QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

Internment (II)

As the world tumbled into its first truly ‘world war’ – first in Europe in 1939, then across the Pacific two years later – there were differences in the treatment of German Queenslanders compared to a quarter-century before, as a range of writers explains. Voigt (1983) reiterates the climate between the Boer War and the outbreak of WWI: “The first anti-German incidents occurred during the Boer War. In the years that followed there was a distinct cooling-off in the attitude of the Australian press and several politicians [to] German-Australians. As far as German immigrants were concerned … whilst anxious to maintain ties with the old country, [they] were nevertheless fully accepted members of Australian society: they were citizens of the Australian community and subjects of the British King – to whom they had sworn loyalty on being naturalized. “Before the outbreak of World War 1 severed many of the links … there was scarcely a doubt about the German immigrants’ loyalty. Their individual and collective contributions to the country’s development were constantly and openly acknowledged. They were not even disputed during the wars, even if they were ‘suppressed’ by propaganda. Names such as … Leichhardt and Ferdinand von Müller and others, with outstanding scientific achievements to their credit, could not, even at those times when propaganda and agitation poisoned relations between the two countries, be erased from the Australian map and the history of the Fifth Continent.” Despite this concession to such achievements, in a later article (Voigt and Rehs, 1985) there came the telling assertion that “the hitherto serene self confidence of the German-Australians received in World War I a blow from which it was never to recover completely.” Governor Sir Walter Campbell qc, addressing a conference (Jurgensen & Corkhill, 1988), noted that: “Unfortunately the rise in anti German feeling which was associated with the outbreak of World War I in 1914 led to the removal of German from the curriculum in the schools and as a subject for study at the University. Also during that time the several German newspapers published in this country were forced to cease circulation, and any copies found in the community were destroyed. The signs of the German way of life and of culture were also forced underground.“ History repeated itself when Australia’s National Security Act 1939–40 reintroduced internment for the duration of WWII. The Enoggera internment and prisoner of war (POW) camp was re-established in early 1940. After 1942 the camp was enlarged to a capacity of 1,800 people in five separate compounds of between 300 and 500 people each.

Those interned included family groups with children and the elderly, mostly German, Austrian, Italian and Japanese. Of all states, Queensland had the highest proportion of its ethnic population interned during World War II with 43% held in southern Australian detention camps. The first train load of internees left for camps in central Victoria in February 1942. Internment during WWII in Queensland took many forms. Allied POWs of German, Italian and Japanese origin were brought here after capture overseas. Enemy ‘aliens’ or residents of Australia with ‘perceived’ links to Axis nations were also placed in camps, for fear of enemy attack, spying or espionage. Many of these – including indigenous Australians – spent the war years behind wire. These included the members of the Aboriginal Mission at Cape Bedford near Cooktown, run by Pastor Georg Schwarz, a German-born Lutheran who had arrived at the mission in 1887. At dawn on 17 May 1942 the army and local police arrived with a convoy of trucks to arrest Pastor Schwarz and remove the Aboriginal people. They removed 254 Aborigines, mainly Guugu Yimidhirr people from the Eight Mile and Spring Hill, taking them to Cooktown, then onward to Cairns. The elderly were sent to Palm Island: 200 or more were dispatched to Woorabinda near Rockhampton. The Cape Bedford people found Woorabinda cold and inhospitable and within a year 60 had died. In 1949 the surviving Guugu Yimidhirr people returned home to Cape Bedford to a new mission site called Hope Vale. Robin Kleinschmidt recalls these internees: “About 30 of the men, led by elder George Bowen, great grandfather of footballer Matt Bowen, spent most of the war on our farm. After they were taken to Woorabinda my father and uncle arranged for them to come to Otmoor to provide seasonal labour with the arrowroot planting and harvest. In the off-season they returned to their families at Woorabinda for a few months and then returned to us. My father arranged for work for them on nearby farms until we needed them again.” At the end of the war the internment camps were closed, and the last internees were released in 1946. Many of the internees had been employed by local farmers and industries that came to depend on their labour. Their assistance was missed at the end of hostilities when internees and POWs were either repatriated or permitted to return to their Australian homes. At the end of WWI, Australia had deported most of its internees; 27 years on, only a small number was deported. Even many of those who had been transported here remained in Australia, which now prepared to welcome another great migration: thousands of war-weary and dispossessed people seeking new lives on the Fifith Continent, far from the wreckage of Europe.

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