assimilation and welfare of migrants’.33 Accommodation structures and furnishings had improved: the sewerage system had been extended and deep-pit latrines removed; the cubicles now had 9-inch innerspring mattresses and electric radiators. Beds 3-feet (not 2-feet) wide, appropriate for ‘long term adult use’, were supplied for hospital staff.34

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

The Good Neighbour showed staff such as E. Martek, a social worker, engaged encouragingly in eye-to-eye contact with newcomer clients.3⁵ Language classes were conducted in more pleasant surrounds.3⁶ Many residents found watching popular films shown at the centre’s cinema a helpful way to pick up the language. Attendance was greatest for action shows featuring Tarzan and James Bond, as well as for westerns, war stories and musicals. It peaked for 'The Great Escape' and 'Lost Command'. Television sets were installed in some recreation huts in 1965, but operated only after 5pm, except on Sundays.3⁷ Cubicles were provided with strip radiators, floor coverings, curtains and better furnishings.3⁸

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Feeding Bonegilla Publicists were keen to show that, from 1956 on, the messes were refurbished, painted and curtained. Through the 1960s, the seven-day, all-too-regular menu of army rations gave way to a more varied 28-day schedule of meals. Erwin Poloczek, a cook, explained to the Border Morning Mail readers that different ‘home country’ meals were prepared at the reception centre. The Dutch liked semolina, flour, puddings, white sauces and cake. Italians preferred spaghetti, meat, tomatoes and baked beans. Yugoslavs and Hungarians liked spicy meals with plenty of paprika. ‘Roast beef, potatoes, lettuce and tomatoes comprise a good solid German meal,’ he said.39 The centre became proud of how it fed its residents. Indeed, wanting to reassure the world about the standard of comfort of the centre, the director, Colonel Henry Guinn, sent invitations to dine in Block 19 out to those members of the press and the police who had gathered to cover the riot in 1961.40

Visiting Dutch comedian Max Tailleur admired Bonegilla cuisine in its industrial-scaled kitchens.41 In spite of the new glamour lent with colour pictures in the 1960s, the migrant communal eating places remained decidedly masculine.42 Outdoor refreshments at the canteen, however, were pictured as having a fashionable continental air.43

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Filming Bonegilla Government publicists thought motion films were even more influential than still photographs, but they required more resources. They produced or supported the making of several black-and-white documentaries promoting immigration. They boasted of making two Eastman colour films when they had sufficient funds in 1959 and 1963. The official story of Bonegilla, it seemed, was told most forcefully in film documentaries destined for big screens in Australia, overseas and on the ships bringing migrants. The plots of the films were simple: migrants arrived, were processed and left. These documentaries showed how migrants were received, accommodated and allocated work, giving special attention to the food, the sunshine and the English lessons. They showed people departing to take up jobs all over Australia. The first documentary, 'We Found a Home' or 'Wie Haben Ein Heim', 1948, was intended to recruit displaced persons. It ended with a voice-over Estonian choir singing, ‘Let’s go, men. We have a job ahead.’ The second, 'Arriving in Australia', 1963, was shown on board the ships bringing assisted skilled migrants. Depicting the improved centre, it was intended to reassure them about what lay ahead. It ended with Henry Guinn, in dapper bow tie, but practical, no-nonsense, rolled-up shirtsleeves, farewelling the newly processed migrants. In 1963, a more ambitious film documentary about Bonegilla, 'A World for Children', was produced by the Children’s Library and Craft Movement with the support and encouragement of the Department of Immigration.44 The film showed three primary school-aged children happily exploring the centre. To a gentle refrain of ‘Going Home’ on flute, then violin, the children climbed along fallen trees, played tunnel ball in bare feet, and swam and splashed in Lake Hume. Plenty of new friends, the river, sunshine and open paddocks made Bonegilla a pleasant holiday camp. The absence of words made the film accessible to prospective immigrants from many nations. It was an evocative lyric, but distributors complained it was ‘too long’. There was no story, just loosely connected visual vignettes of life at the centre. Publicists were proud of the way Australia welcomed migrant children during the 1960s. At the Creative Arts Centre, school-aged children were involved in expressive dancing, gymnastics, painting, puppet making and acting. They went camping, where they learnt basic bushcraft. They put on concerts featuring their versions of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. However, the director complained that the centre seemed to cater for the children of staff rather than for transients, who had greater need of such help.

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

In 1964, Wodonga Shire Council produced a ten-minute black-and-white promotional film called 'Add Another Five' with the help of the border district’s new television station, AMV4. It, too, followed a simple storyline in which the Shire President took a newly arrived migrant family of five from Bonegilla on a tour of the town to show them the employment and education opportunities, the comfortable housing and the friendly reception they might enjoy if they settled locally. It began with a sweeping panorama of the Bonegilla Reception Centre, ‘the biggest in Australia’. It ended with the Shire President prompting a signwriter to ‘add another five’ to the 9 000 population sign at the entry of the town. One scene drew attention to a butcher shop run by Paul Peters and Erwin Grabbe, two migrants who had settled locally and established a good trade as a delicatessen, selling bratwurst, zugenwurst and other European foodstuffs, which literally gave Wodonga a continental flavour.45

The absence of words made the film accessible to prospective immigrants from many nations. It was an evocative lyric, but distributors complained it was ‘too long’.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Depicting the growing migrant presence During the early 1960s, Australia began to normalise, if not prize, cultural diversity. There was talk of ‘integration’, rather than ‘assimilation’. ‘Old ways’ were being ‘grafted’ into Australian culture. The term ‘New Settler’ replaced the now disparaged term ‘New Australian’.46 The growing presence of migrants meant more frequent rubbing of shoulders. At first, they were physically distant rather than street neighbours. Gradually, however, strangers encountered fleetingly in streets, shops and public spaces became, over time, fellow workers, congregation members, hospital patients, school parents, voluntary organisation members or hobby enthusiasts. More intimately, newcomers became schoolmates, youth group friends, boyfriends or girlfriends. Friendships became courtships and even, sometimes, marriages.47

Text rather than pictures told of difficulties between some old-world enemies that made the host community uncomfortable. The press reported tensions between Croatians and Serbians involving a visit by the former King Peter II of Yugoslavia in 1960. In 1963, there were national reports of a Croatian Liberation Front ‘terrorist camp’ in Wodonga. The government worried about the formation of a Croatian headquarters, but the local newspaper did not feel disposed to make any investigation of its own.54

The Border Morning Mail continued to picture community engagement with Bonegilla, but now gave more attention to the growing migrant presence. It pictured the supportive activities of church groups, the CWA, YWCA, Apex, Business and Professional Women’s Organisation, Jaycees, Lions, Rotary and the Good Neighbour Council.48 It now also reported neighbours and community groups rallying in support of migrants who had endured misfortunes. It took to championing some of the unfortunate itself.49 The newspaper showed Albury and Wodonga as plainly good at taking in strangers and as having become economically and culturally enriched as a result, as Bonegilla arrivals spilt out into the community. It pictured ethnic clubs and churches, and the traditions that they retained. It traced the contributions made, for example, by an immigrant photographer, artist, hammer thrower, musical theatre producer and delicatessen owner.50 Border Morning Mail photographs and stories paraded – and may, indeed, have exaggerated the way new and old adapted readily to each other.51 Wodonga welcomed its 1 000th new citizen in 1966 and Albury its 600th in 1967. Photo or story headers declared: ‘They’re now part of our community’, or: ‘We thank you for having us, migrants say’.52 New and old learnt to cohabit without rancour: they shared a space, a locality. If nothing more, both the ‘we’ and the ‘they’ of sets of strangers learnt to cope with each other.53

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

The CWA continued with its bus trips to its Bonegilla rooms on the last Tuesday of each month. These trips helped to establish mutual respect based on exchanges of recipes and the sharing of common child and family care experiences.55 Otto Kampe, a Latvian with a wife and five children, was one of 500 people with handicaps admitted during the World Refugee Year. He was feted and greeted on arrival by Alex Downer as the 250 000th refugee, but needed help from the local Junior Chamber of Commerce to find a job.56 The Dutch in Lavington supported community events.57 A Serbian Orthodox Church acquired a former Presbyterian church building in Wodonga.58 Fraulein Kerstin Merschnik invited locals to welcome in the New Year in a European manner at the German–Austrian Club.59

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Closing Bonegilla By the mid-1960s, the government found it more convenient and cheaper to accommodate migrants in worker hostels run by the Commonwealth Hostels Ltd rather than in Bonegilla and Benalla, the last remaining migrant accommodation centres. In 1967, it cost government $18 per week over and above what it collected in resident tariffs to accommodate each Bonegilla resident.60 From 1965 on, new improved migrant worker hostels were built closer to workplaces. They provided flats with family bathing and cooking facilities. The local newspaper explained: ‘Migrants coming from conditions of improving affluence in Europe expected better conditions than a military-style camp where washing and toilet facilities were shared.’61 Bonegilla was not refurbished. It had become ‘redundant and obsolete’. Immigration Ministers Billy Snedden and then Phillip Lynch insisted in their final analyses that Bonegilla had ‘served its purpose well’, but it had never been intended for anything other than temporary accommodation. Almost apologetically, they explained that Bonegilla had been established ‘at a time when Government was faced with an acute shortage of housing and building materials’.62 It had only been ‘adequately equipped’ for new arrival stays of about three weeks. The post-war immigration program ended when Bonegilla closed in 1971 and reverted to its original use as an army camp.63 Pressed by the need to accommodate National Service trainees for Vietnam, the Army negotiated to occupy several Bonegilla blocks from 1965 on. What began, then, as a partial transformation back into an army camp was completed in 1971. The local community baulked at the prospect of the reception centre closing. The economic stimulus it represented went beyond supplying food and services. Many migrants settled locally and expanded the workforce. The local economy was invigorated with migrants moving into self-employment and many overseas-born women entering paid employment.64 Indeed, by 1971 the population of Wodonga had trebled, and that of Albury had doubled. Further, Reverend Bruno Meutzelfeldt, the first resident Lutheran pastor and now director of the Lutheran World Federation based in Geneva, explained that Bonegilla had fulfilled an important staging role, helping newcomers to adjust to their new country in a welcoming rural, rather than urban, environment.65 There were to be less positive reckonings. The Melbourne Herald noted the end of Victoria’s ‘Little Europe’. Its ‘barbed wire perimeter’ and ‘midget-sized living cubicles’ had given newcomers ‘a depressing first impression of Australia’. The journalist found

PICTURING THE RECEPTION OF ASSISTED MIGRANT WORKERS, 1960-1971

boredom still a major problem: the last residents, mostly from the former Yugoslavia, wandered around, ‘looking lost and bewildered’.66 In 1966, James Jupp, a contemporary critic, argued that Bonegilla had outlived its usefulness. Its retention was ‘less and less defensible’. It was no longer realistic ‘to enforce communal encampment life’ on people coming from an increasingly prosperous Europe. At Bonegilla, newcomers were isolated and felt controlled and vulnerable to manipulation.67 The closing of Bonegilla ended discrimination against the non-British, who were now, like their British counterparts, sent directly to worker hostels on arrival.

From 1966 on, G and H blocks were used by ordnance trainees. Tents are in the foreground. Other blocks were used by survey, catering and transport training units.68 Official photographers recorded the retirement of long-term director Henry Guinn (1954–1966). Guinn was responsible for overseeing substantial physical improvements and for improving community liaison.69 The Border Morning Mail sadly noted the last arrivals on 8 October 1971.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

The Bonegilla Reception Centre closed in December 1971 and the camp reverted to the Department of Defence. Over the next 15 years, the department demolished nearly all of the army huts to make way for a new apprentice training school. Block 19, the lastremaining block of 24, was saved from demolition by ex-resident and local protesters. They successfully lobbied to have it placed on the Register of the National Estate in 1990 as being representative of the whole site. The Army ceased to use Block 19 in about 1998–1999, transferring its ownership to the state government. It was placed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 2002 and on the Commonwealth Government’s National Heritage List in 2007. The remembering of Bonegilla was picture-assisted, and, indeed, quickly became picture-centred, given the powerful roles played by the media and by the local museum in pursuing memory.1 Advocates of the place’s heritage worthiness used pictures, most frequently sourced from the media, to underscore Bonegilla’s importance as an outof-the-ordinary place that prompted thinking about Australia’s post-war immigration scheme. Ex-resident advocates gathered photographs from their family photo albums and memory pieces to form a base for what they hoped might be an immigration museum that would encourage reflection on the migrant experience.2 Prompted by the ex-residents, the Melbourne Sun, drawing on its own records, ran a two-page supplement, ‘Birthplace of a Nation’, in 1986.3 The Sun picture collection formed the basis for the first exhibition arranged by Albury Regional Museum at a large, wellattended reunion in 1987. The Border Morning Mail had already run a five-part series by Tony Wright titled ‘The Immigrants’, which spoke warmly of immigrants’ achievements.4 As a custodian of local memory, the newspaper acted as a champion of the endeavour to form a museum. For the 1987 reunion, it produced a supplement featuring 37 picture stories drawn from its own files and supplied by ex-resident donors.

RE-PICTURING BONEGILLA

The unused buildings did not lend themselves readily to conversion into a museum. It was simpler to commemorate Bonegilla within a professionally tended museum than as an actual place on the ground. Through, and then beyond, the 1990s, local museum professionals, with the collaboration of former residents, won a substantial museum and web presence for memories of Bonegilla. Elizabeth Close, the energetic and innovative director of Albury City Council’s newly professionalised museum, chased and gathered memory pieces and photographs at a large, week-long festival she initiated in 1997. She helped win funding for a travelling exhibition, ‘The Steps of Bonegilla’, about life at the camp. In 2000–2003, the exhibition visited Canberra and Melbourne, where supplementary materials, including more ex-resident photographs, were gathered and displayed. The rapidly expanding Bonegilla Collection was used for a large ‘semi-permanent’ exhibition in the new Albury LibraryMuseum building in 2007 and for site interpretation displays in 2010. Ex-resident, rather than official or media, photographs dominated both the museum and the site presentations.

Commemorative attention focused on the 23 huts in Block 19.5 In 2008, Katina Vasiliou, a visitor, temporarily reinserted herself into the role of a Greek arrival by posing on a suitcase before a backdrop.6 A visitor pens a reflection or memory piece in the Quiet Room hut, 2015.7

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Projecting public faces of Bonegilla and its residents The custodian of the publicity archive, the National Archives of Australia, has used its collection in exhibitions and on a dedicated website called ‘Destination Australia’ (www.destinationaustralia.gov.au). Both the exhibitions and website have increased the currency and amplified the messages of the publicity photographs. Indeed, the official photographs have become an unofficial history emanating from a government authority. In such real and virtual exhibitions, the photographs, I suggest, reassure those still uneasy about an even bigger and more diverse Australia that we have been there before, we muddled through; we coped; they coped.8 Like all well-circulated images they invite investigation, even challenge.9 In 1967, parishioners at the Sacred Heart Church in Beechworth Road, Wodonga installed a stained-glass window transposing the flight of the Holy Family to Egypt into an Australian context, for the family was moving towards the Southern Cross. At the dedication, Emil Prochazka, from Czechoslovakia, spoke on behalf of the donors who had similarly fled their homelands. They were ‘pleased to find freedom of worship and friendship in Wodonga’. ‘When we went to church,’ he declared, ‘we were not treated as New Australians. We were accepted as Catholics and, as such, welcomed by everyone.’10 The Sacred Heart Church has continued to recall the support it gave, displaying the names of the Catholic chaplains at Bonegilla on a plaque. Both the plaque and the window are enduring public faces of Bonegilla and its residents.

At the National Archives of Australia in 2014, a needlework sampler and an enlarged photograph of two men shown walking down a flower-garden fringed road at the improved Bonegilla in 1965 cleverly enticed visitors to enter an exhibition on migrant hostels.11 On the suggestion of Howard Jones, I selected a picture of Bonegilla school children, wearing lederhosen and dirndl-styled dresses, in a march to celebrate Albury’s centenary of local government for the cover of my local history. It showed a centre-inspired community engagement performance.12 Not all the public faces have been congratulatory of the hosts. Giovanni Sgro has given eyewitness testimony about the 1952 Italian riot to television audiences on at least two occasions.13

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Crafting place-based visual stories After the Army transferred the Block 19 site to the state, Parklands Albury Wodonga, a not-for-profit community group, was given responsibility for site management. The Victorian Government funded development of a ‘commemorative site and tourism venue’ and built an interpretation pavilion, which was opened in 2005. The ‘Beginning Place’ pavilion used carefully selected pictures, principally from the State Library of Victoria and the Australian War Memorial, to prepare visitors for their tour of the place. A 20-minute video, compiled from archival moving picture footage, gave a background historical context to post-war immigration. The name ‘Bonegilla Migrant Experience Heritage Park’, initially given by Parklands, was shortened to ‘Bonegilla Migrant Experience’ when Wodonga City Council took over site responsibility after 2010.14 Public art pieces and period photographs help visitors negotiate their own meanings of the place. Resident photographs have been used to rescue the stories of the voiceless. Several evoke sensory memories. Most focus on the commonplace, the everyday. A few even suggest the intimate. In 2015, interpretation emphasis shifted from the huge numbers at Bonegilla to tracing individual stories. Together, the pictures have encouraged an exchange in visual and verbal memories. Like similar public art at other heritage places, the works at Bonegilla are conjectural, imagining how people felt. Nevertheless, they ‘build attentiveness’ and ‘unsettlement’; they ‘influence how people understand and use the past to understand themselves and others’.15

In 2005, a large perforated screen featuring a crowd of new arrivals announced the interpretation pavilion, ‘The Beginning Place’. A series of enlarged Box Brownie stills now establish the entry. They serve as foyer cards to this theatre of memory. So, for example, a photograph by Paul Szilasy, from Hungary, of Marie Herbst, whom he was courting, has been enlarged into an evocative poster board showing a woman looking at a man through a camera in the paddocks of Bonegilla. Sculptors Ken Raff and Stephen Anderson queried the welcoming nature of the reception centre. The mother in a family group appears uncomfortable, 2001. A temporary installation by Ken Raff for a weekend event in 2005 drew attention to the hurt of family separation. In Wodonga, a funky-haired woman is stepping into Australia. She is off to have a baby in a hospital where neither the nurses nor the doctors speak her language, 2001 (Raff and Anderson).

RE-PICTURING BONEGILLA

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Depicting place memory with pen, needle and brush Skilled and unskilled graphic artists have re-imagined the migrant/refugee experience and constructed memory maps.

Nico van Dalen sketched recall of Dutch apprehension about both inappropriate work placements and the deep-pit latrines and communal ablution facilities at what the Dutch persisted in describing as a ‘camp’, rather than a ‘centre’.16 Gunner Neeme, an artist from Estonia who had become a language instructor, drew two bleak pictures of the mood and character of Bonegilla.17 A graffiti piece by George Sofianu and Leotohithu Nikolakopoulu (Greece, 1956) depicts a wartime battle at Pindus, a strategically important mountain pass during both World War II and the Greek Civil War. This was ‘where fire and steel spread death and catastrophe’. ‘Long live Greece.’ A combatant may be wearing a German helmet.18 Colonel John Hillier was a Bonegilla resident as an officer in the Australian Survey Corps from 1966. He characteristically prepared a detailed tour map of the whole campsite. The tours he conducted with Bruce Avery for a festival in 1999 were popular with ex-resident visitors who were anxious to establish their connection with the place, be it by simply viewing the site of their now demolished hut.19 Alex Lyras drew a rough memory map of the Hume Public Service Club to help with its interpretation when it was restored.20 Roman Kitt remembered where his family lived among other New Australian families at nearby Killara.21 Michael Mullins, whose family had made the land available to the migrant settlers, commissioned Cathie Eglinton to make a quilt reproduction of the memory map as a personal memory piece.22 Romana Kurzug Favier (Ukraine, 1950) recalled Bonegilla in oils as a sunburnt landscape.23 74

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Australianising the newly arrived Bonegilla was and is understood to have been an introduction to Australia and to Australianness. The reception centre carried pictorial representations of Australia. Language class posters conveyed ideas about Australian geography. Walls were decorated with pictures of ‘Australian scenes’, including cattle drafting and sheep shearing, and Australian wildlife such as dingoes, koalas and kangaroos. There were also representations of each of the Australian capital cities, important for visualising possible job destinations. The unpeopled spaces of Bonegilla were ideal for their original purpose of military training. Subsequently, the river and the open paddocks provided opportunity for newcomers to familiarise themselves with their new country.24 It was through taking long walks in the area around Bonegilla that residents came to an understanding of a physical setting in which non-metropolitan, inland Australians lived. For them, this was Australia − a hot summer sun in a huge sky, or cold winter nights in unlined and unheated huts. With their photographs, residents remarked on the weather; the open landscape in the middle of nowhere; the lake with its bare, inundated trees. They tried to capture something of the strange flora, fauna and, even, birdsong. Like the displaced elsewhere, in Australia and overseas, some newcomers gave close and thoughtful attention to their new natural surrounds.25 It was the resident photographer, rather than official publicists or the media, who showed how the newly arrived acquired Australia by osmosis in this riverside setting. In the post-war years, scholars were analysing Australian speech patterns and developing an Australian dictionary. Artists and professional photographers were re-discovering what was distinctive about Australian landscapes and townscapes. Anthropologists were paying new respectful heed to the ways Australia’s first people thought about themselves and their country. Historians were looking anew at a national, rather than a colonial, past. Legislators and regulators were introducing measures related to Australian citizenship, an Australian flag, a national day and an Australian currency. Citizens debated how white, and how British, the nation should be. There was, I suggest, a general preoccupation with Australianness, culminating in many ways with the introduction of Australian citizen, rather than British subject, passports in 1968. But it was a changing sense of Australianness – not only loosening imperial loyalties,

RE-PICTURING BONEGILLA

but also admitting and then celebrating hyphenated identities. Ethnic groups have endeavoured to ensure that any narrative of nation building unfolded at Bonegilla incorporates their group stories.26

Like the displaced elsewhere, in Australia and overseas, some newcomers gave close and thoughtful attention to their new natural surrounds.25

Visiting kangaroos help visitors imagine the place as an introduction to Australia.27 Paul Chimin painted a series of Australian landscapes for the walls of the theatre. They survive as reminders of the visual stories prepared to accustom new arrivals to their new homeland.28 For the Savolainen children from Finland in 1963, Bonegilla retained associations with wet swimming costumes, bare feet and tangled fishing lines.29 For the Babic family from Croatia in 1952, it was to be remembered for its rabbits.30 An unknown Dutch person pictured a possum intruder enticed by jam into their sleeping quarters. An unknown Italian shows a captured kookaburra.31 The hyphen of identity has been strengthened with commemorative functions arranged for and by Greek-, Dutch- and Ukrainian-Australian family groups.32

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Eating the past Popular memory has tended to disparage the plainness and sameness of Bonegilla food and the way it was served. There were frequent complaints about the stench of boiled or dripping-fried mutton, but they have to be accommodated beside the fond memories of some for a hearty breakfast on a new day in a new land.33 The reputation of Bonegilla food, more often bad than good, lives on at the place and elsewhere. A smell pot issuing an odour like fried mutton in the Bonegilla exhibition at Albury LibraryMuseum perpetuates the idea that Bonegilla food may have been plentiful, but was not well presented or received. Contrarily, a Melbourne restaurant called Jimmy Grants offers ‘Bonegilla Burgers’ to attract, rather than deter, customers (http://jimmygrants.com.au/).

The emphasis on home-crafted food relates directly to newcomer home-building. The production and consumption of homeland foods both publicly and privately was important to re-settlement. Public eateries won cultural recognition from the host society. Private cooking and eating re-established a distant familiar. With food, migrants had ‘a better base for confronting and launching themselves into life in Australia … and a base from which to perceive and grasp Australian opportunities’. Homeland food formed part of a ‘positive nostalgia’.37

SBS TV has vigorously set out to trace the influence of migrants on Australians’ eating and drinking habits. A copiously illustrated article by Sean Fennessy in the SBS magazine Feast: Experiencing Life through Food invited tourists to eat and drink in the Albury-Wodonga area.34 Here visitors might enjoy a stein at the German–Austrian– Australian Club, visit Peters and Sons for continental foodstuffs, and experience gastronomic multiculturalism at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience. Readers were invited to reminisce with George Kotsiros, speaking about his milk bar, and George Veneris, recalling his Hume Weir Café. Lutz Peters told how his family established a continental delicatessen. There was a photograph of an ex-resident migrant, Jean Van Aiken, showing visitors the former kitchen and messes with some of their industrialsized cooking equipment. The article explained that visitors to the Bonegilla Migrant Experience could view a wall display detailing the seven-day menu available to displaced persons and early assisted migrants.35 Seizing on popular interest, Bonegilla Migrant Experience draws attention to past and present culinary experiences with displays and food-related events, for there is a ‘business of remembering’.36 Public memory places cost money to construct and maintain. They require funding to win attention and inform/guide visitors. Like all memory places, Bonegilla Migrant Experience wrestles with the question of whether it is primarily a commemorative site or a tourism venue. It is both. Events with loose connections, specially arranged festivals and souvenir shop kitsch attract tourists who help provide the funding that is necessary for the place to continue to function. Foodlovers are given an opportunity to ponder meanings of the venue that allude beyond arrival to settlement.

RE-PICTURING BONEGILLA

Photographs are carefully selected to create an old-world ambience in a newly erected dining area. Special events have been held providing instruction in sausage making, fish and meat smoking, and brewing. Sunday roasts are held regularly. A souvenir shop stocks a Bonegilla-branded olive oil.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Heeding earlier times at Bonegilla Bonegilla has a multi-layered heritage. It belongs to the Aboriginal peoples who inhabited the rich riverine district where the Mitta Mitta River joined the Murray.38 It belongs to the pastoralists who worked the area. It belongs to the residents of the modern-day Bonegilla locality. Through its connection with stories about defending and peopling Australia, the site of the former Bonegilla Army Camp and Bonegilla Reception Centre belongs to the Army, the migrants and the people of Australia. The construction of an army camp in 1940 and its subsequent conversion into a migrant centre in 1947 indicate, separately and together, attempts to cope with national vulnerability during and after World War II. The migrant centre site was first and last an army camp. An understanding of the army presence is a prerequisite to understanding not only the physical layering of the site, but also the social setting of the migrant centre, especially when there was conjoint use of the facilities by migrants and soldiers from 1947 to 1949 and after 1965. About half of those who visit the Bonegilla Migrant Experience have a personal or family connection with the place as a migrant centre. A few come to recall Bonegilla Army Camp or its wartime 106 General Hospital. Pictures in the ‘Beginning Place’ pavilion commemorate some of these earlier times. Other pictures extend those stories. Douglas West, a carpenter, recorded the rapid construction of a hutted camp at Bonegilla.39 Nurse Betty Colclough kept a private record of her tent accommodation and friends in 1941– 1942.40 An unnamed unit photographer with the ill-fated 2/29th Infantry Battalion kept track of their training in 1940–1941 prior to their departure to Malaya, then Singapore, where those who survived battle were imprisoned by the Japanese.41 Elsie Cloak, an education officer at the Creative Leisure Centre, established by the Immigration Department in conjunction with the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement, showed how children re-imagined indigenous and early settler encounters on one of their bush excursions.42 Don Edwards, a departmental photographer, became well practised in coaxing smiles from migrant children at play in the department’s accommodation centres. He showed Wanda Skowronska taken on an excursion to a nearby farm to become familiar with the rural nature of life in Australia.43

RE-PICTURING BONEGILLA

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

Sharing personal memories at a public place Block 19 Bonegilla and its cross-river museum in Albury have become depositories of personal memory material. Ex-resident pilgrims and their children and children’s children come to share memories, memorabilia and photographs. Together, they have accumulated a rich archive with a large variety of materials. With that archive they link their family stories into a bigger narrative of nation-building import and help establish inter-generational interest in the experiences of migration. For them, personal involvement is paramount. Family connections with the place attract about half the visitors. Some come seeking ‘something done by me or my tribe’ or, alternatively, ‘something that happened to me or my tribe’.44 Quite a few have demonstrated a remarkably strong connection. Bonegilla was to them a very special place, a significant turning point in their autobiographies, a place of the heart, even a temporary home. Some have donated what they prize as personal or family heirlooms: for example, Ludwig and Milda Kritins (Latvia, 1950), who met and married at Bonegilla, bequeathed their wedding rings.45 For long-term resident centre staff, too, Bonegilla has strong personal links realised in the photographs they have kept. Many former residents and staff members have been willing contributors to Facebook and Flickr to share pictures that support or convey parts of their stories. People make different decisions about their need to share photographs, just as they did about taking or not taking photographs. Images in the Bonegilla Collection show them celebrating weddings and baptisms, but depict only one funeral. Rarely do they involve sharing personal distress.

Two recent visitors re-claimed connection with early congratulatory portrayals of the public face of Bonegilla. Wanda Skowronska recalled being photographed by the publicist, but could now only see the terrified lamb.46 At 14 years of age, Galena Vasins was the youngest of the first contingent of ‘Beautiful Balts’. Now, 69 years on, during a visit with her family, she recalled smiling at a cameraman on arrival with her sister Irina. For resident staff as well as migrants and refugees, Bonegilla holds a life history moment. Lifted from a family album of Henry and Marjorie Guinn, photographs depict the wedding of their daughter Barbara to Dino Glerean at Bonegilla. There is, too, a genial staff get-together and singalong at the director’s cottage, a common occurrence after tennis on Saturday afternoons.47 Edward Golec, with Maria, his mother, was among the displaced (Poland, 1950). He tells how as a widow supporting a child, Maria found work as a kitchen hand in a succession of district hotels. He has volunteered to the Bonegilla Collection in Albury the identification papers with pictures and fingerprints they had in lieu of passports. He has included an enamelled colour image of Maria as a young woman in her native Poland.48 Albert Botteri seems triumphant.49 One poignant private photograph, made public, permits a viewer to observe grief, as mourners come to terms with the death of a little one at the time of the health scandal.50

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

The flicker of faces Defining an historianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s problem with multiple sources, Thomas Carlyle coined the phrase â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;the murmurings of innumerable voicesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, which seems an apt aphorism for a history of Bonegilla. Even more apt is his observation that portraits serve as small lighted candles.51 Adapting those observations, the exhibition item at Bonegilla in which a large number of Bonegilla cards are projected in rapid succession provides a candle-lighted flicker of faces. The cards convey a sense of the vulnerability of individuals, alone or in small family groups, facing the challenges of migration. They hint at those parts of the migrant experience in which children were made pretty to establish an identity beyond family for the first time. Some people stoically return the gaze not only of the photographer but also of viewers beyond the photographer. They create an unsettling effect where the past appears to be looking at, even querying, the present.

Identity photography is a humble craft that produces nothing more than a likeness. Yet its products can establish or unsettle memory of self and others.

Identity photography is a humble craft that produces nothing more than a likeness. Yet its products can establish or unsettle memory of self and others. These images have special power as a collection. With them, the statistical tables and documents grow eyes and ears and facial expressions. As a collection, the cards capture something of the feel of Bonegilla as a densely peopled place in which there was a constant parade of changing nameless faces in the street, at the communal dining halls, and, indeed, in the communal ablution blocks and the very huts next door. Family descendants prize the photos on the Bonegilla cards at the National Australian Archives. Like all portraits, they present something of the air of a person. How did family members present themselves and their children to get their photo taken? What does their demeanour suggest of their circumstances or their hopes? The archive receives about 240 queries a month about its immigration records, often involving the Bonegilla cards. It is this constant use of the immigration records that prompted the successful nomination of the migrant selection papers for placement on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.52

The first heritage listings of Bonegilla made much of the contributions some individuals made to the economic and cultural life of Australia. They named businessmen, politicians, musicians, sportspersons and artists who achieved later fame. But there also were some who achieved infamy. The story of Romulus and Christina Gaita has been told by their son Raimond and made into a film. Tibor Paul, the symphony orchestra conductor, was sent to work in a glass factory. Arvi Parvo, a mining engineer and company director, was employed in a quarry. Konrads Kalejs died in 2001 awaiting extradition to Latvia to face charges of war crimes. Paul Chimin, the cartoonist whose work appears at the front of this book and a painter of the landscapes in the theatre, was hired as a labourer and then a handyman. Then there are the many who were to make no claim on subsequent public notice or fortune. The collage is of displaced persons dispatched from Bonegilla to the Benalla Holding Centre.

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Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

We can never really know what people at Bonegilla were thinking, but we do know that those who managed the site and those who reported on it were intent on showing that the immigrants were able to be assimilated and were being helped to do so. Similarly, we know that the immigrants themselves seem to have been intent on showing that they were on an assimilationist trajectory − they and their families and friends were acquiring Australia. In short, I have argued that Bonegilla was central to the post-war rhetoric of assimilation. And I have shown that ideas about assimilation changed. It was gradually recognised as a slow and two-way process, heavily involving local host communities. Almost invariably, it extended beyond the first generation.1 Readers have been invited to view visual evidence critically. That is, they have been asked to leave open the possibilities of interpretations other than those that might have been originally intended. So, for example, I disrupt the publicists’ views to recruit Germans with a picture of the bureaucracy that awaited them at the centre. I have reminded those who dwell on the reception centre’s achievement that there were riots and infant deaths from malnutrition at Bonegilla. It is appropriate to epitomise that approach with three final picture stories strong in irony.2 First, I point to a photograph taken for, but not used in, an exhibition of Bonegilla’s good points in 1957. The caption tells us that publicists were pleased with the way the catering staff could sit new arrivals such as this Dutch group to a hot, welcoming meal within 65 minutes of arrival, even if it was as late as 10pm. Now, as then, the photograph failed to be considered promotional. It shows the migrants queuing cafeteria-style. The crowded ‘unimproved’ mess hut has bare light bulbs, unlined corrugated iron walls, bare-board trestle tables and unbacked seating benches. Perhaps more than any other picture, it shows how ambience may have shaped perceptions of the food.3 Second, for storytellers who dwell on Bonegilla’s inadequacies and the difficulties encountered by its residents, I point to a resident photograph of a group of young

CONCLUSION

Displaced Persons venturing beyond parental gaze into the countryside with a picnic hamper and a flagon. Their smiling faces admit the possibility that, however grim, Bonegilla did have its share of laughter and cheeky grins. It was not mired in misery.4 Last, I question too heavy a reliance on photographic evidence by ending a book on pictures with a visual blank. The blank signals an otherwise untold story that illuminates yet another aspect of the character of the place. There is no picture attached to the official records of Kathy Valder (then Hedvig). Kathy has no pictures of Bonegilla. She tells how she arrived from Hungary with her mother in 1957, even though Jewish welfare organisations tried to arrange for Jews to avoid Bonegilla. There were wellgrounded stories that some Nazi sympathisers had migrated to Australia via Bonegilla. On the Hedvigs’ arrival, an interpreter told them to avoid the Hungarian block, so they stayed in the Italian block, even though they did not speak Italian. Kathy remembers Bonegilla grimly as ‘not being a safe place for Jews’.5 The photographic record is limited to what people were prepared to show of themselves and others.

These photographs show something of the migrant experience of arrival and early settlement. They show how government went about trying to keep the nation favourably disposed towards migration. They show how a local community went about receiving and taking in strangers. I hope this contribution to the re-picturing of Bonegilla poses questions not only about the then, but also the now, of those three aspects of immigration.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

References

Archival and unpublished material appears in the endnotes as do picture attributions.

Photographs Photographs of Bonegilla are available at: National Australian Archives (www.destinationaustralia.gov.au); State Library of Victoria (www.slv.vic.gov.au/); Museo Italiano, Melbourne (www.museoitaliano.com.au/); Bonegilla Collection, Albury LibraryMuseum, (https://www.flickr.com/photos/alburycollection/sets/72157622677901189/); and Border Mail archive.

Resident memory Ex-residents have recorded memories in several places. They are readily available at: Albury LibraryMuseum (www.bonegilla.com.au/collection/memories/); Fairfax News Store; NSW Migration Heritage Centre, ‘Belongings’ (www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/ belongings); and National Library Bonegilla-related oral history interviews (www.nla.gov.au/). Also see ‘Bonegilla Collection Significance Statement’, 2008, ALM (www.bonegilla.com.au/ research/papers/images/Sources_and_References.pdf).

Publications Amin, Ash 2012. Land of Strangers, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Assmann, Aleida 2010. ‘Re-framing memory: Between individual and collective forms of constructing the past’, in Karin Titmans, et al., Performing the Past, pp. 35–50, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam. Australian Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs 1986. Immigration in Focus, 1946– 1975: A Photographic Archive, AGPS, Canberra. Balint, Ruth 2014. ‘Industry and sunshine: Australia as home in the displaced person camps of post-war Europe’, History Australia, 11(1), pp. 102–128. Billig, Michael 1995. Banal Nationalism, Sage, London. Bleiker, Roland et al. 2014. ‘Visual cultures of inhospitality’, Peace Review, 26(2), pp. 192–200. Borrie. W.D. 1953. ‘New and Old Australians’, in W. Aughterson (ed.) Taking Stock, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, pp. 169–186.

REFERENCES

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Hirsch, Marianne & Leo Spitzer 2009. ‘Incongruous images: Before, during and after the holocaust’, History and Theory, 48, pp. 9–25. Hutchison, Mary 2004. ‘Accommodating strangers’, Public History, 11, Sydney. Hutchison, Mary 2009. ‘Dimensions for a folding exhibition’, Humanities Research, XV(2), pp. 67-92. Hutchison, Mary & Andrea Witcomb 2014. ‘Migration exhibitions and the question of identity’, in Laurence Gourievidis (ed.), Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Ireland, Tracy 2003. ‘“The absence of ghosts”: Landscape and identity in the archaeology of Australia’s settler culture’, Historical Archaeology, 37(1), pp. 56–72 Jordens, Ann-Mari 1995. Redefining Australians, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney. Jordens, Ann-Mari 1997. Alien to Citizen, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Jupp, James 1966. Arrivals and Departures, Cheshire-Lansdowne, Melbourne. Kracauer, Siegried & Thomas Y. Levin 1993. ‘Photography’, Critical Inquiry, 19(3), pp. 421–436. Karnsteiner, Wulf 2002. ‘Finding meaning in memory’, History and Theory, 41, pp. 191–193. Lowenstein Wendy and Loh Morag 1977. The Immigrants, Hyland House, Melbourne. McAllister, Kirsten Emiko 2006a. ‘A story of escape: Family photographs from Japanese Canadian internment camps’, in A. Kuhn & K. McAllister (eds), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, Berghahn, New York. McAllister, Kirsten Emiko 2006b. ‘Photographs of a Japanese Canadian internment camp: Mourning loss and invoking a future’, Visual Studies, 21(2), pp. 133–156. McAllister, Kirsten Emiko 2010. ‘Archive and myth’, in J.C. Walsh & J. Opp (eds), Place Memory and Remembering Place in Canada, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Mannik, Lynda 2012. ‘Public and private photographs of refugees: The problem of representation’, Visual Studies, 27(3), pp. 262–276. Markus, Andrew 2015. Mapping Social Cohesion: The Scanlon Foundation Surveys National Report and Neighbourhoods Report, Monash University, Melbourne (www.arts.monash.edu.au/mapping-population/social-cohesion-report.php). Martin, Jean 1965. Refugee Settlers, ANU, Canberra. Martin, Jean 1978. The Migrant Presence, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Morris, Sherry 2001. Uranquinty Remembers, Uranquinty Progress Association, Wagga Wagga, Murphy, John 2000. Imagining the Fifties, UNSW Press, Sydney. Neumann, Klaus 2015. Across the Seas, Black Inc., Melbourne. O’Grady, Desmond 1961. ‘Migrant camp blues’, Bulletin, 11 November, p. 13. O’Meara, Philip 1998. ‘Negotiating Change: Representations of Immigration in Australian Magazines, 1947–1964’, PhD thesis, Monash University. Panich, Catherine 1988. Sanctuary: Remembering Post-war Immigrants, Allen & Unwin, Sydney (about Bathurst). Pennay, Bruce 2001. Albury Wodonga’s Bonegilla, Albury Regional Museum, Albury, NSW. Pennay, Bruce 2012. Sharing Bonegilla Stories, Albury LibraryMuseum, Albury, NSW. Pennay, Bruce 2013. ‘Picturing assimilation in post-war Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 44(1), pp. 134–141. Pennay, Bruce 2016. ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’, Victorian Historical Journal, 87(1), pp. 5–28. Persian, Jayne 2011. ‘Displaced Persons (1947–1952): Representations, Memory and Commemorations’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney.

Persian, Jayne 2012. ‘Bonegilla: A failed narrative’, History Australia, 9(1), pp. 64-83. Peters, Nonja 2001. Milk and Honey – But Not Gold, University of Western Australia Press, Perth. Petersen, John 2010. ‘Though this be madness: Heritage methods for working in culturally diverse communities’, Public History Review, 17, pp. 34–51. Poria, Yaniv 2010. ‘The story behind the picture: Preferences for visual display at heritage sites’, in E. Waterton & S. Watson (eds), Culture Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, pp. 217–228, Ashgate, Aldershot, UK. Russel, Penny 2010. Savage or Civilised?, UNSW Press, Sydney. Rutland, Suzanne 2009. ‘Sanctuary for whom? Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators in post- war Australian migrant camps’, Australian Jewish Historical Society, 19(3), pp. 382–404. Samuel, Raphael 1994. Theatres of Memory, Verso, London. Shafer, Nicola (ed.) 2009. The Words to Remember It, Scribe, Carlton North. Sheridan, Susan 2000. ‘The “Australian woman” and her migrant others in the post-war Australian Women’s Weekly’, Continuum, 14(2), pp. 12–132. Sigona, Nando 2015. ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the camp as a social and political face’, Citizenship Studies, 19(1), pp. 1–15. Simic, Zora 2014. ‘Bachelors of misery’, History Australia, 11(1), pp. 149–174. Skowronska, Wanda 2013. To Bonegilla from Somewhere, Connor Court, Ballarat, VIC. Sluga, Glenda 1988. Bonegilla: ‘A Place of No Hope’, University of Melbourne, Melbourne. Sluga, Glenda 2004. ‘Whose history?’, in Stuart Macintrye (ed.), The Historian’s Conscience, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Smith, Laurajane et al. 2012. The Cultural Moment in Tourism, Routledge, New York. Smith, Laurajane & Gary Campbell 2015. ‘The elephant in the room: Heritage, affect and emotion’, in William Logan et al. (eds), A Companion to Heritage Studies, John Wiley, Chichester, UK. Smith, Nicholas 2011. ‘Blood and soil: Nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary’, Journal of Australian Studies, 35(1), pp. 1–18. Synan, Ann 2002. We Came with Nothing, Lookups Research, Sale. Szörényi, Anna 2006. ‘The images speak for themselves? Reading refugee coffee table books’, Visual Studies, 21(1), pp. 24–41. Tavan, Gwenda 2005. The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Scribe, Melbourne. Thomas, Mandy 2002. Moving Landscapes: National Parks – the Vietnamese Experience, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney. Tündern-Smith, Ann 2007. Bonegilla’s Beginnings, Triple D Books, Wagga Wagga, NSW. Urry, John 1992. ‘The tourist gaze revisited’, American Behavioural Scientist, 36(2), pp. 172–186; Vogiazopoulos, Zacharis 2006. Memories of Bonegilla, RMIT, Melbourne. West, Tamara 2014. ‘Remembering displacement: Photography and the interactive spaces of memory’, Memory Studies, 7(2), pp. 176–190. Wills, Sara 2009. ‘Between the hostel and the detention centre’, in William Logan & Keir Reeves (eds), Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage, Routledge, Abingdon, UK. Winter, Jay (2006). Remembering War, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Winter, Jay 2010. ‘Sites of memory’, in Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates, Fordham University Press, New York. Wise, A. & S Velayutham (eds) 2009. Everyday Multiculturalism, Palgrave, London.

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Witcomb, Andrea 2009. ‘Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity’, Humanities Research, XV(2), pp. 64–65. Witcomb, Andrea 2010. ‘The politics and poetics of contemporary exhibition making’, in F. Lamerou & L. Kelly (eds), Hot Topics, Public Culture and Museums, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. Witcomb, Andrea 2013. ‘Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 28(3), pp. 255–271. Witcomb, Andrea 2015. ‘Toward a pedagogy of feeling’, in A. Witcomb & K. Message (eds), The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 1, Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK. York, Barry 1995. Michael Cigler: A Czech-Australian story, RSSS, ANU, Canberra. Zerilli, Linda 2000. ‘Democracy and national fantasy: Reflections on the Statue of Liberty’, in Jodi Dean (ed.), Cultural Studies and Political Theory, pp. 178–180, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY.

Endnotes and picture attributions Cover Front cover pictures: Drehlich, 14.901 Albury LibraryMuseum (ALM); 02.209 ALM; A12111, 1/1947/3/9, A12111, 1/1956/22/28; Border Morning Mail 22 October 1959. Back cover pictures: Wodonga City Council, 2015.

Introduction 1 Luke Desforges & Joanne Maddern, ‘Front doors to freedom, portal to the past: History at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum’, Social and Cultural Geography, 5(3), 2004 p. 453. 2 Jean Martin, Refugee Settlers, ANU, Canberra, 1965; Bruce Pennay, Albury Wodonga’s Bonegilla, Albury Regional Museum, Albury, 2001; Sharing Bonegilla Stories, Albury LibraryMuseum, Albury, 2012; ‘Picturing assimilation in post-war Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 44(1), 2013, pp. 134–141; ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’, Victorian Historical Journal, 87(1), 2016, pp. 5–28. 3 Inga Clendinnen, ‘The history question: Who owns the past?’, Quarterly Essay, 22, 2006, p. 43. 4 Andrea Witcomb ‘The politics and poetics of contemporary exhibition making’, in F. Lamerou & L. Kelly (eds), Hot Topics, Public Culture and Museums, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010, p. 239; Andrea Witcomb. ‘ Toward a pedagogy of feeling’, in A. Witcomb & K. Message (eds), The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 1, Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 2015, pp. 324–326. She cites work by Steve Johnson. 5 Andrea Witcomb, ‘Understanding the role of affect in producing a critical pedagogy for history museums’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 28(3), 2013, pp. 255−257. 6 Witcomb, ‘Politics and poetics’; ‘Understanding role of affect’. 7 Andrea Witcomb & Mary Hutchison, ‘Migration exhibitions and the question of identity’, in Laurence Gourievidis (ed.), Museums and Migration: History, Memory and Politics, Routledge, Abingdon, 2014. 8 Mary Hutchison, ‘Dimensions for a folding exhibition’, Humanities Research, XV (2), 2009, p. 86. 9 Andrea Witcomb, ‘Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity’, Humanities Research, XV (2), 2009, pp. 64–65.

ENDNOTES AND PICTURE ATTRIBUTIONS

1⁰ Pennay ‘Picturing assimilation’. 11 Letter to Secretary, 7 August 1958, ‘Improvements to centres’, 10875, 1958, NAA. 12 Caption to image A12111, 65/22/8, NAA. 13 Ghassan Hage, ‘On worrying: The lost art of the well-administered national cuddle’, Borderlands, 2(1), 2003, (www.borderlands.net.au/vol2no1_2003/hage_worrying.html). 1⁴ www.destinationaustralia.gov.au. 1⁵ For example, Philip O’Meara (1998), ‘Negotiating Change: Representations of Immigration in Australian Magazines, 1947–1964’, PhD thesis, Monash University. and Sheridan (2000), The “Australian woman” and her migrant others in the post-war Australian Women’s Weekly’, Continuum, 14(2). 1⁶ Glenda Sluga, Bonegilla: ‘A Place of No Hope’, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 122–140. 1⁷ Jayne Persian, ‘Displaced Persons (1947–1952): Representations, Memory and Commemorations’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2011 and Alexandra Dellios, ‘Commemorating migrant camps: Vernacular memories in official spaces’, Journal of Australian Studies, 39(2), 2015, pp. 252–271, argue similarly. 1⁸ Some families have donated numerous photographs – for example, Makay (71); Karcauskas (70); Savolainen (43); Babic (33); Ashley (32); Schymitzek (23); Nacholinski (20); Broders (18); and Limoni (16). 1⁹ Penny Russell (2010), Savage or Civilised?, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 1–16. 2⁰ Nonja Peters, Milk and Honey – But Not Gold, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2001, p. xiii. 21 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla Stories. 22 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla Stories, pp. 69–71. 23 Sluga Bonegilla, p. xi; John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, UNSW Press, Sydney 2000, p. 158; Howard Jones, Border Mail, 19 October 1991. 2⁴ Doreen Massey, For Space, Sage: London, 2012, pp. 149–162.

1. Picturing the reception of Europe's displaced, 1947–1952 1 Ruth Balint, ‘Industry and sunshine: Australia as home in the displaced person camps of post-war Europe’, History Australia, 11(1), 2014, pp. 102–128. 2 Happy in a New Homeland (1948), A436, 1948/5/506 Part 2, National Archives of Australia (NAA). 3 Justine Greenwood, ‘The migrant follows the tourist’, History Australia, 11(3), 2014, pp. 92–93. 4 Paul Chimin, database file, Bonegilla Collection, Albury LibraryMuseum (ALM). 5 Commonwealth Office of Education (1948), English for Newcomers. 6 Australian Women’s Weekly, 31 January 1948. 7 Age, 9 December 1947. 8 Pix, 31 January 1948. 9 Melbourne Herald, 11 December 1947. 1⁰ Pennay, Albury Wodonga’s Bonegilla. 11 Border Morning Mail (BMM), 11 November 1947; 9 and 19 December 1947; 19 January 1948. 12 BMM, 20 December 1947. 13 BMM, 28 May 1949 and 18 September 1951.

1⁴ BMM, 27 May and 14 November 1950; 22 February 1951. More generally on superficial communication, see Egon Kunz, Displaced Persons: Calwell’s New Australians, ANU, Sydney, 1988, pp. 163–164; Martin, Refugee Settlers, p. 32. 1⁵ Kokic, 97.964, ALM. 1⁶ BMM, 9 December 1947. The attractive girls were not named, but the Latvian girls who spoke English and were to become typists were Hilda Ramjrarig, Vera Ludaitis, Natash Sherahova and Valeska Lans. 1⁷ BMM, 22 December 1949. 1⁸ Downs, 97.976, ALM. 1⁹ Dorothy Marshall, ‘Report of IRO Representative Visit’, CP 815/1021.134, NAA. 2⁰ Arthur Calwell, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 8 September 1949, p. 143. Kershaw reported in BMM, 5 July 1949. 21 BMM, 23 June 1949. 2² In order, series A12111, 1/1949/24 item control symbol 6, 5, 8, 10, 14, 12, 24, NAA. 23 West Sale residents quoted in A. Synan, We Came with Nothing, Lookups Research, Sale, 2002, pp. 165 and 179. 2⁴ The New Australian, November 1949. 2⁵ Pix, 18 March 1950. 2⁶ Photo Sherry Morris, Uranquinty Remembers, Uranquinty Progress Association, Wagga Wagga, 2001, p. 66. Richard Urbanivicius, personal communication. 2⁷ Taczanowski, 91.493, ALM. 2⁸ Tomorrow’s Australians, 1 September and 1 October 1949. Pennay (2012), pp. 22–23. 2⁹ Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), 2 and 5 September 1949; Canberra Times, 3 and 6 September 1949. 3⁰ ‘Newspaper cuttings’, 434, 1949/3/75 PART 2, NAA. 3¹ Philip O’Meara, ‘Negotiating Change: Representations of Immigration in Australian Magazines, 1947–1964’, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1998, p. 208. 32 BMM, 9 September 1949. 33 No donor or photographer, 91.497, ALM. 3⁴ BMM, 5 and 9 September 1949. 3⁵ BMM, 6 September 1949. 3⁶ Picture drawn from the ‘Sun Bonegilla Photograph Exhibition’, donated to Albury Regional Museum in 1987. See Canberra Times, 29 November 1987. 3⁷ Commonwealth Employment Service, ‘Displaced Persons – Policy and Procedure’, point 47, 6 January 1947, A434, 1950/3/13, NAA. 3⁸ ‘Sun Bonegilla Photograph Exhibition’, 1987. 3⁹ Sun, 25 May 1948; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 June 1948, p. 1606. 40 Identification card photographs, A2571, NAA. 41 Dmytro Chub (1980), So This is Australia, Bayda Books, Doncaster, pp. 18–19. 42 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla, pp. 36–39. ⁴3 In order, Mark, 04.005.01; Brassel, 96.1131; Makay, 02.118; Makay, 02.098, ALM. ⁴⁴ For similar themes in the pictures of displaced peoples elsewhere, see Tamara West, ‘Remembering displacement: Photography and the interactive spaces of memory’, Memory Studies, 7(2), 2014, pp. 176–190. 45 BMM, 20 November 1947.

46 Hugh J. Murphy, ‘Publicity needs in Australia for IRO and Displaced Persons migrants’, January 1949, C815/1, 021.134, NAA. 47 Kunz, Displaced Persons, p.145. 48 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla Stories, pp. 62−65. More generally, see Martin, Refugee Settlers, pp. 24, 29 and 65. 49 Kolek, 98.319, ALM. 50 Perek, 96.99, ALM. 51 Canberra Times, 26 January 1951. Ussenko and Bekier (folk dance), 97.083; Vyhnal (orchestra), 97.904, ALM. 52 Ingevics, 98.170, ALM. 53 Bekier, 96.1519, ALM. 54 Evalks, 01.344, ALM. 55 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla Stories, pp. 7–8. 56 A12111, 1/1947/3/6 and 1/1949/22/17, NAA. 57 Nacholinski, 96.1302 and 96.1303, ALM. 58 Dobbins, State Library of Victoria (SLV), http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/122509. 59 Vasins, 02.208, ALM. 60 Lois Carrington, The Real Situation: The Story of Adult Migrant Education in Australia 1947 to 1970, private publication, Tara, 1997, pp. 48 and 70. Carrington used her own pictures and borrowed from fellow teachers to include 45 images of Bonegilla in her book. 61 A copy of the presentation folder ‘Bonegilla’, 1952, is held at ALM. Images from it are in the SLV. 62 Glenda Sluga, ‘Whose history?’, in Stuart Macintrye (ed.), The Historian’s Conscience, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004, p. 129. 63 Language instructors cite instances in which Dawson, the director, made them feel they were simply there to give the immigrants something to do while they waited for jobs. Carrington, Real Situation, p. 54. 64 In order, A12111, 1/1950/20 item control numbers 1, 8, 16, 10, NAA. 65 Dawson portfolio of photos, SLV: www.slv.vic.gov.au/immigvic/gid/slv-pic-aaa88003.

2. Picturing the reception of assisted migrants and refugees, 1951–1959 1 For example, SMH, 26 January 1953; Canberra Times, 8 August 1953; W.D. Borrie, ‘New and Old Australians’, in W. Aughterson (ed.), Taking Stock, F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1953, pp. 169–186. 2 BMM, 10 April 1953. 3 Good Neighbour, September 1955, p. 5. 4 A12111, 1/1957/5/38, NAA. 5 Dormitories were replaced with cubicles, and other improvements were made to better suit the British, but to no avail. A445 220/14/225. Ann-Mari Jordens Alien to Citizen, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p. 162. 6 Dirk Eysbertse & Marijke Eysbertse, Where Waters Meet, 3rd revised edition, Erasmus Foundation, Melbourne, 2007, pp.24−46; Peters, Milk and Honey, pp. 25, 39 and 164. 7 SMH, 19 July 1952; Age, 22 and 25 July 1952. 8 Age, 25 July 1952; BMM, 23 January 1953; ‘Communist Party [and Migrant Community]’, A6122, 384, NAA.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

9 Holt press release, 24 July 1952, A1838, 20/1//3/2 PART A, NAA. 1⁰ Secretary to Minister, 3 September 1952, 52/47A/4864, NAA. 1¹ Holt, 24 July 1952, A1838, 80/1/3/2/ PART 1, NAA. 1² Audit report, 28 November 1952, A1831, 1947/693, NAA. 1³ Frank Sciulli (Italy, 1952), SLV: http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/235482 and http://handle. slv.vic.gov.au/10381/261319. 1⁴ BMM, 21, 24, 25 and 26 July 1952. 1⁵ A12111, 1/1957/11/30, NAA. ¹⁶ Good Neighbour, June 1956. 1⁷ A12111, 1/1961/22/9, NAA. ¹⁸ A12111, 1/1955/22/59, NAA. 1⁹ A12111, 1/1955/22/74, NAA. ²⁰ See items within the listing A12111, A/1954/22/* and A/2956/22/*, NAA. ²¹ BMM, 29 August and 11 September 1975. See also advice re employment of displaced youth, 28 February 1949, SP 446/1, 100/5/1 PART 1, NAA. 22 A12111, 2/1956/22A/28 and 1/1956/22/35, NAA. 23 A12111, 1/1956/22/37, NAA. 2⁴ A12111, 1/1955/22/123, NAA. 2⁵ For earlier recruitment and reception difficulties, see Ann-Mari Jordens, Redefining Australians, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1995, pp. 35–37. 2⁶ A12111, 1/1956/22/50-60; 147-163, NAA. 2⁷ BMM, 22 October 1959. 2⁸ Initially, 16 Union Jacks and 16 Australian Ensigns were dispatched for display. The Australian flags were twice as big as the Union Jacks: A445, 174/4/8, NAA. 2⁹ BMM, 4 June 1953. 3⁰ Australian Railway Historical Society (Victoria Division). 31 BMM, 26 March 1954. 32 Makay, 11.982, ALM. 33 For observations on the similar camp life of displaced persons elsewhere see Nando Sigona, ‘Campzenship: Reimagining the camp as a social and political face’, Citizenship Studies, 19(1), 2015, pp. 1–15. 3⁴ ‘Consolidation’, A12795/149; A1658, 556/4/1 PART 3, NAA. 3⁵ Kolek, 98.332, ALM. 3⁶ P 06866, Museo Italiano, Melbourne. 3⁷ P 01138, Museo Italiano, Melbourne. 3⁸ Zacharis Vogiazopoulos (2006), Memories of Bonegilla, RMIT, Melbourne. 3⁹ Babic, 98.216, ALM. 40 De Wolf, 99.027, ALM. 41 Lober, 03. 051, ALM. 42 Paul Chimin database file, ALM. 43 There were inquiries to investigate how to deal with long-stayers in 1958–1959 and 1966. 44 Desmond O’Grady, ‘Migrant camp blues’, Bulletin, 11 November 1961, p. 13. 45 For example, King, a social worker quoted in Sluga, Bonegilla, pp. 94–95. See also R. Leovic, letter to the Canberra Times, 7 December 1987.

ENDNOTES AND PICTURE ATTRIBUTIONS

46 Auditor’s report, 28 November 1952, A1831, 1947/643, NAA. See also Catherine Panich, Sanctuary: Remembering Post-war Immigrants, Allen & Un¬win, Sydney, 1988, pp. 84–85. 47 Pennay, Sharing Bonegilla Stories, pp. 50–52. 48 ‘Gordana’ in Wendy Lowenstein & Morag Loh, The Immigrants, Hyland House, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 80-86. 49 A12111, 1/1955/22/115, NAA. 50 Makay, personal communication. 51 No name, 91.495, ALM. 52 Lyras, 98.281 ALM and personal communication. 53 Hawker 96.1149 ALM; Vogiazopoulos, Memories. 54 See ‘Community Work’, Destination Australia. 55 Jordens Redefining Australians, ‘Enlisting the Community’, pp. 77–88; Pennay Sharing Bonegilla Stories, p. 48. 56 Pennay Sharing Bonegilla Stories, pp. 33–34. 57 BMM, 20 May 1952; Good Neighbour, October 1954; photo Vogiazopoulos, Memories. 58 Kershaw to Secretary Department of Immigration, 10 August 1959. 59 For example, BMM, 9 June 1954; 5 July 1955; 30 April and 25 August 1958; 5 February, 30 April and 5 July 1958. 60 Barry York, Michael Cigler: A Czech-Australian story, RSSS, ANU, Canberra, 1995, p. 68. 61 Vogiazopoulos Memories; Lyras, 98.066, ALM. 62 Makay, 02.140, ALM. 63 Makay, personal communication. 64 BMM, 27 January 1959. 65 Limoni, 02.023, ALM. 66 Australian Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Immigration in Focus, 1946–1975: A Photographic Archive, AGPS, Canberra, 1986. 67 BMM, 20 September 1950 and 21 January 1953. 68 ‘Our New Australians’, weekly column for two months from 16 May 1957. 69 BMM, 12 January, 13 April, 17 and 21 October, and 28 November 1959. 70 John Hengstmengel, personal communication. 71 BMM, 13 April 1959. 72 An adaptation of Wanda Skowronska’s evocative memoir title: To Bonegilla from Somewhere, Connor Court, Ballarat, 2013. 73 BMM, 11 September 1958; 12 March and 27 November 1959. 74 BMM, 3 June 1959. 75 BMM, 12 January and 21 October 1959. 76 In order, A12111, 1/1962/19/36; Vogiazopoulos Memories; A12111, 1/1957/16/90; 1/1958/15/116, NAA. 77 Identity card portraits, A2571, NAA.

3. Picturing the reception of migrant workers, 1960–1971 1 Letter to Secretary, 7 August 1958, ‘Improvements to Centres’, 10875, 1958, NAA. 2 BMM, 15 October 1960. 3 BMM, 15 August 1963. 4 BMM, 15 October 1968 and 4 January 1969; ‘Czech refugees’ (Bonegilla), A2567, 1968/27, NAA. 5 Memo, 21 July 1964, ‘Maltese’ (Bonegilla), A2567, 1964/41, NAA. 6 Memo to Operations Division, 5 October 1962, ‘Russian refugees, China’ (Bonegilla), A2567, 1962/096F, NAA. 7 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 16–17 November 1964, p. 3005; Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Scribe, Melbourne, 2005, p. 164. 8 Memo, 11 January 1964, ‘Maltese’ (Bonegilla), A2567, 1964/41, NAA 9 Irene Morosow with her grandchildren Nikolai, Kira and Susana, ‘Sun Bonegilla Photograph Exhibition’, 1987. 1⁰ BMM, 11–12 July 1961. 11 ‘Communist Party’ (Bonegilla), A6122, 2383, NAA. 12 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 3 October 1961, pp. 1604–1608. BMM, 18 July and 16 August 1961. 13 Tribune, 2 August 1961. 1⁴ SMH, 18 and 19 July 1961. 1⁵ ‘Communist Party’ (Albury), A6122, 1064, NAA. 1⁶ BMM, 19 July and 12 September 1961. 1⁷ BMM, 18 April, 13 May, 26 June, 4 and 10 July 1961. Letter to the Minister, 13 May and Minister’s welcome, 29 June 1961, ‘Unemployment disturbances’ (Bonegilla), NAA. 1⁸ BMM, 18 July 1961. 1⁹ Sun, 18 July 1961. ‘Unemployment disturbances’ (Bonegilla), A2567, 1961/168, NAA. 2⁰ Drehlich, 14.902 and 14.903, ALM. 21 SMH, 25 July 1961. 22 Acting Director to Secretary, 25 July 1961, ‘Unemployment disturbances’, NAA. 23 ‘Communist Party’ (Bonegilla), NAA; SMH, 16 August 1961; ‘Unemployment disturbances’, NAA. 2⁴ Pat Tennison, ‘A migrant’s first home’, Sun, 18 July 1961; Peter Costigan, ‘Boredom – that’s Bonegilla’s main problem’, Herald, 19 July 1961; ‘Unemployment disturbances’ (Bonegilla), NAA. 2⁵ O’Grady Migrant Camp Blues. 2⁶ ‘Unemployment disturbances’ (Bonegilla), NAA. 2⁷ O’Grady Migrant Camp Blues. 2⁸ BMM, 5 August 1961. 2⁹ BMM, 19 and 25 July, and 4 August 1961. 3⁰ Caption, A12111, 65/22/8, NAA. Good Neighbour article, ‘There’s a New Look at Bonegilla’. 31 ‘Film and Study Centre’, A2567, 1960/124C; A2567, 1965/55/1; A2567, 1962/65339; and A446, 1970/755505, NAA. 32 Correspondence and report on shipboard education officers, ‘Policy’ A446, 1979/75508 and ‘Monthly reports’, A446, 1962/65399, NAA. 3³ A2567, 1958/79 and 1969/79, NAA.

3⁴ Secretary to Director-General of Health, 27 June 1963, ‘Bonegilla’, A1658, 596/4/1 PART 3, NAA. 3⁵ A12111, 1/1965/22/11, NAA. 3⁶ A12111, 2/1966/22A/20, NAA. 3⁷ A12111, 2/1965/22A/15, NAA. ‘Film attendance’, A2567, 1964/66, NAA. 3⁸ A12111, 2/1966/22A/11, NAA. 3⁹ BMM, 14 February 1959. 40 Memo, 20 July 1961, ‘Unemployment disturbances’, NAA. 41 A12111, 1/1959/23/25, NAA. 42 A12111, 2/1966/22A/8, NAA. 43 A12111, 1/1965/22/7, NAA. 44 Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia, Fremantle Press, Fremantle, 2008, pp. 127–132. The family of Dr John Sullivan, a resident doctor, has donated footage of home movies that follow similar themes: 10.992, ALM. 45 Pennay, ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’, pp. 5–28. 46 Current Affairs Bulletin (1968), 43(1) pp. 12–14; Good Neighbour, quoting Prime Minister Robert Menzies, February 1961. 47 Martin, Refugee Settlers, p. 47. Martin explains how both the newcomers and townspeople became more confident with each other through the 1960s. See Zora Simic, ‘Bachelors of misery’, History Australia, 11(1), 2014, pp. 149–174, for the importance attached to marriage, especially inter-marriage, in assessing the success of assimilation. 48 ‘Assimilation’, A2567, 1960/63/1, NAA. 49 For example, BMM, 24 June 1960, 23 February 1961, 9 November 1965, 11 February 1966, and 27 January 1968. 50 In turn, BMM, 9 February 1966, 7 November 1965, 31 January 1969, 6 November 1965, and 12 May 1964. 51 Martin Refugee Settlers, pp. 29–30 and 57. She found Goulburn offered only a ‘limited hospitality’. The broader community was ‘discouraging and unsupportive rather than hostile’. 52 BMM, 17 May 1962 and 2 November 1963. 53 For similar experiences of taking in strangers elsewhere, see Christine Goodall, ‘The Coming of the Stranger: Asylum Seekers, Trust and Hospitality in a British Community’, Research Paper 195, UNHCR, Policy and Evaluation Service, 2010; and Ash Amin, Land of Strangers, Polity, Cambridge, 2012. 54 BMM, 6, 7, 10, 13 and 18 September 1963. A2567/1, 1961/168,NAA. 55 A12111, 1/1965/22/3, NAA. 56 A12111, 60/5/3, NAA; BMM, 24 June 1960, 10 November 1965, and 27 January 1968. 57 BMM, 13 April 1959; Lavington procession, 1957, John Hengstmengel, personal communication. 58 BMM, 18 May 1964. See also reports on 5 February 1958 and 25 August 1964. 59 BMM, 30 December 1971. 60 Joint Committee on Public Accounts 94th report (1967), Department of Immigration, Parliamentary Paper 207. 61 BMM, 5 October 1968.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

62 Snedden to Good Neighbour Council, 26 April 1968, ‘Proposal to close’, MP/1404/1, 1967/4009, NAA; Lynch Ministerial Statement, 12 January 1970, A2567, 1970/86B, NAA. 63 Press release, Snedden, 8 December 1967, PP207/1967, NAA; BMM, 5 October 1968 and 19 September 1971. 64 ‘Proposal to close’, NAA; A2567, 1968/86, NAA; BMM, 22 February, 28 March, 18 July, 2 August, 3 and 10 October, and 5 December 1968. 65 BMM, 16 December 1968. The newspaper was proud of the local community’s hospitality towards ‘strangers in a strange land’: BMM, 30 September 1968. 66 Melbourne Herald, 2 October 1971, p. 23. 67 James Jupp, Arrivals and Departures, Cheshire-Lansdowne, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 29–30. 68 ‘Army accommodation, H block’, A2567, 1965/99/4, NAA. 69 A12111, 1/1965/22/22, NAA.

4. Re-picturing Bonegilla 1 For the importance of visual materials – and particularly photography – to memory generally, see, for example, Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Verso, London, 1994, pp. 315–359; John Urry, ‘The tourist gaze revisited’, American Behavioural Scientist, 36(2), 1992, pp. 172–186; Siegried Kracauer & Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Photography’, Critical Inquiry, 19(3), 1993, pp. 421–436; and Wulf Karnsteiner, ‘Finding meaning in memory’, History and Theory, 41, 2002, pp. 191–193. 2 Alexandra Dellios, ‘Marginal or mainstream? Migrant centres as grassroots and official heritage’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21(10), 2015, pp. 1069–1083 and Pennay ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’. 3 Sun, 4 April 1986. 4 Tony Wright, ‘The immigrants’, BMM, 26–30 June 1979. 5 Wodonga City Council. 6 Border Mail (BM), 10 March 2008. 7 Pennay, personal photograph. 8 Pennay ‘Picturing assimilation’, pp. 134–141. 9 For questioning well-circulated images, see Susan Crane, ‘Choosing not to look’, History and Theory, 47, 2008, pp. 309–330, citing Barbie Zelizer. 1⁰ BMM, 13 November 1967. 11 A12111, 2/1965/22A/21, NAA, This image provided by Amy Lay. 12 BMM, 3 October 1959. 13 Giovanni Sgro on set with Chris Taylor for the filming of an episode of ‘Australia’s Heritage: National Treasure’, which was screened on ABC TV, 2009 and 2016. Photograph Bruce Pennay. 1⁴ Pennay ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’. 1⁵ Andrea Witcomb, ‘The politics and poetics of contemporary exhibition making’, in F. Lamerou & L. Kelly (eds), Hot Topics, Public Culture and Museums, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010; and Laurajane Smith & Gary Campbell, ‘The elephant in the room: Heritage, affect and emotion’, in William Logan et al. (eds), A Companion to Heritage Studies, John Wiley, Chichester, 2015, p.454. 1⁶ Eysbertse & Eysbertse Where Waters Meet. 1⁷ Carrington Real Situation.

ENDNOTES AND PICTURE ATTRIBUTIONS

1⁸ Hut wall graffiti, 12.941, ALM. Stephen Brigelow drew my attention to this item. 1⁹ Bruce Avery, personal communication. 2⁰ Alex Lyras, personal communication. 21 Roman Kitt, personal communication. 22 Michael Mullins, personal communication. 23 Romana Kurkug-Favier, 12.991, ALM. 2⁴ Rachel McLaren, a social worker, thought the views offered ‘a compensation for inconveniences of camp life’, report, 23 March 1950, A437, 1949/6/38, NAA. 2⁵ Others have examined how newcomers develop a close acquaintance with Australian nature as they fashion a sense of belonging: Mandy Thomas, Moving Landscapes: National Parks – the Vietnamese Experience, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Sydney, 2002; Tracy Ireland, ‘“The absence of ghosts”: Landscape and identity in the archaeology of Australia’s settler culture’, Historical Archaeology, 37(1), 2003 pp. 56–72; Nicholas Smith, ‘Blood and soil: Nature, native and nation in the Australian imaginary’, Journal of Australian Studies, 35(1), 2011, pp. 1–18; and Kirsten Emiko McAllister, ‘Photographs of a Japanese Canadian internment camp: Mourning loss and invoking a future’, Visual Studies, 21(2), 2006, pp. 133–156. 2⁶ For similar emphasis on privileging ethnic identity, see Desforges & Maddern (2004). ‘Front doors’. 2⁷ Wodonga City Council. 2⁸ Sam Nightingale provided photographs of the art displayed in the theatre. 2⁹ Savolainen, 97.056, ALM. 3⁰ Babic, 98.225, ALM. 31 Museo Italiano, P-01567. 32 Photographs Bruce Pennay. Kirsten Emiko McAllister ‘A story of escape: Family photographs from Japanese Canadian internment camps’, in A. Kuhn & K. McAllister (eds), Locating Memory: Photographic Acts, Berghahn, New York, 2006. McAllister explores the hyphenated identities of Japanese-Canadians in similar situations. 33 Pennay ‘Picturing assimilation’. 3⁴ Issue 12, August 2012, pp. 108–122. 3⁵ Pennay Sharing Bonegilla Stories, p. 16. 3⁶ Jay Winter, ‘Sites of memory’, in Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, pp. 318−319. 3⁷ Ghassan Hage, ‘Migration, food, memory and home-building’, in Susannah Radstone & Bill Schwarz (eds), Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates, Fordham University Press, New York, 2010, p. 423. 3⁸ See T. Kelly & S. Pollock, ‘Thurgoona bridge project: Archaeological report’, Albury-Wodonga Development Corporation, Albury-Wodonga, 2005. They found Bonegilla as a rich source of artefacts, indicating a large and continuous aboriginal presence. 3⁹ Elsie Cloak, Creative Leisure Centre photo album, 97.942, ALM. 40 Betty Colclough, personal communication. 41 Unsourced photographs supplied by an officer of the Public Records Office, Victoria. Thanks to Doug Hunter for information on the fate of the unit. 42 Argus collection of war photographs, World War II, SLV (http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/109904).

43 A12111, 1/1956/22/28, NAA. 44 Yaniv Poria, ‘The story behind the picture: Preferences for visual display at heritage sites’, in E. Waterton & S. Watson (eds), Culture Heritage and Representation: Perspectives on Visuality and the Past, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2010, p. 226. 45 Pennay ‘Wodonga’s Bonegilla’. 46 A12111, 2/1956/22A/14, NAA. 47 Carolyn Stedwell (nee Guinn), personal communication. 48 Golec, currently uncatalogued, ALM. 49 Albert Botteri, Mrs Rose Botteri and unidentified woman, c.1955, SLV (http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/235416). 50 Priest with Zenon Terkiewicz (Poland, 1950) and coffin with baby, SLV (http://handle.slv.vic.gov.au/10381/281755). 51 Paula Hamilton drew my attention to Carlyle’s aphorisms. Mark Cumming, The Carlyle Encyclopaedia, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004, Google Books. 52 Citation on the Memory of the World Register: www.naa.gov.au/collection/snapshots/find-of-the-month/2007-july.aspx.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5

Zora Simic, ‘Bachelors of misery’, p. 154. On historian irony, see Jay Winter, Remembering War, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006, pp. 120–121. A12111, 55/22/78, NAA. Kazakow, 03.083, ALM. Personal communication. Nicola Shafer (ed.), The Words to Remember It, Scribe, Carlton North 2009. Interview with Kathy Valer-Gordon at Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qI_9xxeejU. See also Suzanne Rutland, ‘Sanctuary for whom? Jewish victims and Nazi perpetrators in post-war Australian migrant camps’, Australian Jewish Historical Society, 19(3), 2009, pp. 382–404.

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

1961 riot, 54–56 A World for Children (documentary), 62 Add Another Five (promotional film), 62 adult education, 58 Albury LibraryMuseum Bonegilla Collection, 68, 82 Alikoussis, Konstintinos, 50, 51 amenities fund, 56 Anderson, Stephen, sculptor, 72 Armenia, migrants from, 52 army camp, ii, 34, 80 Arriving in Australia (documentary), 62 artwork, 74–75 assimilation, 2, 30, 46–47, 48, 58, 64, 86 assisted migrants and refugees, ii, 10, 28–51 ‘Australianness’, 76–77 Australia’s immigration program, 8, 10, 18, 66 Austria, migrants from, 30 Avery, Bruce, 74 Babic, Lubjica, 42, 43 Babic family, 76, 77 Belgium, migrants from, 30 Besford, Constable, 55 Bonegilla Army Camp, ii, 34, 80 Bonegilla Migrant Experience, ii, 72–73, 78–79, 80, 82 Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre, ii assisted migrants and refugees, ii, 10, 28–51 closure, 66–68 displaced persons, ii, 8–29

INDEX

facilities in, 45, 58 filming of, 62–63 increasing arrivals, 16 infrastructure improvements, 30, 42, 52, 58, 59, 60 long-term residents, 44–45 memorialising, 68–73 as migrant introduction to Australia, 76–77 renamed Bonegilla Reception Centre, 52, 53 see also publicity and promotion Border Morning Mail, 5, 12 boredom, 56 Botteri, Albert, 82, 83 Brahler, Helmut, 30, 31 ‘Bring out a Briton’ campaign, 30 ‘British Australia’, 40–41 British migrants, 8, 30, 32, 52 British monarchy, 40–41 Cairns, Jim, 54 Calwell, Arthur, 10, 14, 18, 19 Canada, migrants from, 52 Carrington, Lois, 26 cartoons, paintings, sketches, 9, 74–75 Catholic Church, 70 Chebnikowski, Nickolas, 20, 21 children, 18, 19, 36–37, 62 Chimin, Paul, 8, 9, 76, 84 Chub, Dmytro, 22 Cigler, Michael, 46 Ciminell, Giovanni, 50, 51

Cimpoero, George, 20, 21 Cirillo, Felice, 50, 51 Cloak, Elsie, 80 Close, Elizabeth, 68 closure of Bonegilla, 66–68 Colclough, Betty, 80 Commonwealth Hostels Ltd, 66 community adjustment, 30 community engagement, 12, 64–65 Creative Arts Centre, 62 Croatian migrants, 64 cultural diversity, 64 Czechoslovakia, migrants from, 52 Dawson, R.G., 28 De Wolf family, 42, 43 Denmark, migrants from, 50 Department of Defence, 68 displaced persons, ii, 8–29 Displaced Persons Resettlement Scheme, 28 dissatisfaction with holding centres, 16 see also riots and protests Dobbins, Keith, 26 documentaries, 62–63 Downer, Alex, 54, 56 Downs, Patricia, 12, 13 Drehlich, Friedrich, 54 Drommel, Piet, 32, 33 Dubrowo, Wladimir, 40 Dutch migrants, 30, 32, 36, 48, 49, 50, 52

economic recession, 32, 54, 56 education, 36, 58 Edwards, Don, 36, 80 Eglinton, Cathie, 74, 75 employment, 20–23, 32, 36, 44–45, 48, 50, 51 Europe, migrants from, 30, 52 European refugees, 8 exhibiting Bonegilla memories, 68–73

Hillier, John, 74 historians’ role, 3 Holding, Clive, 54 holding centres, 16, 17 Holt, Harold, 24, 32, 56 housing, 48, 49 Hume Public Service Club, 44, 45, 58, 74, 75 Hungary, migrants from, 30

families, 18 Film and Study Centre, 58, 59 filming Bonegilla, 62–63 Finland, migrants from, 50, 52 food, 32, 44, 60–61, 78–79, 86 France, migrants from, 52 friendships formed, 24

identity photographs, 84–85 Immigration Advisory Council, 10, 28 Immigration Planning Council, 10, 28 immigration program, 8, 10, 66 population-building aims, 18 integration, 58, 64 Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, 30 International Refugee Organisation, ii, 8, 14 Ireland, migrants from, 52 isolation, 42 Italy, migrants from, 30, 32

Gabrielidis, Gabriel, 50, 51 Gaita, Raimond, 84 Gaita, Romulus and Christina, 84 Germany, migrants from, 30, 38–39, 52 Glerean, Dino, 82, 83 Golec, Edward, 82, 83 Golec, Maria, 82, 83 ‘good types’, 12–13 Grabbe, Erwin, 62 Greece, migrants from, 30, 52 Guinn, Barbara, 82, 83 Guinn, Henry, 30, 31, 60, 62, 66, 67, 82 Guinn, Marjorie, 82 Happy in a New Homeland pamphlet, 8, 9 health, 18 Hedvig family, 86 Herbst, Marie, 72, 73 heritage value of Bonegilla, ii, 68, 80, 84 Heydon, P.R., 58

Jewish people, 86 Kalejs, Konrads, 84 Kampe, Otto, 64, 65 Kershaw, Alton, 14 Kitt, Roman, 74 Kotsiros, George, 78 Kovruisianos, Athina, 48 Kritins, Ludwig and Milda, 82 Kunz, Egon, 24 Kurzug Favier, Romana, 74 Limoni, Luciano, 46, 47 Lynch, Phillip, 66 Lyras, Alex, 44, 45, 74

Makay, Eva, 22, 23, 44, 45 Makay, Laszlo, 40, 44, 45 malnutrition, 18 Malta, migrants from, 30, 52 Mark, Robert, 22 Martek, Danko, 40 Martek, E., 58, 59 meals, 32, 44, 60–61, 78–79, 86 media photographs, 5, 10, 11 media reporting, 10, 12, 50 Memory of the World register (UNESCO), 84 Merschnik, Kerstin, 64, 65 Meutzelfeldt, Bruno, 66 Mezulis, Marie, 48 migrant experience, 68–75 migrants assisted migrants and refugees, ii, 10, 28–51 attracting skilled workers, 52 displaced persons, ii, 8–29 immigration program, 8, 10, 18, 66 increasing arrivals, 16 leaving Australia, 52 stereotypes, 24, 50 Mint, Hans Georg, 38–39 Morosow family, 53 Mullins, Michael, 74 Mullins family, 48 museum exhibits, 68–73 museum pedagogy, 3 Nacholinski, George, 26 nation building, 76, 82 National Archives of Australia, 70, 71 National Heritage List, ii, 68 naturalisation, 46, 47 Neeme, Gunner, 74 Netherlands, migrants from, 30, 32, 36, 48, 49, 50, 52

Picturing and Re-picturing Bonegilla

‘New Australians’, 14, 50, 64 ‘New Settlers’, 64 Nikolakopoulu, Leotohithu, 74 Nordic countries, migrants from, 30 Norway, migrants from, 50, 52 Novosel, Katerina, 20, 21 official photographs, 4, 10–11, 14–15, 28, 48 Paikoukis, Elizabeth, 48 paintings, sketches, cartoons, 9, 74–75 Parvo, Arvi, 84 Paul, Tibor, 84 Peters, Lutz, 78 Peters, Paul, 62 photographic sources, 4–6 Poloczek, Erwin, 60 population, Australia, 30 population-building aims, 18 portrait photographs, 84–85 Prochazka, Emil, 70 publicity and promotion, 8, 14, 34–35, 52 contested by residents, 26–27 developing Bonegilla, 30 filming Bonegilla, 62–63 ‘good types’, 12–13 official photographs, 4, 10–11, 14–15, 28, 48 population-building, 18

Royal Visit, 40–41 Rutigliano, Bruno, 20, 21 Rutkowski, Hannah, 20, 21 Sacred Heart Church, 70 Savolainen family, 76, 77 Schreibenref, Jules, 38–39 Schymitzek, Gerda, 44, 45 Schymitzek, Josef (Jim), 44, 45 Sciulli, Frank, 32, 33 Serbian migrants, 64 Sgro, Giovanni, 70, 71 shopping, 46 Simonelis, Norbertas, 10, 11 sketches, cartoons, paintings, 9, 74–75 Skowronska, Valerie, 22, 23 Skowronska, Wanda, 80, 81, 82, 83 Snedden, Billy, 66 social life, 24–25, 44–47, 58 Sofianu, George, 74 Sopalis, Apolonia, 20, 21 South Africa, migrants from, 52 Spain, migrants from, 30, 50 sport, 46, 47 stereotypes of migrants, 24, 50 Sweden, migrants from, 50, 52 Syria, migrants from, 52 Szilasy, Paul, 72

United Kingdom, migrants from, 8, 30, 32, 52 United States, migrants from, 52 Upmalis, Tamar, 10, 11 Urbanivicius, Richard, 16, 17 Valder, Kathy (nee Hedvig), 86 Van Aiken, Jean, 78 van Dalen, Nico, 74 Van Dyken family, 32, 33 Vasiliou, Katina, 68, 69 Vasins, Galena, 10, 11, 22, 26, 27, 82, 83 Vasins, Irina, 10, 11, 22, 26, 27, 82 Vaviadelis, Dimitrios, 50, 51 Veneris, George, 78 Verloop, Anne, 44, 45 Victorian Heritage Register, ii, 68 Visser, Gijsbert, 56 Vodaric, Dinko, 20, 21 Vogiazopoulos, Zac, 44, 45 We Found a Home (documentary), 62 West, Douglas, 80 White Australia policy, 52 White Russians, 52 work placements see employment worker hostels, 66 written memories, 6–7 Yugoslavia, migrants from, 30, 52, 64

Queen Elizabeth II coronation, 40 Raff, Ken, sculptor, 72 refugees, 8 remembering Bonegilla, 68–75, 82–83 residents’ photographs, 5–6, 26–27, 42–43 resilience, 42 riots and protests, 32, 54–56

INDEX

Tailleur, Max, 60 Tammeray, Irma, 10, 11 Townley, Athol, 30, 31 Turkey, migrants from, 52 Tzikas, George, 50, 51 unemployed migrants, 32, 54, 56 UNESCO Memory of the World register, 84

Zoenigseder family, 42, 43