A proportion of the internees was shipped to Canada and Australia, the pliable Dominions, for the duration of the war. The more than two thousand Dunera internees suffered brutal treatment from British soldiers on the voyage to Australia, and then protracted internment, under far more humane Australian guards, at Hay (NSW) and Tatura (Victoria) camps. For a long time, they were treated as if they were prisoners of war.

London’s reversal of policy, exploited by small groups of Australians who were sympathetic to refugees, ultimately led to the gradual declassification and release of internees from Hay and Tatura. Those who were not ‘repatriated’ to Britain, Palestine and elsewhere during the war were allowed to join the Australian Army, mostly as labourers, thus receiving the opportunity to become Australian citizens.

The Dunera Scandal deepens our knowledge of the suffering and stoic pride of the internees, their ingenious preservation of Central European Jewish intellectual, artistic, and cultural life under the most unlikely circumstances – an Australian internment camp built on an old garbage dump site.

The earlier book on the subject, Benzion Patkin’s The Dunera Internees (1979), also covered these aspects of the story. Pearl goes further in emphasising the post-war careers of many Dunera alumni. To use his own phrase from an earlier article on this troopship, the Dunera brought ‘a cargo of talent’ to Australia. Patkin’s book embodies more a Council of Civil Liberties outlook. ‘Is this British justice? … Is this dinkum Aussie fair play?’ he seems to be asking us throughout the book. Both books convey extraordinary goodwill of the internees or ex-internees towards Australian society.

The wartime secrecy and mystification surrounding the internees still inhibit proper historical research. At Hay and Tatura internees’ mail was censored and delayed, so their communication with the civilian world in Sydney and Melbourne is now difficult to reconstruct. Some official files held in Canberra and London have been exempted from normal archival access rules.

Patkin avoided this problem by concentrating upon twenty-five oral histories, supplemented by documents, souvenirs, and sketches preserved by former internees themselves. The integrity of his account derived from his personal outreach to a section of the internees: those who were either Zionists or Orthodox Jews and most urgently required Patkin’s resources as Secretary of the Zionist Federation in Melbourne. While Patkin depicted civilian responsiveness to the internees in largely Jewish terms, he left the impression that too many Jewish leaders were indifferent or insensitive.

Pearl attempts to use more diverse sources and perspectives: he adds official documents to oral accounts of internment; he quotes long passages from internee diaries and letters; he seeks out press and parliamentary debates; he tries to name those responsible for cruelty or inefficiency and he supports various major and minor pro-refugee publicists and lobbyists.

This book lacks the archival thoroughness and explicitness, however, of a major British study, Peter and Leni Gilman’s Collar the Lot! (1980). Pearl’s style of writing social history, without footnotes or bibliography, makes it difficult to know how well he has used his sources. Often he quotes an official document but cannot find its successors. No sense of administrative sequence emerges – a contrast to the Gilman book – and sometimes sequences which exist in his sources are needlessly broken up and confused.

Pearl also ignores Patkin’s book which may or may not be and author’s privilege. But to ignore Patkin’s role as a Jewish communal leader, to fail to assess it, seems negligent. To state that ‘The Jewish community in general showed little concern for their interned brethren’ underestimates Jewish involvement and ignores the interesting questions raised about Australian Jewishness during the WWII. (Pearl partly rehabilitates Rabbi Jacob Danglow, however, from Patkin’s rather sour portrait). Pearl describes Orthodox Jewish observance in the camps, even Rabbi Blumenthal’s Yeshiva in the camps, but fails to explain where the necessary vestments and Talmud came from.

Where Patkin neglected them, Pearl brings to the foreground the welfare activities of various Christian and secular pro-refugee groups: the Victorian International Refugee Emergency Council (VIREC); Margaret Holmes of the Student Christian Movement; the Society of Friends; the bureaucratic sympathiser Alfred C. Clarke; and the writings of Brian Fitzpatrick.

The full story of refugee relief in Australia, in which the Dunera episode is at least half the problem, has still not emerged. What were the relations between various Jewish, Christian, and secular refugee advocates just before and during the war? Pearl touches upon this question but by no means exhausts its potential. The role of certain Englishmen in Australia is suggested by some of Pearl’s evidence. The Bishop of Chichester in England, for example, informed Bishop C.V. Pilcher of Sydney about the British volte-face on internment and the anomalous deportation to Australia. Pilcher in turn appears to have alerted Sir Thomas Bavin and other NSW Supreme Court justices to the problem. He also maintained close contact with the British High Commissioner in Canberra, Sir Geoffrey Whiskard, and even brought the Governor-General, Lord Gowrie, into play.

These ‘unofficial’ but influential networks helped force the British and Australian governments to coordinate their views of the internees. NSW Supreme Court justices visited the camps as ‘official visitors’, a process Pearl does not quite explain. And the Home Office sent out major Julian Layton to serve as Liaison Officer between the internees, the Australian, and the British Authorities. Layton becomes the bureaucratic hero of this story.

It is just this politicisation of the internee-refugee issue in parochial, xenophobic Australia, and its complex bureaucratic resolution, which needs closer analysis. The shift from UAP-Country Party to Labor administration coincided with a new deal for the internees, but was it the decisive factor?

Menzies’s original acceptance of the deported internees was a classic exercise in the pitfalls of Dominion Status. He agreed that Australia would act merely as a custodian of the internees until the end of the war, when they would be repatriated by the British Government.

Right from the start, the British recommended more lenient treatment of the internees than the Australian Government was ready to accept. Perhaps it was simply the political instability and general administrative confusion of Menzies’s first Prime Ministership – rather than the xenophobic, even anti-Semitic prejudice which certainly existed at high levels which prevented the internees from receiving the high priority they deserved? Pearl scoffs too much at Menzies: ‘One assumes that he was more interested in the royals of Buckingham Palace than the refugees at Tatura.’ This trivialises analysis of Menzies’s position, and ignores his favourable responses to other Jewish approaches during the war, including his visit to Jewish settlements in Palestine in early 1941.

Pearl quotes a 1940 petition from Bishop Pilcher to Menzies only to damn the latter by adding that ‘his reply to these logical and humanitarian submissions is not on record’. Yet at the date of the submission, June 1940, the Dunera had not even set out for Australia. (More than once Pearl confuses the issue of the Dunera internees with ‘enemy aliens’ interned by Australia at the outset of the European war).

In another passage, Pearl criticises Menzies’s apparent snubbing of the letter from Pilcher, yet it is obvious between the lines that delicate preparations were in train to allow Pilcher to visit the camps, which he did a few weeks later.

The Army Minister, Percy Spender, was perhaps a transitional figure, but Pearl is unsure. He personally knew refugee (his brother-in-law) who had been wrongly interned in Australia in 1939. Pearl satirises Spender as the man who consistently maintained in Parliament that Australia was a mere custodian, that the internees’ future was a matter for the British to decide, and that internees would not be allowed to remain in Australia after the war.

Spender is also described, however, as responsible for the establishment of tribunals to hear appeals by internees against their status. Finally, without receiving much credit from the author, he is shown conceding in Parliament in June 1941 that some internees might be useful in civilian and army jobs in Australia.

The mystery narrows. What was happening between Menzies. Spender, the Defence Department, and the Army, especially military intelligence? And what was the quality of relationships between these Australian authorities and Julian Layton, the Home Office representative who arrived in March 1941 to sort out ‘the dreadful muddle’? Layton knew Australia quite well. yet he had to remain here for the duration of the war processing and de-processing internees.

Pearl obviously interviewed Layton, whose detailed diaries of the period are, apparently now accessible at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet no clear narrative of Layton’s subtle bureaucratic work emerges from this book.

Similarly, although he shows that Labor, especially the superb administrator Arthur Calwell, eventually opened the way to army service, civilian release and Australian citi1enship for the internees. Pearl does not explain whether pure moral insight of the Council of Civil Liberties variety was their motivation, or whether it was merely the pressure of total war mobilisation after the outbreak of the Pacific War.

Pearl’s partly satirical, partly indignant style produces a lucky dip of historical quotations from which few firm conclusions emerge. On the last page we learn that the Dunera lived happily ever after, until it was scrapped in 1969, and we learn that its graduates hold occasional reunions in Melbourne. What does it all mean?

The leading clue is to be found on page 182, where Pearl writes that:

Australia, a country with an enduring tradition of xenophobia, and not a little anti-semitism had no desire to become permanent host to a crowd of foreigners. The lofty promises of Evian were conveniently forgotten.

In fact there was nothing ‘lofty’ about public performance at the Evian conference of July 1938. Pressure on Australia to accept a significant number of Jewish refugees had not been well-received by the Lyons Government. ‘Alien migration’ was a highly problematical concept. At Evian, British and American lobbying behind the scenes forced Australia’s delegate, the Trade and Customs Minister T.H. White, to allow a token number of Jewish refugees into Australia. The decision was not immediately announced.

The few thousand ‘Evian refugees’ who reached Australia before the outbreak of war, plus the ‘enemy aliens’ interned by Australia itself, followed by the Dunera group, became strategic factors in the breakdown of Australian hostility to alien migration’. To adapt a phrase of General Sharon from another context the Dunera internes were ‘facts on the ground; they were exceptions which, in retrospect, helped to change the rule.

Even Labor’s wartime planning for a vast post-war immigration scheme intended to develop and defend Australia with ‘British stock’. When it came to the point, insufficient British stock and British shipping was available to till the annual targets of the scheme. For this reason Arthur Calwell turned towards the Displaced Person camps of Europe to supplement basically British migration.

Arguably, therefore, the courage integrity and cultural self-assurance of the Dunera boys, plus the other Jewish refugees in Australia during the war, began to teach Australians the benefits of non-British immigration. They were the mechanism by which a profound sociological change occurred in the decades atter the war. Other Europeans came to settle, and even to be welcomed. Much later, Australia abandoned the White Australia policy and accepted significant numbers of Asian refugees. The ‘boat people’ of recent memory perhaps owe a debt, as we all do, to these boat people of 1940.