Australian Journal of Politics and History: Volume 59, Number 4, 2013, pp.501-516.

We are Human Beings, and have a Past: The

Adjustment of Migrants and the Australian
Assimilation Policies of the 1950s
JOY DAMOUSI
The University of Melbourne
This article argues that the assimilation policy adopted by the Australian government during
the 1950s was based on a denial of a migrants past. The assumption that the migrant would
readily merge into Australian cultural life ignored the ways in which past stories and memories
shape the self. Through an analysis of the Good Neighbour Councils I explore the nature of
assimilation that was based on a neglect of collective war memories of immigrant groups. This
perspective is distinguished from that adopted by several theorists of the day such as W.D.
Borrie and Jean Martin whose studies were less crude and one-dimensional. The experiences of
Greek migrants are examined to consider how Greek war stories could not often find
expression or recognition in the assimilationist climate of the post-war period.

Whereas, in the past, we laughed at them, we now laugh with them.1

On the eve of the 1949 Australian federal election, the Australian Prime Minister, Ben
Chifley, addressed his parliamentary colleagues, thanking them for supporting the first
Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, in introducing his bold and ambitious
immigration programme. This endorsement was especially to be commended given that
he was aware that they
must have viewed with misgiving, and some with grave fear, the introduction to this country of
hundreds of thousands of people from other parts of the world whose customs and manner of
living have been different from those Australians have enjoyed.2

It was indeed with considerable misgiving and grave fear that migrants from
Europe were greeted in Australia during the 1940s and 1950s. Despite assurances that
the influx of migrants after the war would arrive from the British Isles or Northern
Europe, it was instead from Southern Europe that migrants came to Australia in
significant numbers.
In this article I draw attention to an aspect of post-war migration that makes this
group of immigrants unique, and seek to connect this to efforts by the governments of
the day to assimilate them into Australian society. This was the first wave of
immigrants who brought a specific type of past with them which was hitherto unknown
in Australia that is, a wartime experience. Immigrants included the official
Displaced Persons. But the point I wish to stress is that there were others who came
1

New Settlers League of Australian, Queensland Division, Third State Regional Conference 30th
October 1954, Good Neighbour Movement Regional Conferences 1954, AA445 (A445/1), National
Archives of Australia, Canberra (hereafter NAA).
2
Australian Worker, Sydney, 2 November 1949.
2013 The Author.
Australian Journal of Politics and History 2013 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and
Classics, School of Political Science and International Studies, The University of Queensland and
Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd.

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Joy Damousi

with traumatic and often brutal experience of war who were not refugees, but for whom
war and its aftermath was the decisive factor in their decision to migrate. The
experience of war formed a significant aspect of their ethnic identity and a fundamental
part of their personal history. At the time there was a profound gap in understanding
the complex experiences migrants brought to Australia and historians have not given
sufficient attention to these since. Historians, political scientists and sociologists alike
have usefully considered the ideological aspects of the assimilation policy but the
premise that it was based on the denial of an immigrants past is unexamined. To date
the suppression of individual and collective memory of that past has remained an
unexplored aspect of Australias assimilationist policy.3
Post-War Migration
It is well known that post-war influx of immigrants was unprecedented in Australias
history. The Curtin Labor government and the Chifley administration that followed it,
undertook an ambitious immigration policy to expand Australias population of seven
million. The increase of two per cent per annum that they aimed to achieve was
impossible without significant intake from overseas which initially privileged British
migration, but which was eventually filled with European migrants.4 The natural
population increase was one per cent; the other percent was to be made up with
immigration, which required 70,000 immigrants per year.5 Jock Collins observes that
this was a substantial increase in comparison to earlier periods: the average annual
immigration intake for the period 1901-1930 was a meagre 18,700, and for 1931-40
was 3,224.6 Between 1901 and 1940 most immigrants to Australia were British and
assisted, although there were a small number of migrants from Greece and Italy. The
1947 census revealed that just under one-tenth of Australians were born overseas (with
6,835,000 Australian-born, 744,000 overseas-born and an estimated 74,000 Indigenous
Australians). Of those from overseas, three-quarters came from Britain and Ireland.7
The post-war immigration policy dramatically changed the composition of
Australian society. The sudden and dramatic flow of migrants had to be justified to an
Australian public fearful of the invasion of aliens and foreigners.8 Calwell was
determined that arrivals of new migrants not challenge the principles of the White
Australia Policy (which attempted to entrench racial and cultural homogeneity in
Australia).9 Calwell thus emphasised attracting British migrants and the need to
maintain white racial homogeneity by focusing on British immigration. Despite his
3
See Stephen Castles, et al., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in
Australia (Sydney, 1988); Gwenda Tavan, Good Neighbours: Community Organisations, Migrant
Assimilation and Australian Society and Culture, 1950-61 in John Murphy and Judith Smart, eds,
Forgotten Fifties: Aspects of Australian Society and Culture in the 1950s, Australian Historical
Studies, No.109 (October 1997), pp.77-89; John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment
and Political Culture in Menzies Australia (Sydney, 2000); James Jupp, From White Australia to
Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration (Cambridge, 2002); Anna Haebich, Spinning the
Dream: Assimilation in Australia 1950-1970 (Perth, 2008).
4
Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p. 37.
5
Jock Collins, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australias Post-War Immigration (Sydney, 1988),
p.20.
6
Ibid., p.21.
7
Ibid., p.20.
8
See Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council, Australia Needs All These People: Migration
Facts (Sydney, 1958).
9
Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne, 2005), p.7.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

503

efforts, it was difficult to attract the numbers needed from one country: the 70,000
immigrants required were unlikely to come from Britain alone.10 When such numbers
were not forthcoming, the Australian government looked further afield to draw
migrants from Scandanavia, without much success. Finally, from 1947 to 1951, the
government admitted 12,000 Baltic refugees, followed by 180,000 more Displaced
Persons D.Ps or reffos as they were disparagingly called most of whom
came from Eastern Europe. In these years, net migration was 450,000, with British
migration making up under half of the intake: 50,000 arrived from Southern Europe,
34,000 from Northern Europe, and 7,000 from Asia.11 These dramatic new
circumstances gave way to a new lexicon. Calwell coined the term New Australian
to allay fears of difference and diversity while the term the Australian Way of Life
was used to stress cultural homogeneity and uniformity.12
This generation of immigrants is distinctive because of the sheer volume of their
numbers which ensured their historical legacy, and because of an unprecedented overrepresentation of migrants from Southern Europe. It is also unique because many
brought wartime experiences and memories with them. I wish to link an examination of
these under-explored wartime experiences to efforts to integrate the migrant in
Australia. A consideration of the past histories of the immigrant is significant because
it reveals that the cornerstone of post-war immigration policy the assimilationist
policy was based on a new identity which was to be built by relinquishing ones
personal past and ones history. In expecting that migrants would readily and
seamlessly adopt their new country, assimilationist policy effectively aimed to
construct a nation-building discourse by denying the life stories,13 the narratives and
the memories of migrants which are central to the creation and maintenance of an
identity and ones sense of self. This policy disavowed a multi-dimensional identity
one in which stories and identities from the past remained intact but which could be
integrated with new experiences. The assumption that the migrant would readily merge
with, or be subsumed in, Australian cultural life ignored the ways in which past
narratives, stories and memories fundamentally shape the self.14
In exploring these aspects of migration, I use the example of the experiences of one
of the largest groups to migrate to Australia during the interwar years: the Greeks.
Drawing on the framework of analysis that the self and identity are shaped through
individual stories and narratives, I consider some of the Greek war stories which
shaped Greek migrants but which could not find expression in the broader
assimilationist climate of the 1950s. Before I examine this aspect, I will examine how
assimilation was understood by three of its theorists W.B. Borrie, Alan Richardson,
and Jean Martin. In arguing for some cultural maintenance, their views should be
distinguished from that of the government of the day which was far more crude in its
application. Both approaches, however, did not adequately accommodate or
10

Ibid., p.22.
Ibid., p.23.
12
Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge, 1999), p.200; Richard White,
Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688-1980 (Sydney), p.160.
13
For discussion of nation-state discourse and transnational migration, see Nina Glick Schiller, Linda
Basch, Cristina Szanton Blanc, From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational
Migration, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 68, 1 (January 1995), p.51.
14
Brett Smith and Andrew C. Sparkes, Narrative Inquiry in Psychology: Exploring the Tensions
Within, Qualitative Research in Psychology, Vol. 3, 3 (2006), pp.169-192; Brett Smith, The State
of the Art in Narrative Inquiry, Narrative Inquiry, Vol. 17, 2, (2007), pp.391-398.
11

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Joy Damousi

acknowledge the centrality of past histories of immigrants in assimilationist

programmes.
Understanding Assimilation: Borrie, Richardson, Martin
W.D. Borrie was one of the key theorists to explore issues of assimilation. Borrie was
largely responsible for developing and consolidating university demography and
migrant studies in Australia. After teaching for several years at the University of
Sydney, he joined the Australian National University in 1948. In 1949 he was
appointed a Research Fellow in Demography and became the founder and head of the
Department of Demography in 1952. An active advisor to governments regarding
population policy, he provided advice during the war to the Department of Post-War
Reconstruction. From 1965 to 1974 he was a member of the Commonwealth
Governments immigration Planning Council. Throughout his distinguished career,
Borrie expanded the discipline of demography, strengthened its institutional and
international presence, and trained generations of demographers. Among his key
contributions were analysing migration trends and developing policies regarding
migration.15
Writing in 1953, Borrie understood assimilation as
a process of immigrants and the local population merging together. This does not [] necessarily
mean that the two groups must be entirely alike, but rather that there should not exist between
them differences which will prevent immigrants from participating in the economic, social and
cultural life of their country of adoption on a basis of equality [] Perhaps assimilation can most
simply be considered in terms of the Australian environment as a process of resulting in the
gradual narrowing down of the differences between migrant and native groups.16

Borrie recognised that the post-war migrants were a different type of migrant in having
experienced war. However, he did not draw out any significance of this in the context
of assimilation. Rather, he argued that New Australians and Displaced Persons had
little choice but to accept what was offered to them:
For these people migration offered the one hope which remained to them to recapture a reasonable
degree of economic security and personal freedom. Uprooted by the war, they could not return to
their own country and had little option but to accept the hospitality of one of the countries which
opened their doors to them through the International Refugee Organisation.17

Borrie understood assimilation as a two way process; yet it was made clear that
migrants were to change to suit what was referred to at the time as the Australian way
of life. While Borrie identified cultural persistence as a strength: the aspiration that
the Australian way of life be ultimately adopted was an ideal. He was especially
interested in the process of assimilation and saw it as complicated and complex. In his
view, pre-war experiences and attachments hindered assimilation and warned that
migrants could limit the success of the assimilation programme if they continued to
look back on former bonds
with an intense loyalty towards their countries of origin as they knew these in pre-war days. So
long as they are under Government contract there is little opportunity for them to band together,
15

See Jennifer J. Rowland, Gavin W. Jones, Daphne Broers-Freeman, eds, The Founding of
Australian Demography: A Tribute to W.D. Borrie (Canberra, 1993); Stuart Macintyre, The Poor
Relation: A History of Social Sciences in Australia (Melbourne, 2010), pp.46-7, 75-6.
16
W.D. Borrie, New and Old Australians in W.V. Aughterson, ed., Taking Stock: Aspects of MidCentury Life in Australia (Melbourne, 1953), p.174.
17
Ibid., p.182.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

505

but now that thousands of them are settling in capital cities and towns in Australia there will be a
tendency for them to revive some element of their national life and culture.18

In his pioneering studies, Borrie did not identify these attachments as necessarily a
negative development it would be an important stabilizing factor amongst many of
these people during the first decade or so of their life in Australia but he could
forsee that assimilation would not be immediate.19
Assimilation would indeed occur over a period of time and with a sustained and
conscious effort.20 The family and the first-born generation were to be the conduit of
assimilation and the future of assimilation lay with the immigrants children.21
Although many of the New Australian adults now in our midst may not become fully assimilated,
and although with the best will in the world [] they will retain characteristics of language,
thought and custom which will render it difficult for them to feel that they are fully integrated
members of our society participating on a basis of complete equality, past experience suggest that
22
their children will not feel this way.

It was the children who can

form the best link in the merging process between Old and New Australians [] But while it is
important for old Australians to be prepared to learn as well as to teach, it is equally important for
the New Australians to be tolerant of the national and regional peculiarities of Old Australians.
They must understand our complicated political organization, our industrial and legal institutions,
23
and so on.

Borrie believed the process would work over generations, a view which modifies the
immediate expectations voiced by government. But he did stress the need for
assimilation to happen. Equally, Australians needed to be reassured that they would not
be swamped culturally by non-British populations. Writing in 1958, he noted the
absence of friction between immigrant and non-immigrant which had probably more
to do with full employment and the segregation of Old and New Australians rather
than a more open view of migrants, although there had been a more liberalizing attitude
towards the foreigner.24
Assimilation was also considered at the time in psychological and sociological
terms. The leading psychological theorist of assimilation was the psychologist, Ronald
Taft, who explored various forms of assimilation to deal with the social problem of the
absorption of non-British emigrants entering Australia.25 Drawing on Tafts
understanding of notions of acculturation in 1961, Alan Richardson addressed the
issue of assimilation in his study of British immigrants in a Western Australian
community. Richardson believed it was impossible in a complete sense to become an
18

Ibid., p.183.
Ibid.
20
Ibid., p.182.
21
Ibid., p.184
22
Ibid., p.185.
23
Ibid., p.186.
24
Professor W.D. Borrie, The Peopling of Australia, George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture,
University of Sydney, 8 October 1958 in W.D. Borrie Papers, Box 3, National Library of Australia,
MS 9498.
25
Ronald Taft, The Shared Frame of Reference Concept Allies to Assimilation of Immigrants,
Human Relations, Vol. 6, 1 (February 1953), pp.45-55; idem, The Assimilation Orientation of
Immigrants and Australians, Human Relations, Vol. 16, 3 (August 1963), pp.279-293. See also,
idem, From Stranger to Citizen: A Survey of Studies of Immigrant Assimilation in Western Australia,
(Perth, 1966).
19

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Joy Damousi

Australian; the question became not how does a Briton become an Australian, but
what changes in the Australian direction occur in a Britons personality as a result of
his efforts to make an adjustment within Australia. Richardson considered ways in
which a new national identification would develop whereby the migrant would
internalize on a large scale some of the knowledge, the attitudes and action patterns of
his host society. It was through satisfaction of material and social needs, acculturation
of the acquisition and adoption of the knowledge, beliefs and behaviour patterns of
the host society and identification, that assimilation could take place.26 How did the
old and the new sit together? Richardson noted that while there were instances where
the old and the new could co-exist without conflict in some matters it may be
impossible to adopt the new way without at the same time giving up the old.27 There is
no question that both Richardson and Borrie were significantly less ethnocentric in
their understanding of assimilation than government policy at the time, as they had an
acute awareness of factors of cultural exclusion.
In a similar vein, one of the most perceptive theorists and commentators on the
migration policy at this time was the sociologist Jean Martin. Her path to this theme
was not demography but sociology and anthropology which provided different avenues
of analysis to both Borrie and Richardson. Born in Melbourne in 1923, she was
educated at the University of Sydney where she studied under the renowned
anthropologist, A.P. Elkin, and attained her Bachelor and Masters degrees in 1943 and
1945 respectively. She moved disciplines from anthropology to sociology and travelled
to the London School of Economics and the University of Chicago to study in the field.
In 1951, she took up a position as a research assistant at the Australian National
University (ANU) where she worked for Borrie. She completed her PhD in 1954 at the
ANU. Martin became foundation professor of sociology at LaTrobe in 1965, but
resigned in 1974 due to ill health. She then accepted a senior research fellowship at the
ANU where she remained until her untimely death in 1979.28
Martins study of assimilation related to Displaced Persons a different group to
those discussed in this article. But her pertinent observations are nonetheless relevant
to this discussion. She looked for diversity and complexity in her theorisation about the
assimilation process. For Martin, different groups followed different patterns of
assimilation. Even a superficial glance she wrote, suggests how the several migrant
types followed different sequences. Some learnt English quickly, read newspapers and
followed public events, while others took years to become even minimally
acculturated and longer still to make Australian friends; their identification with
Australia has developed slowly and unobtrusively alongside other changes.29 Such
examples, she noted, pointed to how the different migrant types might be found to
pass through different phases as they adapt themselves to a new country.30 She looked
for nuance in theorising between binaries and extremes of success and failure.
26

Alan Richardson, The Assimilation of British Immigrants in a Western Australian Community: A

Psychological Study, REMP Bulletin, Volume 9, 1/2 (January/June 1961), p.6.
27
Ibid., p.21.
28
Katy Richmond, Jean Martin: A Tribute, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, Vol.
15, 3 (November 1979), pp.2-5; Katy Richmond, Martin, Jean Isobel (19231979), Australian
Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University
<http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/martin-jean-isobel-11071/text19707>, accessed 5 October 2012.
29
Jean I. Martin, Refugee Settlers: A Study of Displaced Persons in Australia (Canberra, 1964),
pp.99-100.
30
Ibid., p.100.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

507

Martin argued that the process of assimilation is not necessarily even or

progressive. More typically, she observed, in her study of Displaced Persons, a
number had hopefully made contact with Australian churches, clubs, societies, only to
withdraw when the experience proved disappointing; failure to establish firm
friendships with congenial Australians tended to make middle status people consolidate
their relationships with fellow-countrymen or simply retreat into their shells. Martin
began with the premise that assimilation could happen and should happen, but she
accounted for shifts and changes with less of a simplistic trajectory.31 Martins
contribution to this field is enduring and her works continue to be relevant to studies of
this period as they continue to resonate with importance, insight and complexity.32.
In official government literature, assimilation was understood more crudely, as a
process which involved migrants overtly negating their past. Speaking at The New
Settlers League of New South Wales in 1951, J.T. Massey, the Commonwealth CoOrdinator of Voluntary Assimilation Activities, observed how the task was divided into
two: in educating the Australian and the New Australian, but the mission was clear:
Australians may realise the value of migrants as a whole yet our specific job is with
the migrant as an individual person and in his difficulties in becoming one of us.33 In
doing so, it was also a patriotic enterprise and humanitarian because it was one
thing to bring out large numbers of people and quite another to ensure that they become
a satisfying part of the Australian community. The aim was to do what we can for
each person who comes to this country, regardless of his forefathers or his possessions
and to assimilate everyone of them into our midst satisfactorily to ourselves and
them.34 It was not only a matter of becoming Australians however, as there were
other adjustments to be made which Massey outlined:
For ourselves Australians must, by mixing, provide migrants with opportunities for a normal
development of selfhood in our society so that they may gradually feel that they belong. They
need self-expression, recognition, vocational adaption and creative work. Nobody can become
somebody without other bodies and by doing socially helpful action in co-operation with others. It
is not easy to secure social adjustment from unfamiliar elements represented by many New
Australians [] They, like Australians, will need self discipline to avoid social evils and
maladjustments. They will, we hope, contribute moral integrity and spiritual and cultural values as
well as to the economic prosperity of Australia.35

If assimilation did not work, the fault lay with the migrant. In government literature,
Australians were characterized as happy-go-lucky, accepting and affable, as a warm
and welcoming people.
Australians are hospitable, affable, and ready to make friends. They are generous, sport-loving,
and fond of conviviality. But because most Australians will make sport their first choice as a topic

31

Ibid., p.100.
Martins works include Refugee Settlers (1965); Migrant Presence (1978); Community and Identity
(1972); and co-author of Education of Migrant Children (1976).
33
Good Neighbour Councils and New Settlers League, p.2, Minutes of the Conference of
Representatives, Office of The New Settlers League of New South Wales, 140 Elizabeth Street,
Sydney, April 20th and 21st 1951, Good Neighbour Councils and New Settlers League, Series number
J25, Control Symbol 1950/7601, NAA.
34
Ibid., p.3.
35
Ibid., p.4.
32

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Joy Damousi

of conversation, that is not to say they have no other interests. Most of them are keenly interested
in politics and they have a sound grasp of essentials.36

Australia was also presented to prospective immigrants as a land of freedom. In a

pamphlet to newcomers in 1947, the essential characteristic of the Australian nation
was that it was free.37
These ideological understandings of assimilation were framed within Jennifer
Rutherfords formulation of the investment in the image of Australia as a good
neighbour and good nation, which masks an intense aggression towards the Other.38
This investment in an image of Australia as a good nation is a theme that runs
throughout the immigration story one of benevolence but also of aggression,
which is premised on a denial of the experience of trauma, dispossession and
alienation. The fantasy of Australia as a good and neighbourly nation, argues
Rutherford, is one that frames a disparate set of cultural practices, discourses and
historical epochs. Its underbelly is
the Australian legacy: dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the White Australia
policy, the assimilation policies of the twentieth century, a pronounced antipathy towards and
intolerance of the feminine, and a continued cultural policing of traits that [] carry the stain of
difference.39

The stain of difference was dramatically illustrated in efforts to erase individual

migrant memories. No allowances were permitted for the emotional and traumatic
legacy of migration in denying individual memories of immigrants and their past
histories which in many cases incorporated experiences of grief and trauma. The
writings of Borrie, Martin and Richardson allow for more cultural maintenance than
did government policy. Borrie, too, tempered government aspirations by asserting that
it would take a generation at least for assimilation to occur. But assimilation was
nonetheless premised on shedding the skin of the migrant where their past history
could not be incorporated within a national history, with their own traumatic
experiences pushed aside in the formation of their new identities. It was through the
Good Neighbour Councils (GNC) that the denial of the immigrants past with the aim
of assimilation was most clearly articulated.
Good Neighbour Councils
Good Neighbourhood Councils (GNC) were established in local communities in 1950
to facilitate the aims of the assimilation policy. In a short time the Good Neighbour
programme developed an organizational structure, which involved church and
voluntary organizations through which local branches were formed and co-ordinated at
the state level.40 As commentators have noted since, the Good Neighbour programme
was inadequate in providing for newly arrived immigrants, largely because there was
little provision for non-English speakers most of the material produced catered for
36

Pamphlet for European Migrants of Various Nationalities, Pamphlet for European Migrants of
Various Nationalities (Second Draft 24/10/47) Immigration Preliminary assimilation pamphlet for
alien migrants awaiting embarkation to Australia, Series number CP 815/1, Series Accession Number
CP 815/1/1, NAA.
37
Ibid.
38
Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy
(Melbourne, 2000), p.12.
39
Ibid., p.12-13.
40
See Tavan, Good Neighbours, pp.77-89.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

509

British migrants. New Australians were treated as an homogenous, undifferentiated

group.
The Good Neighbour programme expanded into a nation-wide organisation with
300 branches and 10,000 volunteer members.41 It combined government and civic
membership and activity and attracted local members of the community. J.T. Massey
described the activities of the GNC as humanitarian. In the context of the post-war era,
he argued, it could be characterised as such:
The Governments bring the migrant here, and it is our special job to see that everything possible is
done to assist him to be happily and worthily settled. We are concerned with individual people,
people like ourselves who have likes and dislikes, eat, and live and hate. They need goodwill and
friendship [] They need help in a humanitarian way, they are not asking for money, but need
something more valuable and much more difficult to give in its real form, and this is friendship,
Good Neighbourliness. They are asking that they shall have the opportunity to be one of us, and
the Good Neighbour movement is helping them to belong.

On arrival in Australia, migrants were expected to construct a future without a past. It

was only the future that would shape them as citizens. To deny them the legitimacy of
their memories was, however, to inhibit the integration process.
A lack of understanding of the background of immigrants was occasionally
identified as a gap in the knowledge of Australians. At the Good Neighbour Council of
South Australia state conference in 1954 (where the theme of hostility was explored)
this view was expressed:
Another cause of hostility is said to be lack of information which Australians have of the
background of New Australians. Between the two there is a big ground for suspicion, fear and
hostility. That ignorance of the background causes other kinds of hostility, because there are still
people who have a feeling of enmity against those whom they were fighting during the War. They
42
have longer memories than are desirable and their feelings of bitterness have not died down.

Even so, the Councils believed there was little reason for any of the existing bodies to
make an effort to understand the background and experience which migrants brought to
Australia.
When assimilation did not occur, or migrants seemed indifferent, the Councils found
it difficult to understand why they would not respond to their programmes. This is not
to say that there was no effort by GNCs or government officials to reflect on broader
issues, but this did not inform actions or a wider interpretation of how to approach the
whole question of adjustment of the newly arrived immigrant. The aim was simply to
assimilate to the Australian way of life and teach migrants how to do so. This involved
institutions addressing various aspects of assisting migrants to adopt the new. When the
Good Neighbour Committee was formed in Goulburn in August 1950, the
representative from the Department of Immigration, Mr. E. Armstrong, suggested that
Churches could take care of the spiritual lives of their particular faiths; the Country
Womens Association can invite mothers and families to take part in their activities,
and the Boy Scouts could take care of younger members problems.43
The focus remained on future efforts whereby the past that immigrants brought with
them was seen as a hindrance rather than a guide to understanding their adjustment.
41

Haebich, Spinning the Dream, p.179.

The Good Neighbour Council of South Australia, Second State Conference, Friday 22nd and
Saturday 23rd October 1954, University of Adelaide, in ibid.
43
Goulburn Tackles A Big Problem: Committee Is Formed to Help New Australians, Goulburn
Evening Post, 7 August 1950, in Series Number A437 (A437/1), Control Symbol 1950/6/363, Good
Neighbour Committee, Goulburn, NAA.
42

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Joy Damousi

At the first state conference in Adelaide in 1953, the discussion turned to this theme of
the adjustment of the migrant. The session was termed The Psychological Demands
of Adjustment in a New Society. Lennart Kaupmees, the Estonian doctor who actively
engaged in issues of citizenship and migration, categorised psychological adjustment
into three phases firstly, the phase of expectation; secondly, the phase of frustration
and disappointment; and finally, the phase of adjustment.44 These phases came with
particular characteristics and expectations. In phase 1, The average European arrives
in Australia with great hopes. He [sic] hopes to find here a new home, political and
economical security. This phase is characterized as having a very pleasant time.
Everything is totally different from Europe, and the migrant hopes to see everything he
read or was told about Australia in Europe. The phase usually ends with sending to
the permanent work place. The second phase was the phase of frustration and
disappointment. Kaupmees noted that he knew a few migrants who will always stay
in this phase, and unless a Good Neighbour really helps them, they have a permanent
phase of disappointment and frustration. The Good Neighbour had a role to play in
this context in assisting the migrant to avoid disappointment and frustration.45
But the solution seemed to be persistence rather than recognition of the strains of
migration, and the role of past histories in this process of adjustment. In these
discussions, the onus continued to lie on the migrant to quickly move on. The reason
for unhappiness among almost all sections of migrants during their first stage of
adjustment had its roots in nostalgia for a once happy life, remembering relatives left
behind under terrible terror and economical misery, and forgetting that fear and the
tyranny of war years has now ended.46 As we shall see such memories are not easily
forgotten nor shed.
As Borrie himself wrote when the assimilation policy was first developed, there was
not much attention given to how it worked, or how it was going to be applied. In 1955
he reflected that the official approach is [] essentially practical: the object is rather
to assist immigrants to adapt themselves than to study the process itself.47 On this
theme, Kajica Milanov argued in the Australian Quarterly that, while he had nothing
but praise for the aims and intentions of the Good Neighbour Leagues, its activities
were limited to social functions and so were too frivolous, superficial and unrealistic.
He argued that efforts at assimilation where there was only superficial exchange
hindered rather than enhanced any effort to integrate migrants. On the one hand
Australians got the impression that European migrants are quaint and charming people
wearing funny costumes, singing exotic songs and performing their national dances;
the migrants, on the other hand, get the false impression that Australians are childish
people who are intrigued by their old-fashioned costumes, songs and dances long
forgotten in their own countries in Europe. Such superficial and false impressions
limited the success of assimilation. Tellingly, his suggestion was that first, old and new

44

Adelaide Advertiser, 17 July 1953, p.4, 7 January 1953, p.7; Our Home (Sydney), 26 November
1953, p.3.
45
The Good Neighbour Council of South Australia, First State Conference, 30th, 31st October 1953,
Adelaide, Regional Conferences of New Settlers Leagues and Good Neighbours Councils 1953,
Series number A445, NAA.
46
Ibid.
47
W.D. Borrie, Population Studies and Policy in Australia, UNESCO: International Social Science
Bulletin, Vol. VII, 2 (1955), p.217.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

511

Australians should acquire a better understanding of themselves and a thorough

knowledge of each other.48
By the mid- to late-1960s, assimilationist policies were being questioned and
challenged. In 1966, Dan Adler and Ronald Taft observed that the problems of
assimilation were still fresh and communications between immigrant and host are
still halting and unstructured.49 Adler noted in the late 1950s that the signs of
adaptation to the host culture were considered superficial and Australians resented
what they took to be the reluctance of the immigrant to alter his alien ways.50 In the
same year James Jupp argued forcibly that the policy was a failure. In Arrivals and
Departures he wrote that it had outlived its usefulness, observing that socially the
Good Neighbour Councils were finding it almost impossible to deal with anyone but
the British.51
The effort of migrants to adjust has been the subject of much scholarship since the
era of assimilation policy. Beverley Raphael has argued that there is a need to appraise
differences and incorporate valued, safe and personally significant elements of the past,
while progressively taking in those components of the new that are acceptable to
gradually become familiar and known to oneself or ones community. Migrants who
are newly arrived, grieve for their past communities, lives, relationships, but also
integrate the new. When this does not happen, they may be isolated in an idealized,
unreal and unchanging past. But when host communities are also locked into nostalgic
longings of an idealized past the way we were and the way things used to be they
could struggle to embrace new people to a community. The grieving process is
important, but equally important is the hope and joy of the new, enthusiasm for life and
hope for the future.52 Adjustments are far more complex, layered and enduring than
suggested by the discussions undertaken during the 1950s.
Ethnic Identities
It is the notion of an ethnic identity without a past and only a future that I now turn to
consider in the context of one of the largest groups to migrate after the Second World
War the Greeks. In the years that followed the Second World War and the Greek
Civil War (1946-1949), many Greeks looked beyond a ravaged Europe to rebuild their
lives. Mass migration took place to the US and Canada, but it was Australia that
attracted significant numbers of Greek immigrants. The immigration policy
implemented after the Second World War allowed large numbers of assisted and nonassisted Greek immigrants to migrate to Australia. The massive post-war influx of
Greek immigrants was one of the largest in Australias history to that time. In the
period from 1947 to 1972, a total of 214,304 Greek immigrants arrived in Australia.53
A concerted effort to attract workers because of labour shortages after the war, and
the relative distance from war-torn Europe, made Australia an appealing and attractive
48

Kajica Milanov, Towards the Assimilation of New Australians, Australian Quarterly, Vol.23, 2
(June 1951), p.76.
49
Dan L. Adler and Ronald Taft, Some Psychological Aspects of Immigrant Assimilation in Alan
Stoller, ed., New Faces: Immigration and Family life in Australia (Melbourne, 1966), p.76.
50
Ibid., p.85.
51
James Jupp, Arrivals and Departures (Melbourne, 1966), p.149.
52
Beverley Raphael, The Longing in Our Hearts: Mental Health Issues for New and Emerging
Communities, Australian Mosaic, Issue 11, 3 (2005), pp.25-28.
53
Nicholas Doumanis, The Greeks in Australia in Richard Clogg, The Greek Diaspora in the
Twentieth Century, (New York, 1999), pp.58-70. Yiannis Dimitreas, Transplanting the Agora:
Hellenic Settlement in Australia (Sydney, 1998), p.158.

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Joy Damousi

destination given the devastation that the war left behind. Many of those who migrated
to Australia directly, and indirectly, experienced war. But historical studies of war
experience in Australia have not fully explored the presence of war stories, narratives,
and experiences in the new host country. Studies of communities in Australia who have
endured war have largely considered this theme through the experiences of returned
Australian soldiers. There is now a large body of literature that has considered soldiers
who have returned from war and the impact this has had on their families and the
reception by society of their condition. The role of memory has been a key element in
this research. Yet in the literature on how war is remembered, historians have not been
attracted to immigrant memories of war.
The Greek Civil war received wide coverage from the Australian media. Eyewitness
accounts of its early beginnings were published.54 Newspapers reported the atrocities,
executions and violence of war in Greece.55 The discussions conducted at the United
Nations regarding the war were also extensively reported, and H.V. Evatts efforts to
mediate the dispute in his role as President of the Assembly were noted.56 In the wake
of a natural disaster in Greece 1953, the Prime Minister Robert Menzies was moved to
describe what he considered to be the close and friendly connection between the two
countries. Menzies spoke of how beyond the British Commonwealth
no nation [] have Australians closer ties of sentiment and friendship than with the Greeks. Those
ties were formed in the dark days of 1941, when Greeks and Australians together re-created in
defeat the military glories of Thermopylae, Corinth, and Argos []. Hundreds of Australian
soldiers owe their lives or their liberty to the help of Greeks of all classes [].

According to Menzies, these bonds were strengthened in peace, with the arrival of
Greeks to make their homes in Australia.57 While Australian media covered the Civil
War and its aftermath, the connections between these experiences and the wave of
Greek immigration in the 1950s may not have been made by many Australians who
came in contact with the community. Consistent with the assimilationist policies of the
day, and despite the form of public support Menzies offered, the expectation was that
Greek immigrants who may have experienced this war would excise it from their
memories and their identities and adjust to a new life in Australia.
I briefly describe the experiences of some Greek immigrants below and the stories
which continued to be a part of their Greek identity in their adopted country. These
memories have remained largely within the families of those who experienced these
events. I suggest that the assimilationist policy effectively alienated migrants from their
adopted country. During the period of its implementation, the assimilation policy as we
have seen, posited being Australian as the ideal as a superior identity and as the
preferred one to be adopted. In doing so, it also set a climate that did not allow for a
public expression of grief or loss of a previous experience, or emotional response to the
challenges of migration by the migrants themselves. While assimilation policy looked
to the future, it did so with little appreciation or understanding of the traumatic pasts of
those it was seeking to assimilate. In 1978 Jean Martin observed perceptively that the
claim that migrants were assimilable could be sustained because of the limited and
54

Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February 1945, p.2, 9 December 1944, p.3. See also, 23 September
1946, p.5.
55
Canberra Times, 20 June 1945, p.3; Sydney Morning Herald, 5 October 1946, p.1; Argus, 20 June
1947, p.5.
56
Sydney Morning Herald, 29 November 1948, p.3.
57
Ibid., 15 August 1953, p.2

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

513

superficial communication between migrants and Australians and the fragmented

knowledge of migrants experience.58 In an inflection of this argument, John Rickard
aptly comments that Australia had decided that it wanted immigration, but it did not
particularly want immigrants.59 Migrants were expected to disperse and integrate
within the community, and become invisible.60 In this process, their past memories
and experiences were also rendered invisible.
Memories of War
Gabriel Katsamas discusses his experience during the war. He arrived in Australia in
1956. While this migration provided him with many opportunities not otherwise
available to him in Greece, a lingering loss of place remained with him. He reflects
how he
experienced some discrimination from racists, but by hard work I did very well, far better than I
could have done in Greece, but I lost the most valuable thing people have, their own country. For
my children there is no nostalgia. They were born in Australia and they are Australians, but I
cannot forget my homeland. I feel it at night time. Despite my better economic conditions in
Melbourne my heart remains in my village on Ithaca. It is almost deserted now. Only a few people
live there any more.61

At the age of eighteen he fought the Germans during the Second World War. In
October 1947 he was conscripted into the Greek Army but refused to sign the
declaration. As a result, he was sent immediately to the concentration camp on
Makronissons Island, just south of the Attica Peninsula. It was run on the same
principles as the German concentration camps for the people in charge were Nazis.
They had been trained by the Germans. They had Nazi ideas. He experienced extreme
torture in this camp and describes one form of torture:
Every night, at different and unexpected times say, ten oclock, midnight, two a.m. a team
of six to ten police would come around with an order. They would take a prisoner from a different
tent each time and beat him unconscious. You never knew if it were going to be your tent tonight.
So you lost sleep worrying about it. They made you nervous. So you would sign to save yourself
from this fear [] Most of the 20,000 prisoners there were well educated people: lawyers, doctors
[] After their experience there many men went mad or committed suicide.62

The story of Vangelis Ioannou of war offers a similar testimony. Growing up in

Kastoria, he joined the resistance during the Second World War. He tells of how his
uncle was killed, and how the trials of war, with its concomitant violence, atrocities
and trauma, took place. In describing the ways in which the German Army entered into
the Northern part of Greece, a violent history is told:
To stop us getting any help from the villages they behaved like monsters. They burned every
house and barn in the villages, they killed every able-bodied man [] They were especially
vicious where Partisans shot any of their motor-cyclists who used to go alone as scouts in advance
of the army.

These are memories of events that occurred many years ago, and memories are
certainly highly embellished, constructed and mediated. Notwithstanding the nature of
58

Martin, The Migrant Presence, p.28.

John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History (Melbourne, 1988), p.223.
60
Ibid., p.225.
61
Allan and Wendy Scarfe, eds, All that Grief: Migrant Recollections of Greek Resistance to Fascism
1941-1949 (Sydney, 1994), p.138.
62
Ibid., pp.141-142.
59

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Joy Damousi

these memories many of which describe bearing witness to trauma they remain
central to their identity as Greeks in Australia, and this experience continues to define
their individual and family histories.63
Leonidas Petropoulos was the eldest of five children who had grown up during the
1930s under the right-wing dictator, Ioannis Metaxas. His political views were formed
as a teenager: By the time I reached adolescence my experiences of the repressive
government had formed my political attitudes for me. He became a member of the
Greek Communist Party and actively fought the Germans and witnessed brutal
violence and cruelty. He recalls one experience:
I remember 25 March 1942, the first Greek National Day to be celebrated under the German
occupation. I with thousands of other Athenians flocked to Constitution Square for the celebration
before the tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside Parliament House [] The crowd kneeled and
said prayers and sang hymns and patriotic songs. The Nazis moved in and shot hundreds. There
was never a political demonstration without hundreds dying.

He also witnessed the tragic famine in Greece during the Second World War one of
the most lethal in occupied Europe. As the collaborationist government was
incompetent and the occupation authorities were unwilling to supply the starving
population with food, a deadly famine broke out. In the winter of 1941-1942 thousands
of people died of starvation or hunger-related diseases, literally in the streets of cities,
especially Athens and Piraeus. Petropoulos remembers how [e]verywhere you went in
Athens you could see well-nourished Germans and you could see Greek people
collapsing and dying of hunger on the footpath.64
Many who lived in Athens at this time recall this period as robbing them of a
childhood: they couldnt play because they were too hungry; they couldnt attend
school because of their starvation and they had their education severely
interrupted.65 The famine was concentrated in Athens where food was not reaching the
capital, but in the rural parts of Greece where the villagers were self-sufficient there
was no starvation, although there was severe food deprivation. Bearing witness to
victims of famine is another theme of those who migrated from Greece during the postwar period. In times of deprivation, class distinctions were erased as those from the
city fled in search of food. Another immigrant to Australia during the 1950s, recalls
how desperate Athenians travelled to the rural areas for food:
I remember some people who came from around Athens who came to our village. They went into
(our) gardens. They saw the cabbage [] and went wild [at the sight of cabbages]. We had
cabbage (as food) for pigs! Ah they have cabbage here (they said). I thought why are they

63

For recent discussion of memory, trauma and identity, see Maja Zehfuss, Remembering to
Forget/Forgetting to Remember in Duncan Bell, ed., Memory, Trauma and World Politics:
Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (London, 2006), pp.213-230; Amaryll
Perlesz, Complex Responses to Trauma: Challenges in Bearing Witness, Australian and New
Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, Vol. 20, 1 (1999), pp.11-19; Ron Eyerman et al., Narrating
Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (Boulder, CO, 2011); Richard J. McNally,
Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, 2003). In the Australian context, Robert Reynolds, Activist
Emotions: Gay Radicalism and Melancholic Attachments, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 41, 3
(2010), pp.286-301; Robert Reynolds, Trauma and The Relational Dynamics of Life-History
Interviewing, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 43, 1 (2012), pp.78-88.
64
Ibid., p.111.
65
Interview with Jim, 30 March 2009, in possession of the author.

We are Human Beings, and Have a Past

515

responding like that to cabbage [] I was surprised because they were coming from Athens (we
assumed they would be sophisticated) but they went wild for the cabbage.66

The humiliation of hunger and starvation is conveyed in this story, as the sophistication
of Athenians was lost as they were reduced to the level of animals in sharing the food
that was reserved for animal consumption. Another interviewee recalled how when
someone died and the council took him to bury him, theyd say: his coupon Where
is his coupon?. Theyd take it from you. Many, however, in order to hold on to the
coupon, when their child or their husband or their mother died, theyd take them and
theyd throw them into some ravine, and elsewhere, so as to hold onto the coupons to
get food, to get bread [].67 The desperation to flee such circumstances was the
reason why many migrated to Australia when the civil war finally ended in 1949. This
connection between the famine as well as food deprivation endures in the collective
memory, but is also one that needs to be explored further in migration histories.
Theodoros Spidiropolous, who arrived in Australia in 1954, reflects how each of
those who fought the resistance against the Germans can all write a story because so
much happened to each one and everything happened in so short a period. When the
Germans invaded Greece in 1941, he was sixteen, in the fourth year of primary school.
He joined the resistance when he was seventeen and in the fifth year at the high school
in Katerini where he was born. His relatives and family members were also involved in
the brutal warfare against the Germans and then in the Civil War. After a visit in March
1954 from an Australian migrant recruiting group, he decided to migrate to Australia.
For him, his past experiences and this history are a fundamental part of his Greek
identity in Australia. The need to pass these stories to his children is essential and
important:
It is very wrong not to speak the truth to our children. We should not be forced to hide our
experiences. We were so terribly victimized. And the Greek newspapers kept up such lies about
us. A number of Greeks who have migrated here were so victimized that they taught their children
to have nothing to do with politics. This upsets me greatly, because I believe everything in life
depends on politics.68

The war stories of John Papas reflect further the devastating experience of many Greek
immigrants after the war and the ways in which this memory has been subsumed in
family history. Born in 1936 in Kallithea, his father, who was in the EAM [the
National Liberation Front] was brutally killed. As a young teenager, at the age of
twelve or thirteen, he would deliver food to the partisans, and came very close to being
executed himself.
We used to load the mules with maybe manure or something like that, and in that manure, in the
sacks of manure that wed put on the side, my mother used to wrap the loaves of bread and other
food, put it in there, and I took it to them, and also some other messages. Now, if I was caught by
the right-wing forces that were roaming everywhere at the time, there was no court for me, just
execution straight away [] But we were doing it, we were all happy to do that because we were
fighting a right cause we believed in. At the end, about 1949, my father was killed the Good
Thursday, thats that Thursday before Easter, 1949. About four months before that, they put me up
to execute me, to shoot me. And they fired a machine-gun at me, and the man that was supposed to
kill me, I presume, this is my estimation, that he never killed a man before and he was trembling,
so he didnt have a good aim and he missed me. But I felt the bullets going through my ears here.

66

Interview with Helen, 30 March 2009, in possession of the author.

Interview with Michael, 30 March 2009.
68
Scarfe, eds, All that Grief, p.103.
67

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Joy Damousi

These stories remain embedded within family history, but Australian society did not
accommodate them as part of the migrants story.
Papas arrived in Australia in the mid-1950s at the age of nineteen to reconstruct a
life away from this violence, but the memories are important for him to retain, and to
keep this interpretation of history alive in Australia. One way in which this experience
was transposed to Australia was through a continued connection to and interest in
politics:
I think its the duty of every human being to be interested in politics, because politics control our
lives. If we are not interested in politics, that means that we are not interested about our lives,
about our kids lives, about everybodys lives. Politics is everything.69

The experience of violence and deprivation in war is a major theme amongst many of
the Greek immigrants who arrived in Australia during the post-war period. Successful
migration during the assimilationist period was premised on an effort to negate and
repress such memories, or to confine them to family memory, rather than to integrate
them within broader understandings of the immigrants past.
Conclusion
To repress past experiences, memories and narratives, as the assimilationist policy
aimed to do, was to negate a key aspect of the migrants identity and self. While some
theorists attempted to argue for a more nuanced theory of assimilation, the
governments insistence on merging into becoming Australian was premised on a
denial of migrants past; individual and collective memories were seen as problematic
and a hindrance to the stated government policy of making the migrant invisible and
culturally Australian. Moreover, taking into account the war stories such as those of
the Greek community illuminates a more complex and complicated migrants story that
was rendered invisible in the immediate post-war period and one that continues to
struggle to find a place in the national narrative.

69

Interview with John, 11 February 2010, in possession of the author.