Histories of Controversy by Dellios Alexandra;

Author:Dellios, Alexandra; [Dellios, Alexandra]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.1: Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, visiting children at Bonegilla, 1949.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Albury City’s Bonegilla Collection at the Albury Library Museum.

It is important to understand how child migrants were imagined in this national political context. For the government, children were the ‘most malleable of the new arrivals’ as it was presumed they could easily learn English and ‘absorb the Australian point of view more quickly than adults’.13 As part of the Department of Immigration’s publicity campaign to sell the scheme to the public, Labor’s Minister for Immigration Arthur Calwell visited Bonegilla in July 1949 and was photographed with migrant children.14

He described the children as ‘the little boys and girls whose courage and valour might in the future be needed with that of the children of native-born Australians to preserve this country if ever it is attacked’.15 While the immigration scheme continued to focus on recruiting male labourers—‘magnificent human material’—children also garnered increasing public attention as contributors to the future growth of Australia. Anxieties over population growth, defending Australia’s borders and the low birth-rate shaped these reactions to migrant children.

A language of ‘virility’ dominated early promotion of the immigration scheme, and migration officers in DP camps were instructed to scrupulously screen women for sexually transmitted diseases.16 The department’s guide for medical officers screening DPs in camps stated that ‘women of child-bearing age should be capable of bearing children’: women’s worth as migrants and future citizens rested with their reproductive capacity. The economic worth of men rested on their labouring capacities.17 Addressing a broader context, historian Catherine Kevin argues that postwar antenatal writing and medicine functioned to manage pregnant women’s embodied state; the Australian woman in the postwar era was envisioned as the ‘mother of the unborn’.18

Both men and women were pivotal to the vision of assimilating new, healthy citizens. Children were perceived as being part of the domestic sphere, and therefore often thought of as the purview of women. But migrant children took on additional meanings in an assimilationist postwar Australia. The grand aims of nation building involved men, labour, and mass works. But children (and women as reproductive bodies) had a place in this vision too: they were fundamental to forming new Australian families, viewed as the basic unit of society. Children were a longer-term investment in Australia’s future. It was said that the assimilationist failures of parents would be remedied by their children—who would attend Australian schools, grow up Australian and adopt the so-called Australian way of life.19

Questions of cultural adjustment and the difficulties of negotiating familial and societal expectations did not feature in the assimilationist rhetoric of the Department of Immigration or the media. As historian Joy Damousi argues, assimilation focuses on the assimilator, and does not consider the hopes, fears, culture and history of those being assimilated.20 Indeed, investments in primary and secondary education, specifically ‘migrant’ education and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) training, was negligible in the 1940s and 1950s.21 It would be decades before this area received due attention and government funding.

Assimilationist rationales translated to

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