Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre

By Alexandra Dellios

Bonegilla was a point of reception and temporary accommodation for approximately 320,000 post-war refugees and assisted migrants to Australia from 1947 to 1971. Its function was integral to the post-war immigration scheme, something officially lauded as an economic and cultural success. However, there were considerable hardships endured at Bonegilla, particularly during times of economic and political insecurity. Enforced family separation, poor standards of care, child malnutrition, and organised migrant protest need to be recognised as part of the Bonegilla story.

Histories of Controversy: The Bonegilla Migrant Centre gives this alternative picture, revealing the centre’s history to be one of containment, control, deprivation and political discontent. It tells a more complex tale than a harmonious making of modern Australia to include stories of migrant resistance and their demands on a society and its systems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Aug 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9780522870596

Book preview

Introduction

Controversy and Containment at

Bonegilla Migrant Centre

The success of the post-war immigration scheme can be largely attributed not only to Calwell’s advocacy but to his organisation … The Immigration Department put great effort into orienting New Australians in their new lives, with the aim of minimising conflict between old traditions and new home.¹

Twenty years after the program began, the White Australia policy was dropped. After 30 years, the migration program accepted people of all races without discrimination. Australia made these changes confidently because it had found that in the absorption of migrants it was an expert.²

The postwar immigration scheme was a series of agreements established with other nations and organisations that brought more than two and a half million migrants to Australia between 1947 and the early 1970s. Most of these arrivals were assisted by the Australian Commonwealth government—the remainder were sponsored by family or community organisations. Initiated after World War II by the Chifley Labor government, and expanded by subsequent Liberal–Coalition governments, the postwar immigration scheme was a dramatic departure from previous immigration policy. The scale of migration encouraged in the postwar era was hitherto unseen in Australia’s history. Between Federation in 1901 and the beginning of World War II in 1939, approximately 700 000 people migrated to Australia.³ In contrast, one million people migrated in each of the six decades following 1950—and from countries increasingly outside Australia’s prewar definition of ‘white’ (preferably Europeans, but especially British peoples). The White Australia policy, while still in force throughout much of the postwar immigration scheme, was progressively relaxed, so that Australia’s prewar efforts to preserve the predominance of the British in Australia was gradually weakened.⁴

Public proclamations about the success of the immigration scheme, and more progressive statements attributing success to migrant groups’ own cultural tenacity and social mobility, are not uncommon in public discussions on Australia’s migration history. The process towards a multicultural society, many journalists, politicians and academics proclaim, has been remarkably harmonious, given Australia’s long (and ongoing) history of racial exclusion and segregation. The examples offered in the quotations at the start of this chapter have obvious qualifiers: in the first, Labor MP Tanya Plibersek is addressing the Labor Party faithful, lauding and inflating the foresight of Arthur Calwell, the first minister for the newly formed Department of Immigration in 1945, the unwilling architect of modern multicultural Australia. In the second, historian John Hirst publicly expresses opinions that set him in opposition to many left-leaning Australian historians within academe—those who locate the success of the scheme not in the harmonious and receptive nature of an Anglo-Australian public, but in the ability of postwar migrants to adjust and persevere in the face of structural and cultural discrimination.⁵ These quotations are interesting acts of recent historical revisionism. But all statements regarding the success of the scheme have at their core an ability to gloss over the ‘blips’ (a term used by historian Richard Bosworth) in Australia’s immigration history.⁶

The clear economic successes of postwar migration, and now the positivist revisionist tendency to locate the beginnings of our current superficial multiculturalism in the postwar era, risks concealing the lived and intimate realities of the scheme. Bonegilla, the subject of this book, was a Department of Immigration Reception and Training Centre, located on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, that operated across the period of the postwar immigration scheme, from 1947 to 1971. It was a temporary home, a point of processing and dispersal, to some 320 000 European arrivals who came to Australia under assisted passage provided by the Commonwealth government. As non-British assisted arrivals, they were all made to sign two-year work contracts with the Commonwealth in return for their assisted passage and temporary, subsidised accommodation.

Migrant children, men and women passed through Bonegilla during its twenty-four years in operation—over the entire course of the mass postwar immigration scheme. Some stayed for a week or less; others stayed for years, depending on their employment situation. Unlike other attempts to tell the history of Bonegilla, this one will unpack the most controversial episodes in the centre’s history to reveal how individuals and families lived and responded to the constraining situations in which they found themselves.

Since the inception of the immigration scheme—with the acceptance of European Displaced Persons (DPs) uprooted from their homes during and after World War II—we have been told by politicians and journalists that the scheme was an ambitious and successful exercise in nation building and postwar reconstruction.⁷ Australia’s cultural and social life was transformed as a direct, albeit unintended, outcome of those decades of mass migration. For those hundreds of thousands who came as refugees in the wake of World War II and Soviet repression, Australia has also been a refuge, a second home and a new beginning. In the last few decades, some public commentators and refugee advocates have referred to ‘pride in the nation’s past’ of welcoming new arrivals to cast shame on our present attitudes to asylum seekers.⁸ Alternatively, in 2001, historians Klaus Neumann and Gwenda Tavan addressed some of the popular and more official uses to which immigration history is put: ‘we’ are a humanitarian nation with a proud history of accommodating refugees, a multicultural nation with a successful record of settling diverse peoples.⁹ They argue that immigration history, while broadly marginalised as an academic practice, is valued insofar as it relates to the unifying narratives of the nation-state. A historical vacuum therefore surrounds popular understandings of Australian immigration. More recently, academic historical studies exploring the more intimate landscapes of migration—inter-ethnic, communal and familial experiences of settlement—have broadened the field.¹⁰ More work is needed on how government spaces and practices have contained and constrained personal and communal experiences.

An exciting field of academic historiography that emerged, and then receded, in the 1980s—and which relied heavily on oral history and the desire to give a voice to the ‘silenced, marginalized, or disenfranchised’—attempted to complicate understandings of postwar migration.¹¹ This book contributes to that academic discourse. Historians Richard Bosworth and Janis Wilton, Jock Collins, James Jupp and Eric Richards have urged us to consider the difficulties migrants faced in adjusting to postwar Australia, and the structural inequalities and poor settlement services they experienced.¹² This is a familiar vein of immigration history from the 1980s: shinning a light on the Commonwealth government’s ineptitude in managing the postwar immigration scheme, and thus diffusing ‘pride in the past … and amorphous matters as success or failure’.¹³ But how did Bonegilla, and its government services and standards, fit into this context? How do we understand the intimate experiences that Bonegilla contains for some 320 000 residents and their descendants?

Bonegilla’s history has served any number of present-day narratives, from all sides of the political spectrum. This includes celebratory and revisionist attempts to trace the ‘birthplace of multiculturalism’ to Bonegilla—as evidenced in responses to its National Heritage listing in 2007.¹⁴ It also includes attempts to trace Australia’s humanitarian tradition to postwar reception centres, and to indicate a more accommodating past in contrast to present-day asylum-seeker policy.¹⁵ Alternatively, Bonegilla has been used to reveal a continuous vein in our history of poor treatment of and punitive measures for new arrivals, and to condemn the historical shortcomings of Australia’s reception practices.¹⁶ This book makes an intervention into the existing and conflicting narratives surrounding Bonegilla by considering the most controversial aspects of its past, and how they affected the lived realities of migrants. It argues that Australia’s migration history cannot be typified by either progress or continuity.

I focus on four controversial episodes in Bonegilla’s history: the issue of family separation under the Commonwealth government’s two-year work contract with DPs and assisted migrants; the deaths in 1949 of newly arrived DP babies, and general standards of health and wellbeing for children; the apparently unpalatable food that features so prominently in memories of Bonegilla; and the infamous 1952 and 1961 riots over migrant unemployment. These episodes, and their implications for standards of care and family life, feature in personal and familial narratives of postwar migration. They do not always feature in more officially sanctioned narratives of Bonegilla and the postwar migration scheme.

Each controversial episode in Bonegilla’s past also holds its own mythologies in the personal and familial memories of those who have a postwar migrant background. These episodes have much to tell us about the functioning of the postwar immigration scheme and its extensive bureaucracy. But this is more than a bureaucratic history of the Department of Immigration from 1947 to 1971. These controversial episodes reveal the key concerns and shortcomings of settlement during this period, the standards of care experienced by new arrivals, and the lived realities of DPs, other refugees and Commonwealth-assisted migrants. I cannot give due attention to all opinions and feelings held by all former residents who passed through Bonegilla, or their descendants, but I hope to offer a diversity of explanations for how these episodes can be understood within their context.

This is not the first time these episodes have been placed under scrutiny and shared with the public. In 1991, Albury Regional Museum, near the former Bonegilla site, staged an exhibition entitled ‘Bon-Ne-Gil-La in Transit’. Guided by Glenda Sluga’s 1988 history, Bonegilla: A Place of No Hope, the museum explicitly refuted the ‘happy official photographs’ of Bonegilla to suggest a history of separated families, boredom and unemployment, and discrimination.¹⁷ But museum spaces have limitations, and this exhibition, like many others that have attempted to tackle Australia’s migration history, was bound by familiar tropes around migrant success stories: that is, Bonegilla was a launching pad from which new lives began.¹⁸ This book hopes to open up new spaces and discussions around multiple and contradictory stories of Bonegilla and its controversies. In doing so, it encourages discussion about present-day practice and how we might receive and settle migrant families.

Control and Refugees

Australia’s long history of receiving new arrivals, and refugees in particular, has remarkable consistencies, as well as inconsistencies. This is not the place to explore parallels with the present.¹⁹ However, the issue of control, particularly control over non-citizen bodies, is persistent throughout this history of Bonegilla—although I hope I do not draw any disingenuous connections that simplify the links between present and past practice. Postwar arrivals were welcomed as potential future citizens, however grudgingly or condescendingly. The present context is markedly different. So called ‘illegals’ are, in a biopolitical war that attempts to manage the nation by exerting control over who enters its space, rendered ‘bare life’.²⁰ Unprotected because of being stripped of their political status, ‘illegals’ are held separate from the protections of the state.

Revisiting these histories of controversy and family containment may give us a means to understand how the following statements can arise: ‘Migrant and refugee reception facilities are euphemisms for detention or concentration camps … The Bonegillas of the 1950s and the refugee detention centres of the 2000s are the modern equivalents’.²¹ Some former residents of Bonegilla do choose to draw these parallels, and use them as a productive platform from which to engage others in an activist agenda. However, government-administered reception centres are not linear predecessors to detention centres. Indeed, Australia had no formalised policies for processing refugees until the arrival of Vietnamese boat people from 1976. In regard to settlement policy, from the 1980s onwards, a combination of community groups, the private sector, and state and federal governments have provided homes for humanitarian entrants who would have previously passed through Bonegilla. This arrangement has provided a blended system of settlement services, albeit under a restrictive and competitive funding scheme.

Concurrently, from 1992, the Keating Labor government established mandatory detention centres for asylum seekers arriving outside the humanitarian refugee stream—and since that time, both Labor and Liberal–Coalition governments have enforced increasingly punitive measures, including the use of offshore detention centres for people arriving by boat and seeking to lodge refugee claims in Australia. Mandatory detention marks a concerted departure from previous practices of refugee reception.

Despite the interesting conversations that arise out of comparisons and contrasts between these two government-administered spaces, detention centres are not exactly modern equivalents to reception centres such as Bonegilla. The former were explicitly designed as deterrents and continue to inflict untold damage on thousands of women, men and children.²² The latter, while not exactly prime examples of a ‘national cuddle’, were intended as reception points for assisted migrants that the nation envisioned would become citizens—albeit on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder.²³

Bonegilla’s history is rife with examples of separating out certain migrant groups for control and containment. For example, an extensive range of legislation and institutions in postwar Australia distinguished and favoured British from non-British (alien) migrants. Assisted British migrants passed through urban (and often better equipped) hostels, rather than large reception and training centres like Bonegilla. Managing ‘non-compliance’ and attempting to regulate the boundaries of citizenship is the basis for the operation of the modern state.²⁴ Bonegilla’s history contains many examples of ‘non-compliance’, sometimes inadvertent, from new arrivals unfamiliar with or actively opposed to the regulations placed on them. Compliance in this case refers to compliance with the Migration Act 1958 and the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, which defined who was considered to be an ‘alien’—any non-British arrival. The Aliens Act 1947 regulated what this group could do, making it compulsory for all alien residents over the age of 16 to register with local authorities and to report any change of name, address or occupation.²⁵ In combination, these three acts regulated the lives of non-British migrants, setting legislative boundaries intended to contain and control alien cultural norms and social practices, regulating their access to social structures and social benefits, and placing them under surveillance.

Unpacking the Myths

In approaching the history of Bonegilla, one has to contend first with the many and often conflicting accounts of the site. Bonegilla has often been approached as somewhat ‘notorious’, and historian Glenda Sluga’s academic work Bonegilla: A Place of No Hope contributed to this perception.²⁶ In less academic accounts, including personal recollections and the mainstream media, Bonegilla has been variously described as a detention centre; a little Europe; a concentration camp; the birthplace of multiculturalism; a place of no hope; an Eden; and a first home. In effect, this book offers one among many versions of Bonegilla’s history as a migrant centre. In part, it counteracts certain celebratory representations that now circulate in public history—particularly, the revisionist narrative of Bonegilla as a birthplace of benign multiculturalism, which presents a simplified, positivist history of the nation’s immigration past that whitewashes the complicated and ambiguous processes involved in migration and long-term adjustment, as well as the nation-state’s regulation of multiculturalism.²⁷ This official revisionist and conservative version of multiculturalism—as the inevitable and harmonious outcome of Australia’s postwar immigration scheme—has had a pervasive effect on how Bonegilla’s history is officially promoted and, consequently, received.²⁸

Some communities and individuals derive a sense of collective identity from a Bonegilla connection (however detached from a lived experience) and display a multi-vocal understanding of its past, which may or may not include an understanding of Bonegilla as the ‘birthplace of multiculturalism’.²⁹

In exploring some of the more controversial aspects of Bonegilla’s history and placing it within the wider context of the postwar immigration scheme, we can build a more complex image of that period in history. We may also get closer to understanding why its meanings are so contested. Knowing these histories complicates narratives of postwar migration, especially those that operate in popular culture and heritage tourism today.³⁰ I do not believe this to be a ‘dystopian approach to sorrowful pasts of post-war migration’, as public historian Bruce Pennay contends, nor a progressive narrative.³¹ In presenting these many stories, I hope to account for a diversity of experiences and provide some historical context to people’s memories.

Postwar Immigration 1947–1972

During the twenty-four-year period, from 1947 to 1971, that Bonegilla received and accommodated assisted migrants, many changes occurred, both to Bonegilla’s physical landscape and to its administration. This period also witnessed wider social and political changes to the scheme and to the national psyche. The White Australia policy was progressively weakened from the mid 1960s as Australia’s position on migration and racial exclusion became increasingly untenable, internationally and locally. Inevitably, Australia’s ethnic profile was also dramatically altered—having expanded the immigration intake to include countries in southern Europe, the Middle East and South America. From the 1960s the forceful cultural assimilation of new arrivals (and the expectation that migrants would assimilate and did not require separate services or programs) was shelved in favour of a slower process of ‘integration’. Services to newly arrived migrant communities gradually improved. Throughout this time, assisted new arrivals continued to pass through the remote centre of Bonegilla. Immigration was curtailed in the early 1970s, after the election of the Labor Party under Gough Whitlam in 1972, due to economic recession. The following offers a concise history of the postwar immigration scheme.

From 1946, the Chifley Labor government realised that Australia’s population could only increase at the desired rate through migration—preferably British migration. Arthur Calwell, the first minister for the newly formed Department of Immigration, was a vociferous defender of the White Australia policy, and remained so during his tenure in office. He viewed mass immigration as a means to boost Australia’s defences in the region. In 1942 he told his parliamentary colleagues that postwar Australia would not continue to be a ‘white man’s country’ unless it dramatically boosted its population, which rested at under eight million.³² Calwell went on to argue that Australia needed to grow at a rate of 2 per cent per year in the postwar era if it wished to achieve rapid economic growth, full employment and a higher standard of living. Australia needed tradesmen and other labourers to fill huge gaps in heavy industry, agriculture, house building, and other public works.³³ Robert Menzies, then leader of the Liberal Party opposition, needed no convincing—and during his time as prime minister from 1949 to 1966, he supported mass immigration.³⁴ As historian Klaus Neumann argues, since 1945 no Australian government has repudiated the idea that Australia benefits from immigration—issues attached to refugee acceptance and settlement policy are another matter altogether.³⁵

British migrants could not meet this postwar demand; furthermore, the newly formed Department of Immigration was unable to secure sufficient shipping from the United Kingdom.³⁶ The radical decision to take non-British immigrants, specifically western and northern Europeans, was deemed necessary for economic development and defence purposes. This was not a decision motivated by humanitarian interests, and did not see a watering down of the key precepts of the White Australia Policy—indeed, Calwell doggedly pursued the deportation of Malays, Indonesians and Filipinos who had sought refuge in Australia during World War II. He was unable to find enough willing migrants from the preferred ‘Nordic’ countries (Sweden, Norway and Finland) to fill employment quotas in heavy industry and agriculture. Displaced persons in refugee camps across Germany therefore became a viable source of immigrants. Almost one million were still living in refugee camps two years after the end of the war—some historians estimate that 12 million were displaced at the conclusion of war in May 1945, most of whom were repatriated by the Allies and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.³⁷ Displaced persons consisted of people forcibly taken from their countries of nationality by Germany or its allies, and, increasingly, people from the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), former residents of the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and Yugoslavia who refused to return to their countries for