The Australian Displaced Persons Scheme

Origins and purpose

Australia looked first to the United Kingdom for migrants after the war, offering assisted passages to British ex-servicemen and then to the British public. There were not enough people willing to come and not enough ships to carry them. In 1947 the Australian Government reached agreement with the International Refugee Organisation to take in some of the people displaced by the war and living in refugee camps, principally in Germany.1

Arthur Calwell, the first Minister for Immigration, sold the programme at home on grounds of security and labour rather than charity. He argued that without a much larger population Australia could not hold the continent, and he described the displaced he had seen in German refugee camps as an ideal source of migrants who would help meet Australian labour shortages. The condition he attached was explicit: they had to serve what became two-year contracts in industries and occupations vital to the development of Australia, and they could not expect to pick and choose their jobs.1

The agreement with the International Refugee Organisation was signed on 21 July 1947. Under it Australia undertook to settle 12,000 displaced persons each year, with provision to increase the number, from the camps in Germany, Austria and France.58

How it worked in practice

Selection happened in Europe. Australia saw itself as competing for the best of the displaced persons, and recruited first the young and, in official language, easily assimilable people from the Baltic countries. The search for good quality workers widened to include Poles, Ukrainians, Slovenians, Hungarians and White Russians, then Bulgarians, Romanians and Albanians, and by the end of 1949 it embraced all European groups the IRO deemed eligible. The pool of employable young men and women was exhausted quickly: displaced families became acceptable from mid-1948, widows, deserted wives and unmarried mothers with children in early 1949, and men without wives but with young children later that year.1

People in the camps understood that they were being assessed as workers rather than as refugees, and prepared accordingly. Applicants remembered hardening their hands to look fit for labouring and describing themselves as domestics rather than teachers. Selection officers judged whole family units, including whether a grandmother could care for a child while a mother worked.1

The first contingent, 839 young men and women from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, reached the newly opened Bonegilla Reception and Training Centre in north-east Victoria in December 1947. The ship that carried them, the United States Army transport General Stuart Heintzelman, had left Bremerhaven on 30 October 1947 with 843 Baltic displaced persons and reached Fremantle on 28 November; it was the first of nearly 150 voyages by some forty ships. The National Heritage List assessment of Bonegilla records that the passengers were accommodated at the Graylands and Swanbourne hostels in Western Australia, then continued on the Kanimbla to Melbourne and by train to Bonegilla, and that Graylands, not Bonegilla, had been the first migrant camp for displaced persons. A Ukrainian scholarly account notes that this first group was presented to the Australian public as the Beautiful Balts, young Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians described as close to the Scandinavian peoples and carefully selected with a view to a favourable public reception. Passengers were shipped in bulk, often in former troop ships.1458

Reception centres provided the general medical examination and X-ray of migrants, the issue of clothing, payment of social service benefits, interviews to determine employment potential, and instruction in English and in Australian life. Bonegilla processed more than half of all the displaced persons who arrived before 1953. As the ships multiplied, an additional reception centre opened at Bathurst in New South Wales, on the former army camp site at Kelso, and temporary reception centres opened at Greta in New South Wales and at Northam and Cunderdin in Western Australia. Bathurst ran from 1948 until April 1952, with eleven residential blocks holding just over 6,000 people in unlined iron sheds, wooden barracks and tents; most residents stayed a few weeks or at most a few months.13

Placement was the point of the whole apparatus. Bonegilla was expanded to hold 7,700 people, with 1,600 more in tents if required, a teleprinter was installed to speed the dispatch of workers, and up to forty employment officers processed as many as 100 people a day during parts of 1950. Because employment and family accommodation rarely lay in the same place, twenty holding centres were opened in other former service establishments in country districts to take dependants. From Bathurst, workers and dependants were directed to northern New South Wales; from Bonegilla to southern New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and South Australia.1

The Ukrainian experience within the scheme

Ukrainians made up 8.5 per cent of the displaced persons Australia received, on the breakdown published in the Bonegilla history from Egon Kunz's study, behind Poles at 37.1 per cent, Yugoslavs at 13.8 per cent and Latvians at 11.4 per cent. The National Heritage List assessment of Bonegilla likewise names Ukrainians among the main groups of the 170,700 people brought out under the IRO scheme, alongside Poles, Yugoslavs, Latvians, Hungarians, Lithuanians, Czechs and Estonians. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine gives a different measure for a slightly different population: about 21,500 Ukrainians emigrating to Australia in 1948 to 1951. The two figures are not interchangeable, since one is a share of the IRO-assisted intake and the other a count of Ukrainian emigration to Australia over four named years.128

The scheme separated Ukrainian households as a matter of routine. Michal and Vera B, who arrived in 1949, remembered the bus taking the men away to work while the women cried because they did not know where the men were going. Orion Wenhrynowucz, who arrived in 1948, was sent to Ivanhoe while his wife went to the Royal Melbourne Hospital as a domestic. Nikolaus H, 1949, was sent to a glass manufacturer in Melbourne while his wife Maria and their daughter Elisabeth went in the opposite direction to Cowra. Anton Sziller, 1949, went to Adelaide and his wife Lea to Cowra. A separated breadwinner paid for his own accommodation near his work and contributed up to three pounds a week towards his family's keep in a holding centre.1

Where Ukrainians ended up was also patterned. A study of the settlement of former displaced persons found Poles and Ukrainians in country areas, while Czechs, Greeks and Hungarians preferred the cities and Germans and Yugoslavs went to industrial centres. The camps in the meantime became places of Ukrainian institutional life: choirs, schools, worship and exhibitions took shape at Bonegilla, Bathurst and Greta Migrant Camp while the two-year contracts ran.1

Ukrainian institutional life took root beyond the camps as the contracts ran their course. In Adelaide the Ukrainian Orthodox community worshipped in an Anglican church in 1950 and erected its own small church of Saint Michael at Thebarton in the same year.7

What happened afterwards

Completing the contract changed a person's position. The Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine records that immigrants who had served their two years automatically received the right of permanent residency and the right to choose their work, and became eligible for Australian citizenship after five years. Married women were released from their contracts earlier if their husbands could find work and independent accommodation, which was the administration's chief remedy for family separation.12

The scheme wound down as the camps in Europe emptied. By 1951 only 177,000 people remained in European refugee camps, mostly the aged and infirm, and the last refugees officially recognised as displaced persons reached Australia by early 1952. Former enemy nationals had never been within the IRO mandate, and Australia brought them in instead under nation-to-nation agreements from 1951.1

Family reunion continued after the scheme proper closed. In 1955 the Department of Immigration implemented Operation Reunion, intended to assist family members overseas to migrate to Australia to be reunited with family already living there; a Ukrainian scholarly account states that 30,000 people migrated under it from countries including Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.5

The selection machinery left a personal dossier for every person it moved. The National Archives of Australia holds 170,700 personal dossiers of displaced persons who emigrated to Australia between 1947 and 1953, inscribed on the Australian Memory of the World Register, whose listing describes the collection as documenting a major shift in Australia's immigration priorities, which before the Second World War had favoured migration from Anglo-Celtic sources.6