Refuge Australia: Australia™s Humanitarian Record

Debunks several commonly held assumptions about Australia’s humanitarian record. It demonstrates that Australian responses to various international refugee crises from the 1930s to the early 1970s were informed by self-interest rather than humanitarian concerns. It shows that Australia’s support for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the 1951 Refugees Convention was often at best half-hearted.

Winner of the 2004 Human Rights Award for Non Fiction

Presented by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, the judges described Refuge Australia as a highly readable account of Australia’s long history of debate about refugees and asylum seekers. Drawing together thousands of personal stories of refugees seeking refuge in Australia between 1930 and 1970 and original government documents, the book describes Australia’s ambivalent attitude to refugees in a cool, clear tone. “In so doing,” the judges wrote, “Klaus Neumann doesn’t prejudge the issues. Rather, he allows readers to arrive at their own conclusions. Refuge Australia does, however, leave the reader with a sense of optimism and the idea that change is possible. In the midst of widespread community debate about Australia’s current treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, Refuge Australia provides an important historical context in which to examine these issues. It’s also a great read.”

‘Neumann reveals the good, the bad and the ugly of how our nation has responded to the desperate and the despairing since 1938. This fine book is indispensable to the debate about refugees today.’ - Phillip Adams

Klaus Neumann is a German-born historian currently based in Melbourne. He is the author of several books, including most recently, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany.

Four years after Samad Abdul bin Amjah had sought refuge in Australia, the Minister for Immigration told him to leave. By then he had married, had two children and found a steady job. His employer appealed to the Minister for leniency, but to no avail, and Amjah was deported from Australia.

Although this story may sound all too familiar, it actually occurred in the 1940s. Amjah’s is one of the many compelling stories in this new book by historian Klaus Neumann. Drawing on original archival research, Neumann has pieced together the stories of a remarkably wide range of people who sought refuge in Australia and its territories between the 1930s and the mid–1970s, and the government policies that developed in response.

Refuge Australia debunks several commonly held assumptions about Australia’s humanitarian record. It demonstrates that Australian responses to various international refugee crises from the 1930s to the early 1970s were informed by self-interest rather than humanitarian concerns. It shows that Australia’s support for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the 1951 Refugees Convention was often at best half-hearted.

Refuge Australia explores the government’s response to refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, to European refugees and displaced persons in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, and to Asians expelled from Uganda in 1972. The book describes how Australia had to deal with hundreds of onshore asylum seekers well before the arrival of the first Indochinese ‘boat people’ in 1976, and that some of them were detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

Refuge Australia concludes by discussing the significance of a history of Australia’s humanitarian record. This history is often referred to in the media, but has not previously been brought together in one book.

Refuge Australia is a timely intervention in the debate about refugees and asylum seekers in post-Tampa Australia.