Australians: Flappers to Vietnam

by Thomas Keneally

  Stephanie Stajkoff came from an ethnic German family in Silesia, a province then in eastern Germany that at various times before the war had belonged to Poland. When the Red Army invaded Silesia and began taking frightful vengeance against the Germans, ‘we had to leave everything and just run’. In Germany, they lived in one room. ‘It was tough in the beginning, but maybe it was a good schooling for us: when we came to Australia and found we had to start from nothing it wasn’t quite as hard, because we’d been living on the black market for a few years, exchanging a linen tablecloth maybe for two pounds of butter . . . even our German people weren’t very nice to us . . . My mother never wanted me to go [to Australia]. She said, “You’ll be the coolie for the people there.” I wouldn’t believe her—you see all Germany was in ruins—what future did we have? When you’re young and you see a whole country in shreds . . .’

  They waited in Bremen for a ship to Australia with two other families, in one living room with blankets as partitions.

  Once in Australia, her father, Wassil Stajkoff, served some time instead in a butter and then a tiling factory. He was then given a job as a draughtsman in the Snowy Mountain scheme instead. Within eight months he was approved as a member of the Institution of Engineers and was upgraded to Engineer Grade One.

  Miroslav Svelha recalls that escaped Czechs like himself were subjected to rigorous questioning by the Americans to see if they were actually Communists intending to infiltrate Western countries. Other refugees who worked on the Snowy also observed that the political screening in the West was aimed more at protecting Australia from Communists than at detaining Fascists. Hans Fisher and Otto Blank were two of the plant operators selected by Roy Robinson without reference to their having been enemy soldiers. Fisher was, however, a social democrat, and that was on record since the Nazis had stopped him leaving Germany. Two other former German soldiers were carpenters Heinz Jeromin and Karl Paul. All were from East Germany and had fought in the war, although Blank, Fisher and Paul were still only teenagers when it ended, whereas Jeromin was twenty-eight. He was pleased the madness had ended.

  ‘The Snowy sounded funny to us,’ said Jeromin, ‘because in Australia we expected sun.’ He had lost his father, mother and brothers in the war and didn’t care where he went as long as it was away from the disaster of Germany.

  The scale of devastation in Italy too was prodigious. Pino Frezza, who was from the south of Rome, wrote, ‘Italy was in a state of panic, not work, and there was a lot of damage after the war, so it was hard to find a job.’ Although Ireland had remained neutral during the war, the late 1940s and early 1950s brought a severe economic depression. Malta, meanwhile, was still a place of rubble when Paul Gresh and his three brothers left for Australia in 1949 to become diamond drillers on the Snowy. Greece was also a ruin; Michael Vgengopoulos had a brother in Australia who sponsored his passage and got him a job in the tunnels of the Snowy.

  On the SS Skaubryn from Bremerhaven in May 1951, there were twelve hundred people. Their composition was characteristic of the ships bringing migrants and displaced persons to Australia: 302 Germans, 274 Yugoslavs, 186 Polish, 103 Russians, seventy-four Latvians, seventy-three Hungarians, fifty-six Czechs, eighteen Lithuanians, fourteen Estonians, fourteen Ukrainians, twelve Romanians, nine Bulgarians, nine Spanish, eight Polish/Ukrainian, five Austrian and ten described as ‘stateless’, and others. On ships to Australia and in the refugee centres, the Australian film The Overlanders, starring Chips Rafferty, Australia’s John Wayne, was shown. One wonders what the migrants from Europe made of it—the immense spaces over which cattle were moved to save them from the grasp of the Japanese.

  The tradesmen going to work on the Snowy were required to repay their passage—about £160—out of their earnings of ten pounds per week. Some immigrants resented the fact that they had to put up with the same food and conditions as the displaced persons, who were travelling for free. The migrants, so recently famished during and in the wake of war, were still appalled by the food, the lamb chops floating in fat. On one boat, the Germans actually went on strike for better conditions.

  The displaced persons and the migrants arrived at the holding camps of Bathurst, Bonegilla and Greta—though the German recruits for the Snowy were bussed straight off to Cooma. Jim Jones of Glasgow, already at work, noticed the German carpenters when they arrived. ‘They’d black corduroy suits, wide at the bottom and with three little Mother of Pearl buttons down the front and a bloody Homburg hat on with it. It was amazing—a little bit of Germany right there in the Snowy Mountains.’

  There seemed to be a pattern in the Snowy scheme by which particular nationalities took certain jobs. Australians tended not to work underground, while the Irish were prominent as plant operators and construction workers. Electric power transmission—the connection of power from pole to pole across precipices—was done by the Italians, that is, after the Italians began to arrive in the early to mid 1950s. Bob Ampt, an electrical engineer who worked on the Snowy from 1949, remembers that the Italians and Spanish had a great feel for the work, and possessed great balance as they walked—without any apparent panic or vertigo—across a six-inch (fifteen-centimetre) steel rod on an electrical tower. Italians also tended to predominate in any form of masonry work, and worked in the tunnels, while Poles, Ukrainians and people from the Baltic states tended to work on the surface. The Germans were skilled craftsmen, and the Yugoslavs took jobs as miners and semi-skilled tradesmen or else worked in the bush in the investigation division. Hydrography, which necessitated long hours of skiing in winter, attracted many Czechs.

  Ulick O’Boyle, an Irishman, wrote, ‘Living in the [work] camps—I loved it, because you met people from all over Europe—German counts and ex-SS men, one Italian commander who’d been fighting in the 8th Army in North Africa, Poles, Yugoslavs—all kinds of fascinating bloody characters.’

  Australian Albury Hosking had been a POW of the Japanese and despite his sufferings had become interested in the scale of some projects and gave up the law degree he’d been studying towards before the war to become an engineer. ‘The Snowy was just starting then—it was the biggest thing in Australia and I thought “I’ll be in that!”’

  And Ivan Kobal spoke for many migrants when he said, ‘War was destructive and the [military] camps were without sense . . . as soon as we saw a project like the Snowy, we started to live.’ He wrote a poem:

  On the world’s map a dish of barren sand,

  Yet full of life, sun-soaked, birds’ paradise.

  Ena Berents, a Vladivostok-born doctor, was the physician in Cabramurra township, which was constructed to house workers on the scheme. She had come to Australia via Shanghai. She had studied medicine in the United States, specialising in pathology, returned to Shanghai and married a Norwegian. After the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949, the Berents went first to Oslo, where they heard about the Snowy, and came out to Australia with ten pounds in their pockets.

  There were others who served the project in indirect ways. Bill Holmes, a detective based in Cooma for most of the Snowy’s construction years, would meet the Sydney train every day, and as unsavoury candidates got off he would screen them, rightly or wrongly, and put some of them on the return train. His colleague Bev Wales said that every warrant issued in Sydney for ‘wife starving’ (lack of maintenance payments) seemed to arrive in Cooma with ‘believed to have gone to the Snowy’ stamped across it and wife starvers were a particular concern of Holmes, and he tried to track them down.

  Many newly engaged young men went ‘down the Snowy’ for six months or a year to build up a deposit for a house. So did students raising money for university. But ‘old’ Australians consisted of only about a third of the overall workforce, and so the Australian workers experienced what it was to be a minority. Yet they set the tone; as a young journalist named George Johnston would say, the newcomers were accepted by the Australians if they were willing to try to honour Australian mores, including standing their shout like
a man.

  Roy Robinson, the Snowy scheme recruiter, had hired a German engineer called Walter Hartwig, who became his interpreter and advisor as he moved from Berlin to Hamburg and Hanover to gather the core of skilled tradesmen and professionals to supplement those at home in Australia. ‘The Australian military mission in Berlin arranged with the German authorities to place ads in the press and on radio. We must have seen nearly 3000 people who’d already been sifted in some way before they came to us.’

  The Allies had already supposedly checked the background of all the displaced persons.Robinson had to ensure he didn’t recruit‘ any one who had Nazi sympathies or had been part of the Nazi side of politics’. This was easier said than done. But the Allied military had captured nearly all the dossiers on citizens in Germany and so the names were submitted to the joint military occupiers, the Americans and British, to get a clearance. There were a few, he admitted, who turned out to be not of the kind he would have recruited if he’d known their true backgrounds. ‘I believe the international authorities whom these people had helped rewarded them by giving them good clearances so we’d take them to Australia.’ Robinson estimates that a maximum of ten or twelve such people may have got through the screening process. Two men were later deported.

  Pat O’Dea, who headed the security force on the Snowy, remembers of one immigrant that when he had a few drinks, ‘he would openly come out with photographs he’d taken during the war of people that he’d executed himself. These were Russian soldiers . . . but farmers and peasants were also amongst them, and he stood there amongst the bodies.’ The man eventually ‘disappeared’. O’Dea also recalls one instance when it was formally alleged that a Snowy worker was a war criminal; though the allegation was never confirmed, that man also disappeared.

  Ultimately the failed Hungarian uprising against the Soviets in 1956 brought a new wave of refugees to Sydney and the Snowy. A sixteen-year-old apprentice, Frank Gyorgy, walked from Budapest to the Austrian border, as did many others, dodging Russian patrols and depending on the local people to guide them around the minefields and the check points. An interesting motive mentioned by a number of immigrants was also expressed by Gyorgy: ‘I chose Australia because I knew least about it at the time.’ If they had heard little about a nation, it meant that it must be safe, boring even.

  To the long-established Australians in whose suburbs and towns these displaced persons appeared, there was no interest in the story of their extraordinary escapes. It was their strangeness that occupied and outraged the locals. Stephanie Stajkoff said that some Australians tended to think every German was a Nazi, but noticed that antipathy towards Germans died out in two to three years.

  A number of the displaced persons were doctors on the Snowy, but as one of them was dispiritingly told, ‘It will take you ten years and £10,000 to become a doctor in this country,’ the man so addressed, a Latvian physician Jonathan Baksa with a German medical degree, managed to pass that test, and in less than ten years. After first labouring the required two years for the government, he repeated three years of study at Sydney University, working night shifts in a factory to pay for it.

  The death rate from the scheme would prove significant. The cost from loneliness and suicide was high, and the scheme’s economic and environmental costs would ultimately be argued to have outweighed its benefits. The irrigation it enhanced would greatly damage the Murrumbidgee and Murray river systems. But at the time it was praised as a supreme national engineering accomplishment. And ever since, the Snowy scheme has been seen as the cockpit in which Australia became multicultural.

  More than a hundred thousand men and women from thirty countries worked on the scheme. The scheme’s Bill Hudson declared, ‘You’ll be neither Slavs nor Balts but men of the Snowy.’ ‘You’re Australians now!’ cried a peacemaking overseer to former World War II enemies, Polish and German, brawling in a pub.

  A documentary, Strangers in a Strange Land, shown on British television in September 1961, took a less sentimental and more disapproving look at the scheme. The Snowy River Authority’s London representative was offended by the depiction of Cooma as a wild town overrun by ‘boozing, gambling, sex-starved continentals’ who received high wages for their work and were crazed, in a sparse environment, by a lack of choice to spend them on. They could not depend on the established Australians for company. Nearly every one of the new arrivals interviewed said that the Australians were not friendly to them. They swore therefore that they would never become naturalised Australians (though in fact many thousands did).

  There were, however, notable gestures towards assimilation. In Cooma in 1959 the Avenue of Flags was erected to celebrate the nations working together on the scheme, and German ex-soldiers were invited to participate in the annual Anzac Day march. And immigration officials and others used the Snowy as a model for how immigrants should behave: look at the rapid assimilation into Australian society of the migrants who worked on the scheme, follow their example, and you too, the new migrant, can also expect to be accepted at work and on the street.

  WHEN CHINA GOES RED

  After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the Chinese people in the West were considered not only yellow, but also Red. Reaction against Chinese Americans was very intense as the United States revived the Trading with the Enemy Act from World War II treating Chinese Americans in ways similar (if not so extreme) as those in which the Japanese had been treated during the war. Surveillance and repression of the Chinese in Australia was not as severe, for only a few thousand Chinese lived in Australia, mainly in the Sydney and Melbourne Chinatowns, or in isolated country towns. But the Japanese invasion of China and the subsequent Pacific War had galvanised the small community.

  The Chinese Youth League (CYL) and the Chinese Seamen’s Union (CSU) in Australia were two late 1930s radical organisations designed to struggle against Japanese militarism. They did not believe in the Nationalist Chinese societies of the dominant merchant class in Chinatown. Many Chinese workers were drawn to the cause of more radical Chinese nationalism. Before the Pacific War, the radical organisations had formed links with the Australian Communists, and undermined the authority and patronage of the pro-Nationalist or Kuomintang merchant class. The CYL supplied truckloads of fresh fruit and vegetables to striking Port Kembla wharf labourers and their families during the 1938 pig-iron dispute. Like the wharfies, they believed that the scrap iron loaded on the cargo steamer Dalfram would be converted into bullets and bombs to advance the Japanese invasion of China.

  The CSU now fought for better wages and working conditions for Chinese crew members on merchant vessels in Australian waters and in Pacific war zones. They also organised work gangs to help build the Warragamba Dam and grow vegetables on Sydney’s western outskirts, and worked in the construction of amphibious landing craft for the US army at the Bulimba dry dock near Brisbane.

  At the end of the Pacific War, many Chinese from the Pacific islands, New Guinea, the Netherlands East Indies and British Malaya who had taken refuge in Sydney from the Japanese were repatriated by the Chifley government. Stranded Chinese mariners chose either to return to China and fight with the Red revolutionary forces against the nationalists or to remain working in Sydney. In 1949, many Chinese sailors who refused to leave Australia were imprisoned and later transported by the Chifley government to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Chinatown became a haven for radical Chinese workers and displaced Chinese families who wanted to go on living in Australia.

  In 1946, the Indonesian independence movement called upon the Australian labour movement for support, and Chinese and Indonesian seamen walked off Dutch-chartered ships in Sydney and Brisbane ports. The Australian Maritime Union, opposing Holland’s effort to regain colonial control of Indonesia, declared the Dutch ships ‘black’; that is, the Australian wharfies refused to load their cargoes. When Dutch officials ejected sixty Indonesian patients from Holland’s Turramurra TB Clinic in Sydney, the CYL and the
CSU gave them food, shelter and companionship from their Dixon Street offices. The refusal by Indonesian and Chinese seamen to man the Dutch ships inspired Indian seamen to join the boycott. But throughout the boycott the Chifley government arrested and deported a number of militant Chinese, Indonesian and Malayan seamen.

  The Australian government, after the debilitating coal strike, was frightened of anti-Communist reaction in Australia, so it did not recognise the new Chinese government. On the Haymarket streets early on the Double Tenth (the new national day of Communist China), 10 October 1949, a number of Chinese assembled below a makeshift flag of the new China to proclaim its birth, and then travelled to the Royal National Park south of Sydney to celebrate the day with a picnic.

  But now, with the intensification of the Cold War as a result of Communism’s capture of China, Chinese radicals in Australia became increasingly isolated as the Kuomintang merchants of Sydney and Melbourne turned against them. Louis Wong, former CSU secretary, feared that if he became too active he would be deported as an undesirable alien. The Cold War paradox was that ASIO gave sanctuary to former European Nazis and Fascist collaborators amidst the mass migration of Europeans to Australia in the first decade of the Cold War, but Chinese radicals were denied Australian residency and threatened with deportation. ASIO recruited Chinese informants to spy on ‘Chinese politicals’. In 1950, when the CYL and the CSU founded the San Lian Club, which screened films from the new China and conducted Mandarin and Cantonese language classes, influential Chinese merchants appealed to the government to get these organisations evicted from their rented rooms.