cause they were citizens of Austria-Hungary. These were mainly mineworkers at Kalgoorlie, who the racist union had been trying to exclude from the mines for years.
Even some Serbs, who were actually British allies in the First World War, were interned, so viciously confused was the attitude of authority. Later, a number of Russians, also ostensible allies, were interned, really because of their trade union and labour movement activity. Most of these people were locked up in an enormous concentration camp at Holsworthy near Liverpool, in NSW.
When the war ended, these prisoners, who by then numbered about 6000, were kept interned until after the signing of the Versaille Treaty in 1919, when the overwhelming majority of them were ruthlessly deported to their countries of origin. A few, like the brewer Resch, managed to stay in Australia after mounting an extensive and costly legal campaign, which he had the resources to fund. The overwhelming majority of the Germans were not so favoured by circumstances. p> Many of the deportees were back-loaded on empty troop ships. A large and significant number of those deported were Australian citizens, and many were Australian-born. So much for В«citizenshipВ» in British Australia. According to Fischer's book, hundreds of migrants who weren't enemy aliens, but who were politically and industrially active on the left, were deported in the same sweep.
To quote Fischer: В«The total number of deportees, based on the shipping lists of the nine transports, comes to 6150. Of these, 5414 had been interned, the remainder were family members and uninterned ex-enemy aliens who either accepted the offer to be repatriated or were ordered to leave the country. В»The major Australian figure who publicly opposed this atrocious witch-hunt was His Eminence Archbishop Mannix. p> The intrinsic cruelty of all this is almost unimaginable. Six thousand people uprooted and implacably deported from this country where they had built their lives, and had lived for many years, to the chaotic and miserable Europe of the 1920s. The main instrument carrying out all this brutality was British-Australian military intelligence, particularly one Major Piesse, whose name will be remembered in infamy for generations.
An examination of the written records of military intelligence suggests that all this cruelty was motivated by a kind of mad, but in a way logical, notion that the crisis of the war gave the British economic interests the chance to settle accounts with German business activity in Australia and the Pacific, which was seen as a major competitor with Britain.
The German-Australian cultural community was cowed and crushed by this, and the old centres of German community settlement have never really regained their German multicultural aspect, which is a great pity for the cultural richness of Australian society.
Nevertheless, one of the ironies of all this is that after the Second World War substantial German migration to Australia recommenced, and when you refer to the redoubtable Charles Price and his computer breakdowns of Australian ethnicity, he presents convincing evidence that the German ethnic component in Australia is still the largest after the English, Irish and Scottish, and ahead of the Italian and Greek, at about 4 per cent of the mix. The current best-known German-Australian is, of course, Tim Fischer, the leader of the National Party.
The foundation of the Australian Communist Party, as a section of the Communist International, in 1920, had considerable repercussions, over time, on the labour movement's attitude to the White Australia policy and racism. From its inception, the Communist Party had a formal opposition to the White Australia policy and racism, though many of its members were quite naturally still influenced by the prevailing racist mood of the labour movement as a whole.
Nevertheless, even the left-wing union bureaucrats, the 'Trades Hall Reds ', led by Jock Garden, the Secretary of the Sydney labor Council, took, for that time, quite a courageous stand against racism. They affiliated the Sydney Labor Council to the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, which had its headquarters in Vladivostok, which included unions in a number of Asian countries.
This gave rise to a hysterical clamour from the establishment and right-wingers in the labour movement, like the bureaucrats of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), who accused the Sydney Labor Council of thereby undermining the White Australia Policy, which was in fact true, and completely laudable. p> At the ACTU Conference in 1930 there was quite a complex battle over affiliation to the Pan Pacific Trade Union Secretariat, with the conference evenly split over the issue, the Sydney Labor Council and Garden in favour of the affiliation, and Bob Ross, who by this time had shifted somewhat to the right, opposing the...
