Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

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I was lucky enough to work with Ken Inglis and friends on Dunera Lives: A Visual History, published in 2018. The book is an attempt to tell something of the Dunera story through 500 images, one of which attracted far more comment than any other. This was a grainy black-and-white photograph from Bern’s collection taken on 14 December 1938, a month after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht.

The photo shows fifteen-year-old Gerd Bernstein (Bern’s original name), dressed in a suit, raising a glass to his family. His mother Helena, father Otto and maternal grandmother Sophie Maas sit at a table in their Berlin home at Wielandstrasse 17. A picture of young Gerd hangs on the wall.

The faces most exposed to the camera are those of grandson and grandmother. Gerd looks thoughtful and hesitant, even sad, while on his grandmother’s face I see both love and terror — love for him, and terror about what the future holds for her Jewish family. The next day Gerd left Berlin on a Kindertransport, bound for Britain. On 17 December, alone in Britain just two days after leaving home for a strange and unfamiliar country, he turned sixteen.

His parents survived the war despite his father Otto’s imprisonment in Theresienstadt concentration camp from 1942 to 1945. Otto was the sole survivor among the hundred people with whom he was transported to Theresienstadt; Sophie died there.

After the visual history appeared, Bern and I discussed readers’ reactions to this photograph and the intense, heavy sadness it prompted in many, me included. Bern would have none of it. He thought this response muddled, our emotions skewed by knowledge of the Holocaust.

In Bern’s mind, this photograph showed a moment in the life of his family, no more and no less. To view the photograph through the lens of the Holocaust was a mistake, and he made a point of reminding me that in 1938 the Nazis had not yet embarked on the systematic destruction of European Jewry.

Bern’s position on the photograph reflected his historical preferences. The substance of any history, Dunera’s included, is in the detail. He saw history through a lens that allowed little room for the floating of partly conceived ideas and none at all for speculation, no matter how worthy the intention. If there were a place for emotion, it was after the facts were established. Perhaps his approach could be called traditional. I can’t imagine Bern thinking much of the modern belief that histories can be retold on the basis of emotions.

Whatever the merits of Bern’s approach, it made him a wonderful informant. His view of the past as the stuff of hard facts meant that he spoke only about what he knew. If he didn’t know the answer, he said so. If he thought the question irrelevant, he made that clear too, then explained why. He punctured myths, of which Dunera has more than its share, and raised questions that forced historians and others to think anew about key moments in the story.

Recently I asked him about an incident that looms large in Dunera history and memory. On the voyage to Australia, British guards treated the internees with calculated brutality in a gross, and in some cases criminal, dereliction of duty. The Dunera canon tells that guards, as part of this sustained assault, forced internees to walk over broken glass strewn across the deck of the ship.

The glass was there, Bern told me, but he doubted it was placed deliberately, and he and others simply stepped around it. While the weight of evidence about this incident is against him, I know that Bern, as a historian of the Dunera, never spoke idly. On that basis alone, his account demands consideration.

Ken Inglis cherished Bern’s clarity and commitment to accuracy. They corresponded from the start of Ken’s Dunera project — which also led to a second book, Dunera Lives: Profiles, in 2020 — exchanging emails regularly until Ken’s death in December 2017. Their voluminous correspondence, now part of the Inglis Dunera papers at the National Library of Australia, reveals two scholars in respectful and admiring conversation, one testing notions and ideas, the other encouraging or discouraging those possibilities.

While Bern was an oracle on Dunera, on one aspect of the story he had no answers. When the Dunera internees arrived in Australia, most were incarcerated first at Hay in western New South Wales. Because the camps there could house only 2000, around ninety-five of the internees, seemingly chosen at random, were taken instead to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, along with other men who had travelled on the Dunera and been deemed dangerous by British authorities.

Bern was part of this Tatura rump, and there he stayed for the duration of his internment, which lasted until January 1942. Thus, he knew nothing of camp life at Hay. Ken would chuckle at this inconvenience, suggesting that Bern had been remiss in not arranging his internment to suit the needs of future historians.

Bern exerted a strong influence on the writing of the two volumes of Dunera Lives, saving us from mistakes and misinterpretations, and suggesting lines of enquiry that emerged as themes in the books. He was our most prolific and important informant. If our telling of a story differed from the one he knew, he always gave our version a fair hearing. On the odd occasion, we might even have convinced him.

On other occasions, not at all. In Dunera Lives we took a strong line on Winston Churchill’s role in the Dunera affair. While Churchill’s wartime government would later issue an apology of sorts to the Dunera internees for the appalling treatment they suffered, by that time many had already concluded that British liberalism was a chimera. Bern was of the opposite view. He held that Churchill had no choice but to act as he did, and that to suggest otherwise was to allow historical judgement to be derailed by the luxury of hindsight.

This position was entwined with another view to which Bern stuck fast. The Dunera had delivered him to Australia, where he made a rewarding and productive life. As he said often, there was nothing for him in postwar Europe, whereas in Australia, as a young man with energy and purpose, he was able to embrace education and new beginnings, free of the restrictions and prejudices that had shaped his life in Germany.

For Bern, his good fortune was the story, and this mattered more than issues such as the question of Churchill’s culpability. He thought the Dunera the luckiest thing to ever happen to him. Perhaps the fact that his parents survived the Holocaust also influenced this position.

Bern was an unusual Dunera boy in other ways, too. While happily Australian, he maintained strong links to his homeland. He returned to Berlin and Germany often, visiting past haunts and chasing up friends. He continued to speak and read German, and listened to German news on the radio. A couple of years ago Bern wrote to tell me about the Exilmuseum in Berlin, after he had heard mention of the nascent institution on a German radio program. He wondered if the museum’s curators would be interested in learning about the strange story of the German and Austrian exiles who in 1940 found themselves interned in rural Australia. They were.

For other Dunera boys, such engagement with Germany and Austria was anathema. Their wartime experiences and knowledge of the Holocaust poisoned their feelings for the land of their birth. Many never returned to Germany and Austria; many chose to avoid Germanic culture and language.

Bern too knew the pain of persecution and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Anti-Semitism forced him and his mother to flee Germany for Britain. Hitler’s regime murdered his grandmother and imprisoned his father. But never did he allow the pain and injustice of the past to determine the direction of his life. It was a remarkably brave choice, and one that not all Dunera boys were able to make, or even wanted to.

Bern’s longevity conferred a sad and perhaps unwanted title. He was the last Dunera boy in Australia, and among the last anywhere. It is thought that there is a Dunera boy alive in France, and another in New York, and possibly others of whom my colleagues and I don’t know, though it is unlikely that these “unknowns” would number more than one or two.

Bern accepted his position with grace, acknowledging the dubious honour as a responsibility rather than a burden, which surely it was. To the best of my knowledge, he never refused a request for an interview, and was diligent in answering questions from scholars and members of the Dunera diaspora. Perhaps he saw duty in these tasks; the Dunera had led him to a good life in Australia, and provided both a scholarly purpose in his later years, and enduring friendships.

On what proved to be his last weekend, Bern travelled to Melbourne, where he delighted in the company of Peter Danby’s family. Danby, originally Peter Danziger, was also a Dunera boy, though the friendship was older than that, the two having met in Britain. Bern was accompanied by Peter and Joanna, two of his three children. The Brent–Danby friendship is now carried by the next generation.

In September 2022 I took the British author and activist Jennifer Nadel to meet Bern in his Canberra home. Jennifer’s father, George Nadel, was a budding scholar when he was deported to Australia on the Dunera. She knows little about his internment, but enough to realise that George’s postwar silences hid deep trauma. For Jennifer, Dunera has been a difficult and painful word.

Aside from their Jewish heritage, George Nadel and Bern had little in common. George was born Austrian, Bern German. Both had a passion for history, though they were driven by differing approaches and emphases. George, who went on to found and edit the venerable journal History and Theory, was an academic who practised history in more formal worlds and ways than Bern. If Bern were ever a reader of that journal, I imagine him warming more to the history than the theory. Bern saw the Dunera as a ship of salvation; for George, the Dunera seems to have heralded only misery.

And yet both men survived the Dunera, and by 2022 Bern was one of very few people anywhere in the world who could talk directly of the experience. Through Bern, Jennifer was given a privileged glimpse of a past about which George never spoke. As we drove away from Bern’s home, she said that his German-accented English, and certain of his mannerisms, evoked fond thoughts of her father.

When I wrote to Jennifer to tell her of Bern’s death, she immediately recalled his bearing and presence, and the importance to her of their meeting. Bern’s willingness to act as a conduit to the past, to talk openly and directly about Dunera, helped many people like her to better understand the story and their part in it. In so doing he aroused emotions. I wonder what he made of that.

Jennifer described meeting Bern as a privilege. It’s the right word. To have known, talked and corresponded with him was a privilege, and something I cherish. Ruhe sanft, lieber Bern. •

The post A Dunera life appeared first on Inside Story.

Many of the families of the roughly 2050 Dunera men have in their keeping wartime keepsakes passed to them by fathers and grandfathers. Over the past three years many of them have contacted me, wanting to donate their treasures to public institutions so that others may also enjoy them. I help where I can, providing introductions to the museums and libraries I know will care for and celebrate the collections. My spare room has become a halfway house for artefacts on their way from private homes to the public sphere.

Curators may shudder at that thought, but I think it’s wonderful. Each day I have privileged glimpses of rare artefacts — paintings, sketches, letters, perhaps an artist’s beret or a travel trunk — that tell vivid stories of people’s lives, of hope and loss in a world at war. Just last month the son of a “Dunera boy” entrusted to my keeping the scores of letters his mother and father sent each other during the war years. In that treasure trove is a tale of love; but other collections can devastate. I have read letters exchanged by Dunera internees, safe in Australia, with mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers trapped in Nazi Europe.

The most intimate of these collections reveal details about Dunera internees of whom we knew nothing when writing the books. Of the great majority of the “Dunera boys” we know only a little, and sometimes nothing other than the biographical bones — name, age and homeland — offered on wartime forms. Many, and probably most, didn’t speak publicly about their lives, and especially about their wartime lives as unfortunate souls arrested and imprisoned without fair reason. For some, this history evoked pain; others preferred to look ahead, never dwelling in the past. Some didn’t want the Dunera experience to colour how their lives and careers were interpreted.

Paul Mezulianik was one of these silent men, his Dunera history not for sharing. I first heard his name in January 2019 when Æone Shrimpton, his stepdaughter, wrote from England about the possibility of donating his art collection to an Australian home. A little over two years later, an exhibition of his work is showing at Tatura Museum, near Shepparton in northern Victoria. In presenting a selection of those artworks for the first time, the staff at Tatura Museum and I have taken the liberty of delving into his past. We do so to honour an individual and tell something of his unique story. About 2000 Dunera stories still remain to be told.

Paul Mezulianik was born to Rudolf Mezulianik, a sales representative, and his wife Gisela (nee Wien) in Vienna on 12 November 1921. Rudolf, who had been raised as a Catholic, had left the church on 11 July 1917 to marry Gisela, or Gitel, who was Jewish. Until the late 1930s the couple were part of Vienna’s Jewish community. On 21 March 1938, just days after Hitler came to Vienna’s famed Heldenplatz to proclaim Germany’s incorporation of Austria, Rudolf left the community. Gisela followed his lead on 19 June 1939.

Paul, raised in the Jewish faith, was baptised on 28 November 1938, shortly after the anti-Semitic violence of Kristallnacht. He was seventeen. Later he would tell Australian officials that he was Catholic, but he wasn’t. His creed was atheism.

An only child, Paul studied at a primary school in Vienna’s fourth district, then for three years from 1931–32 at the Akademische Gymnasium, a high school of excellent reputation. But his marks were so poor that he couldn’t continue to fourth year. Whether he abandoned his studies or continued them elsewhere isn’t known.

Paul remembered Hitler declaring the Anschluss. In the months that followed, the anti-Semitism inherent in Nazi rule and law began to close in on him and the Mezulianik family. On at least one occasion, when Nazi officials came calling, brave neighbours protected Gisela. As the Nazi threat pressed ever harder, queues at foreign embassies lengthened. Jews and others in desperate need of safe haven applied for refuge in friendly countries, with the United States the most popular of potential destinations.

“Certain pieces appear to depict scenes and characters from the years of his internment”: Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

Paul applied for a visa at the American embassy in Vienna in December 1938, but he was denied passage to the United States. It was a common story: the Western liberal democracies were slow — immorally so — to respond to the humanitarian crisis in Europe. The Society of Friends, known as Quakers, eventually arranged his passage to Britain in May 1939, with his residency guaranteed by a British man married to one of Paul’s Austrian friends. While his parents remained in their flat in Vienna — where they would survive the war — he began work on a farm in Yorkshire.

On 16 May of the following year, months into the war, Paul was one of the thousands of Germans and Austrians to be stung by the illiberalism that swept Britain following German military advances. Worried about the possibility of Nazi agents hiding among Germans and Austrians who had sought sanctuary in Britain, Churchill and his government authorised mass arrests. With this one bureaucratic act, thousands of refugees from Nazism were rendered “enemy aliens,” Britain their sanctuary no more.

Churchill’s government wanted enemy aliens as far away as possible from Britain and the war. Paul would tell his family of being deported on the SS Arandora Star, which was sunk by enemy action in July 1940, on its way to Canada, with about 800 lives lost. He remembered being pushed from the foundering vessel into the sea, then dragged from the waters of the Atlantic onto a lifeboat. With more men in the water than space in lifeboats, many of those who survived the sinking soon drowned.

Paul’s account echoes that of another Dunera internee, athletics coach Franz Stampfl. Although no evidence exists to put him aboard the Arandora Star, Stampfl told of surviving its sinking. Paul’s name doesn’t appear on passenger manifests either, or in official documents as a survivor of the sinking, and there is no particular reason why he should have been on the ship. The Arandora Star carried internees about whom the British authorities had political doubts, of which Paul was unlikely to be one. He was probably a category C “enemy alien,” meaning that authorities felt he posed no threat to Britain’s security. Moreover, he arrived in Australia with an intact suitcase and contents, a circumstance extremely rare among Arandora Star survivors. This is not to say that Paul, and Stampfl, weren’t on the Arandora Star, but simply to note that history doesn’t show it.

Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

A week after the Arandora Star’s survivors were returned to land, the HMT Dunera departed Liverpool for Australia, carrying more than 2000 of Churchill’s “enemy aliens.” In Dunera terms, Paul was not destined to spend long in Australia. He was held at Hay, in New South Wales, from September 1940 until May 1941, where he lived in Camp 8, Hut 20. One of his hut mates was Heinz Schloesser, whose remarkable life inspired Belinda Castles’s novel Hannah and Emil. Then he was part of the mass movement of Dunera internees to Tatura, in Victoria, where he remained until July of the next year. His return to Britain having been approved, he boarded the TSS Themistocles in Melbourne on 18 July 1942.

Paul’s closest Dunera friend may have been Rudolf Stern, from Cologne, whose birth date, 3 May 1924, made him one of the youngest internees. The two men kept in touch after Paul returned to London. In one letter, Rudi asked Paul to help find him a job in London. Though probably written in Tatura, the letter was sent from the Liverpool transit camp in Sydney, where Dunera men intending to return to Britain were housed while awaiting passage. Rudi died on 29 October 1942 when the MV Abosso, the transport on which he was returning to Britain, was sunk by a German submarine northwest of the Azores. Paul carried the sadness of Rudi’s death for the rest of his life.

Like so many former Dunera internees facing hostility from people who assumed they were German, Paul gave thought to changing his name. His entry in the London Gazette’s list of newly naturalised Britons in January 1950 reads:

Mezulianik, Paul (known as Paul Julian); Austria; Artist; 12, College Road, Isleworth, Middlesex. 22 December, 1949.

Did he want a British name to accompany his British identity? If he did, the thought was fleeting. He appears not to have used the surname Julian, or at least he didn’t formally register the change. His family — he married Patricia, mother to his son Stephen, in 1944, and Esilda, Æone’s mother, in 1963 — knew him only by the name Mezulianik.

After he returned to Britain, Paul took a factory job making aircraft instruments. Once the war was over he turned to film, working initially in animation for Gaumont-British Animation, then for other companies. His animation credits include the 1954 version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. His work won acclaim, leading eventually to a position as director of the Special Animations Unit for Rank Screen Services. Later he made prize-winning television advertisements for Dorland Advertising, which in time became part of the Saatchi & Saatchi empire.

Success allowed for early retirement, at age sixty, and time to indulge his passions. He gardened, listened to music and played the piano, and travelled widely with Esilda — to Europe, the United States, Africa, and islands of the Indian Ocean. Each year he visited his parents in Vienna, maintaining this annual pilgrimage after Gisela died in 1969 until Rudolf’s death in 1978. Paul died on 21 January 2019, aged ninety-seven.

Undated sketch by Paul Mezulianik.

A month before Paul’s death, Æone Shrimpton, his stepdaughter from his second marriage, uncovered a trunk in the attic of the Berkshire house he had shared with Esilda. For decades Paul had hidden his artworks, about 250 in number, from his family. They are almost exclusively figure drawings, studies of human emotions and form, and together they show a fine hand, charting his development as his technique and use of colour became more refined. Certain pieces appear to depict scenes and characters from the years of his internment, and the poor quality of much of the paper suggests that at least part of the collection dates to wartime.

The many nudes prompt the thought that Paul might have joined a life-drawing class, but some of these images, too, may have been sketched during his internment. Artists who could draw the female form found their work highly sought after among the all-male Dunera population, who gave money, cigarettes or other rewards in exchange. The African men and women Paul depicted may have been sketched aboard the TSS Themistocles, which called at Durban and Freetown on his return voyage to Britain in 1942.

By the time of Æone’s discovery, Paul was blind, suffering dementia, and unable to answer questions about the works and his motivations as an artist. He may not have answered them anyway.

Paul was not an easy person, says Æone, with love. Confined to a nursing home late in life, he continued to play piano while complaining bitterly, in Æone’s words, that it wasn’t a grand. He loved gardening and found enjoyment in growing fruit, vegetables, dahlias and zinnias, though that pleasure also showed his pernickety ways: dahlias and zinnias were the only flowers he liked, and the only species he grew. He was given to doubts about his abilities. He was an outstanding pianist, but never considered himself as such. Did he hold similar reservations about his art?

And there was the matter of the war, about which Paul was reluctant to speak. What Æone does know of Paul’s experiences came from her mother, who was also hesitant. In 2014, when Æone asked Esilda in her last days about Paul and the sinking of the Arandora Star, “she became very distressed and it seemed to haunt her.” Æone decided not to tell Paul she had found his art collection.

The Austrian historian Elisabeth Lebensaft was another who learned that Paul preferred to leave the past undisturbed. He resisted her request for information, replying politely but firmly that he remembered almost nothing of the Dunera and his internment. At some point he did tell his friend Fritz Sternhell (1924–2020), of Oxford, something of his experiences: perhaps discussing the past was easier with those who also had lived the Dunera story. Fritz returned to Britain on the same ship as Paul, the TSS Themistocles.

Dunera wasn’t the only source of pain in Paul’s past. In the years after the war, he conducted a long affair with the fiancée and, later, wife of his best friend. This was Esilda, Æone’s mother, whom he later wed. As always, such circumstances had costs. Paul became estranged from Stephen, his only child, who later changed his name, further distancing himself from his father. When Paul died, Æone and her husband Christopher engaged an agency to locate Stephen so he could have the opportunity to come to the funeral. He was found, and attended, but hasn’t been in touch since. The Mezulianik lineage is lost.

“Werde, was Du bist!” Robert Hofmann’s portrait of Paul Mezulianik, c. 1941–42.

For only one piece in Paul’s collection, and in this exhibition, is the exact provenance known: a portrait of Paul by the acclaimed Austrian artist Robert Hofmann, a fellow Dunera internee. Hofmann, who was fifty-one when he arrived in Australia, was an artist of considerable reputation, winner of the 1922 Prix de Rome and one of Europe’s finest exponents of portraiture. Were the two men friends? Did Hofmann help Paul refine his touch and method?

The portrait, completed at Tatura in 1941 or 1942, shows a strikingly handsome young man, pensive and reticent. Hofmann captured a sense that the subject holds on to something not to be shared. His inscription on the portrait, though hard to decipher, appears to read: “Werde, was Du bist!” (“Become what you are!”) The portrait hung in Paul’s house throughout his postwar life. This artwork was for sharing, his own works were not. He kept his history close. •

Become What You Are: The Art of Dunera Boy Paul Mezulianik is showing at Tatura Museum until July. This article is an expanded and edited version of an essay in the exhibition catalogue. After the exhibition ends, the Mezulianik collection will be donated to the State Library of New South Wales.

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The second half of 1943 brought chaos to Italy, with the collapse of Mussolini’s fascist regime and then, in September, surrender to the Allies. Allied forces landed on the Italian mainland and began their slow advance northward, opposed by German soldiers sent to defend the peninsula. With the collapse of the Italian war effort and the state’s bureaucracy, the prison system that held Allied POWs faltered.

Some Allied prisoners simply walked away, unchecked by the Italians who once had guarded them. That was the easy part; the hard part was finding a way to freedom, which often involved picking a way past Italian fascists, aggrieved by developments in the war and looking for violence, and through the German forces that had flooded northern and central Italy to defend the Gustav Line. Many escapers made for the Alps and tried to cross into neutral Switzerland; others went south in the hope of locating Allied lines and finding sanctuary behind them.

As the book’s subtitle indicates, Kittel has a particular focus. She follows the prisoners of Campo 106 and their bids for freedom in the weeks and months after Italy’s surrender. Her father, Col Booth, was one of those who “shot through” from Campo 106, and her impulse to learn about her father’s war led her to more stories of Italian captivity and escape, and to significant civilian histories. Woven through the book are interesting portraits of Italian men and women who helped, and sometimes hindered, escaped POWs. Kittel has done well to find these stories, which illuminate aspects of Italian life under fascism and occupation. Careful and determined research informs the narrative.

The image of bumbling, comical Italian soldiers has dominated Australian perceptions of the war against Mussolini and life in Italian captivity. Early in the book Kittel writes of Australian soldiers who duped their Italian captors into believing they didn’t know how to use a shovel, prompting the credulous Italians to offer digging instruction. Surely this is a story that grew in the telling, a tale conforming to the stereotype of the larrikin Aussie soldier and the dopey, pliable “Ities” who served Mussolini. I mention the passage not because it’s typical, but because it sticks out from the narrative as wholly atypical. One of the best things about this book is that Kittel deftly avoids tired caricatures of Aussie diggers and incompetent Italian soldiers.

Given a choice, POWs would have chosen Italy over Changi or the Thai–Burma Railway or the Sandakan death marches, but it doesn’t follow that captivity in Italy was benign, as perception and written histories often have it. Colonel Vittorio Calcaterra, commandant of Campo 57 at Gruppignano and a committed fascist, was infamous among Australian prisoners for his brutality. He and his thugs inflicted cruel and degrading punishments on POWs, forcing sick men to stand on parade in sub-zero temperatures, and stripping, chaining, starving and beating other prisoners.

For all the physical suffering of POWs, captivity made deeper wounds on the mind. Kittel shows that the circumstances of imprisonment matter less than what prison represents: the theft of an individual’s freedom. The book thus prompts readers to consider a radical and important thought: did prisoners of Italy suffer the same level of mental torment as prisoners of Germany or even of Japan, the gold standard for measuring POW misery?

The question is implicit, for Kittel wisely avoids linking her story to the experiences of Australian POWs in the Asia-Pacific theatre. Much of the limited literature on Australian POWs in Italy is shaped by an unhelpful tendency to examine the Italian experience relative to events in Asia. Details of beatings at Changi reveal nothing about what men endured at Campo 57 or 106 or elsewhere in Italian POW camps.

Nor was the pursuit of freedom some sort of boys’ own adventure in bucolic Italy. Kittel’s subject matter came with risks, for it is the stuff of schoolyard daydreams, feats of derring-do hard to comprehend. But she succeeds in telling these stories without injecting a false note of romance, never trivialising escapes as exciting jaunts. Fear and death stalked the men all the way to Switzerland or Allied lines, and they often went without food and shelter. If they reached the Alps they then had to cross them, challenge enough in peacetime. In civilian clothes behind enemy lines they forfeited the protection of the Geneva Conventions; capture could mean being declared a spy and executed. Some Australian escapers in Italy were murdered by Italian fascist soldiers. The physical and mental burdens incurred in “shooting through” were as heavy and damaging as those imposed by captivity.

In the final two chapters, the best in the book, Kittel considers how the experience of captivity shaped the postwar lives of these POWs. She writes movingly about the pleasures and difficulties of returning home to families and communities who offered warm welcomes and love, but rarely understanding. I hope that in these two brief chapters is the kernel of a new book, a companion volume to Shooting Through.

In places Shooting Through is overwritten, the metaphors clunky. Some sentences seem to have been written around certain words and phrases, with language chosen for effect rather than to make sense of the story. Kittel’s habit of avoiding good, simple words for sexier alternatives can rankle: “diarised” or “scribed” instead of “wrote,” “trundled” instead of “drove,” “spearheaded” instead of “headed,” “toddled” instead of “walked.” Does anyone in a war zone “toddle”? Rather than lifting the story, this language intrudes, especially given the power of the raw material: these histories don’t need embellishment. There is a sprinkling of typos and misplaced apostrophes through the book, most in the last third of the manuscript. A sterner, more careful edit was needed.

But these are quibbles. Shooting Through helps us better understand the experiences of Australian soldiers imprisoned by Italy in the second world war, a significant but little discussed chapter in Australian military history. Kittel has done Col Booth and his mates proud. •

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The fight is about natural gas extraction in the Great Australian Bight. For several years, oil companies, including BP and Chevron, have signalled interest in drilling under the bight to confirm the existence of untold mineral riches. Equinor, a Norwegian oil and gas company, plans to begin exploratory drilling by 2021, pending final permission from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, or NOPSEMA, a statutory Commonwealth agency.

Equinor’s Stromlo-1 well would be about 370 kilometres offshore, in some of the roughest seas in the world. Its isolation would make an oil spill hard, perhaps impossible, to contain. According to Equinor’s own worst-case modelling, a spill could spread over thousands of kilometres, west to Perth and as far east as the coast of New South Wales. In this scenario, Tasmania would be surrounded by oil.

To my embarrassment, I knew none of this until a recent trip across the country. In early March, having decided to act on an idea we had long talked about, my wife and I set off in a campervan with our two boys, nearly three and nearly one. “A really big adventure,” our eldest called it. We drove 10,000 kilometres in five weeks, Perth and back.

We got to Adelaide quickly, skipping over country where we had spent time before, then slowed down. Rather than head directly west from Port Augusta, we decided to turn south and mosey our way around the Eyre Peninsula. We spent our first night on the peninsula in Cleve, a quiet, pretty town about forty kilometres inland, but otherwise we kept to the coast: Tumby Bay, Port Lincoln, Coffin Bay, Elliston, Streaky Bay, Smoky Bay. The ocean supports many people in these towns, through fishing, oyster farming and tourism. And beyond its economic value, locals know its beauty. People we met on beaches and jetties welcomed us to the “west” and its beautiful azure waters.

The South Australian Tourism Commission has designated the road around the Eyre Peninsula part of its Seafood Frontier. For a few days we lived well on seafood fresh from the Great Australian Bight: fish at Streaky Bay, oysters at Coffin Bay and Smoky Bay. Along the coast we saw and met hundreds of grey nomads, many of whom had timed their trip to the Eyre Peninsula to coincide with the whiting run. They came with caravans and tinnies, ready to set up camp and spend days on the water fishing. At Elliston the sea looked so alluring that we went for a dip. The water was memorably clear and crisp. We had the beach to ourselves.

Everywhere, as we travelled around the Eyre Peninsula, we were implored to Fight for the Bight — posters at the bakeries, newsagents and pubs, stickers plastered to car bumpers. Signs urged people to hop on a surfboard, paddleboard or kayak and paddle out to join protests. We got the sense that the campaign had galvanised communities around the Eyre Peninsula and made protesters from people who had never protested before. It was inspiring. And the fight has spread across Australia: “paddle outs” have been held in every state.

The bight nurtures a wondrous marine environment. The New York Times reports that it has been called “Australia’s answer to the Galápagos,” its ecological value comparable to the Great Barrier Reef. About 85 per cent of its species are found nowhere else. Governments in Canberra and Adelaide know this. The Great Australian Bight Marine Park, covering over 45,000 square kilometres, is protected by South Australian and Commonwealth legislation.

Equinor says it can drill safely, the stock pledge of oil companies. Scientists disagree. The noise and reverberations caused by drilling will disrupt the delicate balance on which species depend. An oil spill would confirm the ecological catastrophe.

From the Eyre Peninsula we made our way along the bight coast to Penong, a town of about 200 on the South Australian edge of the Nullarbor. If you’re heading west, it’s the last stop for food, petrol and supplies before you venture on to that mighty, majestic plain. For travellers and truckies moving in the other direction, Penong is a place to refresh. Not all remote Australian towns feel welcoming. Penong does. There is a caravan park, school, roadhouse, pub and general store. And a windmill museum. On a bare patch of ground between the caravan park and the back of the roadhouse stand windmills of different sizes and ages. Among them is the Comet, the biggest windmill ever made and used in Australia. The sight of the windmills is surprisingly striking, especially when framed by the rising or setting sun.

About twenty kilometres down a dirt road from Penong is Cactus Beach. Since the 1960s, surfers in the know have come to ride its left and right breaks, some of the cleanest and most consistent to be found in Australia, or anywhere. Great white sharks cruise these waters, but the waves are so pure that few serious surfers are deterred. They don’t travel all the way to Cactus not to get wet. The limited number of camp sites in the dunes behind the beach are filled by surfers who stay for days, weeks or months.

Phil “Shirl” Laws and his wife Sharon run the Penong General Store and Comet Cafe. Shirl says that half of the town’s business, theirs included, comes from surfers. He worries about drilling in the bight and the effect an oil spill would have on Penong and other towns on the coast. A recent survey by the Australia Institute found that about seventy per cent of South Australians don’t want drilling in the bight. Shirl is more definitive: he knows nobody who is in favour of it.

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association reckons that Equinor’s proposal might generate 1500 jobs over the next forty years. It isn’t much of a carrot given that the bight already supports many more people than that, and without the risks involved in drilling. Nor do bight locals want a vision of progress imposed on them by those who measure its value only in monetary terms. The locals we met want their bight left as they know it, beauty over money. “Big oil don’t surf” reads one campaign slogan. As Shirl and I were talking, two men, aged about twenty, came into the store for hamburgers. On their ute was a sticker: Fight for the Bight.

Liberal politician Rowan Ramsey is the federal member for Grey, which covers more than 92 per cent of South Australia: all of the state other than the densely populated southeast. In June 2017, in a statement expressing support for the plan to drill, he praised the record of Statoil (now Equinor) and said he looked forward to the company bringing its “skills” to the bight. Lately he has been more equivocal, noting that his interest is “jobs and people,” a version of the “jobs and growth” incantation that blinds politicians, and conservative politicians especially, to social and environmental concerns.

Shortly before the May federal election, the Ocean Elders, a group of eminent citizens from around the world, wrote an open letter to Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten imploring them to protect the bight. Shorten pledged that a Labor government would move quickly to investigate the likely effects of an oil spill. It was something, though hardly an iron commitment to fight.

The Coalition’s response was similarly underwhelming. Resources minister Matt Canavan declared that “a re-elected Liberal National government will commission an independent audit of NOPSEMA’s current consideration of exploration in the Great Australian Bight.” As the Guardian reported, the commitment was aimed at voters in the marginal, coastal electorates of Boothby in South Australia and Corangamite in Victoria, both of which would be affected by a major oil spill from the Stromlo-1 well. With the election gone, there is reason to doubt the Coalition government will keep its promise. In October last year, Canavan called for offshore oil exploration, including in the bight, to be made a “national priority.”

When we first dropped in at Sharon and Shirl’s store, on our way to Perth, a picture of a line of cliffs caught my eye. “That’s Bunda,” Shirl said, “two or three hours west of here.” For twenty-five years he had been a truckie: Melbourne–Perth–Melbourne. On his way across the Nullarbor he’d stop at Bunda, at the top of the bight, and look out to sea. Sometimes he’d see dolphins and sea lions frolicking in the water. Once a shark came through the swell. He told us where to pull off the Eyre Highway for the best views.

The next day we followed his directions and drove to a rest area 110 kilometres from the WA border. Five hundred metres or so off the highway is a dusty space to park, and from there a gravel walking path leads to the edge of the continent. I don’t remember seeing a sign on the highway to suggest a stop was worthwhile. If not for Shirl, we would have sped past.

The Bunda cliffs rise more than a hundred metres above the bight and stretch about 200 kilometres from western South Australia to the border with Western Australia. We were awestruck by their size and drama, and by the peace and space: in front of us the wild waters of the Southern Ocean and its many shades of blue, behind us a vast expanse of red dirt. To stand in what seemed like an endless wilderness was mesmerising. Part of the spectacle is that nothing tempers the landscape. The surging waters of the bight and the ancient limestone of the Nullarbor meet in brutal, beautiful contrast. We’ve travelled far and wide; no place has held us like Bunda.

NOPSEMA officials are set to rule on Equinor’s environmental plan by the end of May. Before making their decision, they should be made to stand on the Bunda cliffs. There’s magic there, says Shirl. “You feel different. Look to where the sea meets the horizon and you can see the curve of the Earth.” He knows no other place like it. •

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In most cases, their internment didn’t last the war. The British and Australian governments recognised the injustice of their situation, and the fact that they posed no threat, and from 1941 offered them paths out of internment. Those who stayed in Australia during the war were eventually given the option of permanent residency, and about 900 remained. In ways big and small, grand and humble, they helped build postwar Australian society.

In early September each year, members of the Dunera Association gather in the town of Hay in southwestern New South Wales to remember and celebrate the Dunera story. September is when the Dunera docked in Melbourne and then Sydney, and Hay is where most Dunera boys were first interned in Australia. Few are still alive – the youngest is ninety-two – and fewer still attend these occasions. At Hay in September 2015 there were two: Bernhard Rothschild and Werner Haarburger. Some people we met at the reunion were convinced Ken was a third. One conversation I heard went like this:

Questioner: “What are your feelings on returning to Hay, seventy years later?”

Ken: “I wasn’t on the Dunera. I’m an interested observer.”

Classic Ken: understated and modest.

Questioner: “Is it hard to return to where you were interned?”

Ken: “I wasn’t interned.”

After a pause, his questioner continued:

“Well, thank you for coming back. The presence of Dunera boys makes the weekend all the more special.”

I wanted to invent a backstory for Ken and run with it – turn Ken Inglis of Preston, Victoria, into Klaus Ingel of Potsdam, Germany – but he wouldn’t have it. Here is evidence of Ken’s commitment to truth and accuracy. What it says about me as a historian I’m not sure.

Though not one himself, Ken’s links to the Dunera boys are long and deep. His interest in their story spans seventy years, and now he is writing about them. Here I tell of some of their shared history, and offer my views on what Ken brings to the study of Dunera.

In 1947, Ken Inglis left home for the University of Melbourne. He had earned himself two scholarships: one subsidised a Bachelor of Arts, and the other covered meals and board at Queen’s College. For a callow seventeen-year-old from Preston in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Queen’s was a thrilling new world. Under Dr Raynor Johnson, master of the college since 1934, Queen’s had become the most diverse and international of the university’s colleges, a home to staff and students from beyond Melbourne and Methodism. At Northcote High and Melbourne High, Ken had been aware of students from overseas, but most of these reffos, to use the idiom of the day, lived and studied beyond his Anglo-Celtic social circle. Not so at Queen’s, which in the 1940s was home to three men from the Dunera: Leonhard Adam, George Duerrheim and George Nadel. European, and exotic for it, they represented a new and different kind of person for Ken.

Dr Leonhard Adam had arrived at Queen’s in 1942, his release from internment arranged by charitable organisations sympathetic to the plight of the Dunera internees. Fifty years old, he had served the Kaiser in the first world war, and had enjoyed a successful career as a legal scholar and judge in the Weimar Republic. In the years before the second world war he left the law for anthropology, building a reputation as an expert on primitive art, and it was in this capacity that he was employed at the university. Ken remembers him sitting erect and proud at high table, a dignified figure.

Duerrheim also sat at high table, and next to the master and other staff in the annual college photo, though he was a student. In these photos he looks forlorn and older than his age. He had come to the university and Queen’s in 1943, aged thirty-five. His place at Queen’s was tribute to Raynor Johnson’s worldly interests and religious pluralism. Duerrheim was a Roman Catholic, classified Jewish by the Nazis, living in a Methodist institution. He hoped to finish the medical degree he had very nearly completed in his native Vienna. The German annexation of Austria in 1938 and the adoption of Nazi race laws had led to his being barred from sitting his final exams. British-minded medical authorities in Victoria, the state with the most rigid rules on doctors’ qualifications, took little heed of these studies and his extensive practical experience, and insisted he join the Melbourne medicine course at second-year level: five more years of study to achieve what the Anschluss had denied him. Duerrheim died young, in 1965. He practised medicine for not much longer than he studied it.

Duerrheim and Adam were benign figures. George Nadel, born in Vienna in 1923, was dark and mysterious. Jim Morrissey, a Queen’s resident, called him “Old Black Daddy,” a nod to his shadowy ways. The archaeologist John Mulvaney, who knew Nadel as a fellow history student, thought him a “con man of some proportion.” Ken, choosing his words carefully, says Nadel was “wily,” “ruthless,” “ludicrous” and intellectually brilliant. Nadel achieved first-class honours in history in 1948, a golden year in a golden age for Melbourne history, then decamped to Harvard. He founded the scholarly journal History and Theory, published to this day; Isaiah Berlin and Raymond Aron were among its first contributors. Mulvaney had it that Nadel’s other great achievement was marrying a Rockefeller, but of this we’re yet to find corroborating evidence.

In 1947 Ken knew of Adam, Duerrheim and Nadel as Europeans and reffos, but not of their connection to the Dunera. As yet, the name of that ship meant little to him. It came to mean more in 1948, when Ken took Franz Philipp’s course in renaissance and reformation history.

Philipp was an art historian from Vienna who, after the journey on the Dunera, internment, and service in the Australian army, found a home in Max Crawford’s history department. He was quiet and gentle, an uncertain lecturer whose words, mumbled with a heavy accent, were hard to follow. Another characteristic was his eye for ability. He spotted Arthur Boyd – Philipp wrote the earliest scholarly review of the young artist’s work – and he spotted Ken. After reading Ken’s “mature and scholarly” essay on Machiavelli, Philipp suggested he consider an academic career. For the young man from Preston with a love of words and writing, it was an exhilarating prospect; one, Ken notes, he “hadn’t dared to entertain.” The man from the Dunera set Ken on his way to a career as a scholar.

Philipp was one of several scholars from the Dunera who found employment at the University of Melbourne. Some Ken encountered in the course of academic life or at parties, where they occasionally talked of the past and their journey from Europe. Ken listened, snatching words about Dunera here and there and learning more of their stories. Were these men typical of the Dunera internees, he wondered. The few he knew were all intellectuals. In politics were Hugo Wolfsohn, tutor, and the precocious Henry Mayer, student. Both were dynamic contributors to university life, and to Ken daunting and formidable figures. “Mayer and Wolfsohn were a fearsome pair,” he writes, “prowling the Arts building and the Union like bears hungry to feast on our dogmas and confusions, especially those deriving from Karl Marx.” Mayer especially was everywhere; a vocal member of undergraduate societies, author of firebrand articles for campus publications, and in 1949 editor, with Max Corden, of Melbourne University Magazine.

Kurt Baier and Peter Herbst were in philosophy. Ken took a unit of philosophy, for which Herbst was his tutor, and attended other lectures out of interest. Baier’s lectures were worth it. “High calibre” and “intellectually penetrating,” John Mulvaney called them. Gerd Buchdahl was another Dunera reffo in Ken’s circle. Ken heard him give a seminar paper to the history department on the evolution of scientific thought from Kepler and Galileo to Newton, and what it was that Newton knew that the others didn’t. “It was a superb piece of intellectual history,” Ken recalls. “Gerd had everything as a lecturer.” Buchdahl went on to found the study of history and philosophy of science at Melbourne and at Cambridge.

Ken has told of the personal and academic satisfaction he derived from his time at the University of Melbourne. The scholars from the Dunera didn’t make these years, but they added to them, giving him glimpses of worlds he hardly knew. Many had a sophistication he admired.

Dunera boys and their stories followed Ken beyond the University of Melbourne. In Oxford in 1954, he and his wife Judy welcomed Gerd and Nancy Buchdahl and Peter and Valerie Herbst to their flat. Judy had her own connections. She was close to Peter in particular, who had been teacher and colleague at Melbourne, where she had studied philosophy and achieved first class honours in 1950. Arguing a point about the Dunera, Buchdahl and Herbst, both of whom spoke perfect English and favoured high diction, resorted to name calling. “Nonsense, you stinkpot.” “Don’t talk to me like that, you shitbag.” More than sixty years later, Ken tells this story with relish. He remembers the scene as vividly as any from his time at Oxford. Two German refugees and Anglophiles, once interned in the Australian bush, mixing profanities and scholarly wisdom in his flat in Oxford. It’s a good story.

Herbst became professor of philosophy at the Australian National University, where Ken also taught, and their friendship continued. Other Dunera friends in Canberra included Fred Gruen, an economist and neighbour in the Coombs building at ANU, and Klaus Loewald, a historian who lived near Ken and his second wife, the writer Amirah Inglis, in O’Connor.

Loewald’s story is remarkable. Born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1920, he escaped the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 by staying on the move, resting at night on trains rather than at home. In London he worked in a factory job before his arrest and deportation to Australia. Released from internment in 1942, he served in the 8th Employment Company of the Australian army alongside other former Dunera internees. He returned to London in 1945 and emigrated to the United States the following year; there, he took American citizenship and built an academic career. In 1962 he left Berkeley for Saigon to teach American politics and history at the university and to serve as American cultural attaché. He resigned from the US diplomatic service in 1970 in protest against the Vietnam war and Nixon’s presidency, moved to Australia with his wife, and joined the history department of the University of New England. He died in 2004 without having travelled to Hay with Ken, a trip Loewald had suggested they make.

Historian and former diplomat Klaus Loewald (right), shown here with fellow Dunera internee Hans Marcus on the fiftieth anniversary of the vessel’s arrival. Rebecca Silk

Through these years Ken tried to interest his postgraduate students in writing about the Dunera, but never had any takers. Deep into retirement, he decided to tackle the job himself. He’d begun to sketch out a memoir when he reached the late 1940s and was distracted by Franz Philipp. Why write about his boring old self when he could write about Dunera, Ken thought. Classic Ken. He had no German, but he knew Dunera boys, and that scholars and film-makers hadn’t told all their story. And so he set sail on the bad ship Dunera, as he sometimes calls it. While I’m glad he did, I wish we could have had both histories: Ken on the Dunera and Ken on Ken.

Thus far, much of what I’ve said isn’t new: Ken has written about his encounters with Dunera boys, and told these stories better than I can. In the time left to me, I give my perspective on what Ken brings to the study of Dunera, and of his methods. I think this is worthwhile. I have the privilege, and it is a privilege, of watching Ken at work, and I reckon I’m one of relatively few to have enjoyed so close a view: Amirah obviously, Jan Brazier on Sacred Places, Jay Winter over the last few years on this project, and probably not too many others.

Dunera scholarship is surprisingly thin for such a rich subject. In 1963, Walter Koenig, a Jesuit priest and one of the oldest men deported on the Dunera, wrote an article for the Catholic journal Twentieth Century about his internment. Two years later Sol Encel wrote about the Dunera internees for the fortnightly magazine Nation, and in 1979 and 1983 Benzion Patkin and Cyril Pearl published histories. Both books have their strengths, while leaving much untold. Klaus Loewald, Ken’s friend in Canberra, contributed two articles to Dunera historiography. Paul Bartrop and Gabrielle Eisen compiled a fine resource book, and a few Dunera boys have penned memoirs, many self-published and some wonderful. Elisabeth Lebensaft and her colleagues have written excellent studies in German of Dunera boys. Leaving aside the articles Ken has published, that’s about the sum of dedicated Dunera scholarship.

Ken takes a broad view of the Dunera story, broader than Patkin and Pearl. He is interested in the lives of the Dunera boys before and after internment. What they did with their freedom is important: think of Klaus Loewald, for example. His dying wish, in 2004, was for a change of government in Australia and in the United States. How could such a telling statement be left out of any account of Loewald’s life?

The trouble with saying more is you need to know more. Ken’s Dunera archive, which includes archival documents, newspaper clippings, interview transcripts, handwritten notes and reams of email correspondence with Dunera boys and their families, fills six large filing cabinets. The first folders in the archive are arranged chronologically and then, if further subdivision is needed, thematically. The Dunera internees were held in camps at Hay and Orange in New South Wales, and Tatura in Victoria. Ken has files for these places, then files on “Camps general,” “Camps – artists and sculptors,” “Camp currency,” “Camp culture,” “Camp poems and songs,” “Camp publications,” “Camps – religion,” “Camps – sex,” “Camps – university exams,” and so on. Another file has information on the use of the term “Dunera boys.” Ever alert to language, Ken asks how and when it arose. Best thinking at the moment is that it emerged in the early 1980s when the film director Ben Lewin was planning his television mini-series about the Dunera.

The second part of the archive is devoted to files on individual Dunera boys. There are about 250 of these files. Some have a few sheets of paper, others half a tree – 2000 pages or more. When I learn something about a Dunera boy, I check the archive to see if Ken has the information already. Usually I find he does, and that he’s made notes on what this Dunera boy had in common with others, whom he was close to, the ways in which his story matters, and where mention of him might fit in the book. Ken’s always one or two steps ahead, but he never makes me feel that I’m one or two steps behind. That’s one reason why he’s a great scholar, and it has nothing to do with reading or writing. He takes people with him.

What then to do with this information? How to distil it into a logical and coherent piece of writing that tells us something we didn’t know? Because Ken’s work is easy to read, readers can assume that the words on the page came to him easily. Not always. Ken proceeds by asking questions, questions that haven’t been asked or answered. Here are three central to his work on Dunera:

What was it about the Dunera boys, and what about Australia, that made so many of them such high achievers in and beyond the academy, the arts and business?

In what ways has the story been mythologised by Dunera boys and others who make it a celebration of worldly success and too readily take the outstanding to be the norm?

Why do some Dunera boys reject comparisons between themselves and asylum seekers, between the Dunera and the Tampa?

Ken is wary of repeating received wisdom. When he was at the University of Melbourne in the 1940s, he wondered if the Dunera boys he knew represented the whole. No, he discovered. On the Dunera were men of different abilities, cultures and religions, a fact that runs counter to popular perception, such as it exists. Brilliant intellectuals were the exception rather than the norm, and a significant minority of the 2000 Dunera boys were not Jewish. Ken has a file on rogues, thugs and scoundrels among the Dunera boys.

The Dunera history we are writing will include biographical sketches of Dunera boys. Some of these Ken has completed. If he’s in contact with the man or his family, Ken sends what he has written for comment, and waits anxiously for reply. Such is his respect for the rules and practice of history, and for people, who are the focus of his work. He takes no liberties, even after a lifetime of good reviews and prizes for writing. And for the record, invariably the replies are positive. Last year Ken published an article about Henry Mayer, who enjoyed a long academic career at the University of Sydney after finishing his studies at Melbourne. He remained a formidable figure, the sort of multifarious and elusive character that biographers find hard to capture. Elaine Mayer, his widow, thought Ken’s piece superb.

The Dunera history will carry the Inglis hallmarks: clear and elegant prose, and sentences that prompt readers to wonder about things they haven’t wondered about before. In terms of the order in which Ken has written his books, the timing is good. To this project he brings all that he knows about the social and cultural history of war, the University of Melbourne, the politics and tenor of postwar Australian society, art and the visual image as historical source, and many other subjects that are part of the Dunera story. And the Dunera history will be the most personal of his books. As Jay has said many times, he and I can help, but the bulk of the story must come from Ken. This history started out as a memoir, after all.

Recently Ken was interviewed by an author interested in the Dunera. She asked what he hoped his Dunera history might achieve. “Fresh thinking” about similarities and differences between the Dunera boys and contemporary refugees and asylum seekers, he answered. A gentle and modest aim, and true to Ken. As he has done over many years, he will show Australians something of their society and invite them to dwell on what they see. •

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