‘Desirable Types’: Australian Press Photography and Jewish Refugees 1935–49
2023; Routledge; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/1031461x.2022.2143543
ISSN1940-5049
Autores Tópico(s)Photography and Visual Culture
ResumoAbstractThis article analyses Australian news photographs of Jewish refugees during two pivotal eras: from 1935 to 1939, when increasing numbers of refugees sought asylum from Nazi persecution in Europe; and from 1945, in the wake of the Holocaust, as the Australian federal Labor government was formalising Australian citizenship and embarking on a program of expanded immigration, while still adhering to the restrictive White Australia policy. The article argues that the visual record of Jewish refugees was significant in conveying three specific if contradictory visual idioms: Australia as a sanctuary; the ideal of the 'good citizen', easily assimilated; and the refugee as a source of threat and disruption. Editorial regulation, political context and government censorship were fundamental to the news mediations of belonging and citizenship. The article shows that after the war, the Australian federal government sought to manage these press narratives, signalling the tenuous place of refugees in modern Australia. AcknowledgementI would like to thank Robin Gerster for his thoughts and suggestions on my draft, and the reviewers and editors, Fiona Paisley and Tim Rowse, for their considered feedback. In addition, my thanks to Research Assistant Caroline Garrod-James for identifying critical primary sources, and Annalisa Giudici for her editorial assistance.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1 CIAC, Draft letter to editors, 26 March 1947, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA): A436, 1948/5/330.2 Leslie Haylen, CIAC Notes, 31 March 1947, NAA: A436, 1948/5/330.3 Fay Anderson and Sally Young, Shooting the Picture: Press Photography in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2016), 5.4 The mastheads include a combination of daily tabloids and broadsheets: Adelaide Advertiser, Age, Argus, Courier-Mail, Daily News (Perth), Sydney Daily Telegraph, Melbourne Herald, Mercury, Adelaide News, Sydney Sun, Sydney Morning Herald (hereafter SMH), Brisbane Telegraph and West Australian. Pictorial magazines such as Pix, launched in 1938, will not be analysed in this article because they are not newspapers. I am interested in the news photographs that readers viewed on a daily or weekly basis.5 I have excluded hard news stories on immigration and refugees, which included thumbnail images of politicians, officials and religious figures.6 Suzanne D. Rutland, 'A Study of Conflicting Images in the Australian Media: Holocaust Suffering and Persistent Anti-Jewish Racism', in Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World, eds Shirli Gilbert and Avril Alba (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019), 91–116. Some works that address press representations, and which have been very useful in researching this article, include: Fay Anderson, '"They Are Killing All of Us Jews": Australian Press Memory of the Holocaust', in Aftermath: Genocide, Memory and History, ed. Karen Auerbach (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2015), 65–85; Fay Anderson, '"Never Look Away": Humanitarianism and Australian Newspaper Photographers', in Visualising Human Rights, ed. Jane Lydon (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018), 141–66; Paul Bartrop, Australia and the Holocaust 1933–45 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 1994); Michael Blakeney, Australia and the Jewish Refugee (Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985); Andrew Markus, 'Jewish Migration to Australia 1938–49', Journal of Australian Studies 7, no. 13 (1983): 18–31; Andrew Markus, 'Labour and Immigration 1946–9: The Displaced Persons Program', Labour History 47 (1984): 73–90; Suzanne D. Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (Sydney: William Collins Pty Ltd, 1988); Suzanne D. Rutland, 'Australian Responses to Jewish Refugee Migration before and after World War II', Australian Journal of Politics and History 31, no. 1 (1985): 29–48; Suzanne D. Rutland, 'Postwar Anti-Jewish Refugee Hysteria: A Case of Racial or Religious Bigotry?', Journal of Australian Studies 27, no. 77 (2003): 69–79; Suzanne D. Rutland, 'From Hell to Hope', in Legacies of Violence, ed. Robert Mason (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017), 142–61; Rutland, 'Conflicting Images'; Suzanne D. Rutland and Sol Encel, 'No Room at the Inn: American Responses to Australian Immigration Policies, 1946–54', Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 5 (2009): 497–518; Jon Stratton, 'The Colour of Jews: Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy', Journal of Australian Studies 20, no. 50–51 (1996): 51–65; Jon Stratton, 'Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy', in Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (London: Routledge, 2000), 176–97.7 Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1. See also Daniel Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2010); Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005).8 Liisa Malkki, 'Refugees and Exile: From "Refugee Studies" to the National Order of Things', Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 497–98.9 Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 13, 23. See also Gabrielle Moser, Projecting Citizenship: Photography and Belonging in the British Empire (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 21.10 Anderson and Young, 4.11 Sally Young, Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia's Newspaper Empires (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2019), 484.12 Ibid.13 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2009), 10.14 The editorial decisions surrounding the use and selection of photographs were, as Zelizer notes, largely intuitive rather than prescriptive. See Barbie Zelizer, 'When War Is Reduced to a Photograph', in Reporting War, eds Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan (London: Taylor and Francis, 2004), 115.15 See, among many, Butler, 10; Stuart Hall, 'The Determinations of News Photographs', in The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media, eds Stanley Cohen and Jock Young (London: Constable, 1981), 226–43; Zelizer, Remembering to Forget; and Zelizer, 'When War Is Reduced to a Photograph'.16 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 25.17 Hall, 229.18 For research on photography and citizenship see Azoulay, Civil Contract; Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London: Verso, 2012); Jane Lydon, Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); Jane Lydon, ed., Visualising Human Rights (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2018); Moser. Scholarship on refugees and visual coverage includes, among many texts: Lillie Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolić, 'Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee "Crisis": A Visual Typology of European News', Media, Culture & Society 39, no. 8 (2017): 1162–77; Tanya Sheehan, ed., Photography and Migration (London: Routledge, 2018); Lynda Mannik, 'Public and Private Photographs of Refugees: The Problem of Representation', Visual Studies 27, no. 3 (2012): 262–76; Kerry Moore, Bernhard Gross and Terry Threadgold, eds, Migrations and the Media (New York: Peter Lang, 2012); Peter Nyers, Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (London: Routledge, 2006); Michael Pugh, 'Drowning Not Waving: Boat People and Humanitarianism at Sea', Journal of Refugee Studies 17, no. 1 (2004): 50–69; Terence Wright, 'Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees', Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 53–66.19 See Mannik; Liisa H. Malkki, 'Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization', in Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, eds Karen Fog Olwig and Kirsten Hastrup (New York: Routledge, 1997), 227–58. Other key texts include: Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison and Xzarina Nicholson, 'The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees', Australian Journal of Political Science 48, no. 4 (2013): 398–416; Chouliaraki and Stolić; Malkki, 'Refugees and Exile'; Nyers; Pugh.20 See Bleiker et al., 398–416; Jane Lydon, 'Fantasy Islands: Photography, Empathy and Australia's Detention Archipelago', in Sheehan, 100–14; Thy Phu, 'Refugee Photography and the Subject of Human Interest', in Sheehan, 135–50; Jon Stratton, 'Uncertain Lives: Migration, the Border and Neoliberalism in Australia', Social Identities 15, no. 5 (2009): 677–92; Jon Stratton, 'Non-Citizens in the Exclusionary State: Citizenship, Mitigated Exclusion, and the Cronulla Riots', Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25, no. 3 (2011): 299–316.21 Moser, 1.22 The suspicion about Eastern European Jews (those from Russia and Poland) continued throughout the 1930s and 1940s. F.C. Derbyshire to H.E. Spencer, 'Admission of Jews to Australia', 20 June 1925, NAA: A434, 1949/3/3196.23 Stratton, 'Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy', 187.24 Ibid., 188.25 Markus, 'Jewish Migration', 18.26 Ibid.27 Cited in Blakeney, 103.28 See Markus, 'Jewish Migration, 19; Bartrop, 71.29 See for example H.R. Ashton's editorial, 'Refugee Migration', Sun, 12 July 1938, 4.30 Hugh McClure, 'Citizens for Australia', SMH, 9 July 1938, 16.31 The author of the survey did not define 'large-scale'. Malcolm J. Turnbull, Safe Haven: Records of the Jewish Experience in Australia (Canberra: NAA, 1999), 23.32 'They Scour Europe to Select Jews', Daily News, 3 August 1939, 7.33 Stratton, 'Jews, Race and the White Australia Policy', 189. See also Markus, 'Jewish Migration', 19.34 Markus, 'Jewish Migration', 23.35 'Jewish Refugees Arrive', Brisbane Telegraph, 13 February 1939, 2.36 'Thirty-Five Jews from Central Europe Seek Refuge Here', Daily Telegraph, 5 October 1938, 11.37 'Jewish Refugees Arrive', 2. See also 'Jewish Refugee', Brisbane Telegraph, 22 June 1939, 10; 'German Jewish Refugee Children', Brisbane Telegraph, 21 July 1939, 12.38 'Thirty-Five Jews from Central Europe Seek Refuge Here', 1.39 See 'Homes for Harassed People', Age, 29 May 1939, 10; 'On the Land', SMH, 10 January 1939, 9.40 'On the Land', 9.41 'Where Refugee Women Cook Irish Stew', SMH, 31 July 1939, 12.42 See 'Migrants Arrive', Melbourne Herald, 17 April 1939, 2.43 'Jewish Problem', Truth, 17 July 1938, 25; 'Jewish Invasion: Australia Dumping Ground', Truth, 6 November 1938, 28.44 'Government Must Halt Unrestricted Jewish Influx', Truth, 9 October 1938, 24. Water metaphors continue to be used by the media when objectifying refugees and asylum seekers. See Pugh.45 'Persecution Makes Them Strong', Smith's Weekly, 22 July 1939, 13.46 See Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, 1–15.47 See for example: 'Camp Horror Evidence under German Eyes', Daily Telegraph, 21 April 1945, 3; 'First Atrocity Pictures from Belsen Camp', Adelaide News, 23 April 1945, 1; 'Private Rooms and Lace Curtains for Ghouls of German Horror Camps', Sun, 29 April 1945, 6.48 Arthur Calwell, Be Just and Fear Not (Melbourne: Lloyd O'Neil in association with Rigby, 1972), 100; CIAC, 'Report of the Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Committee', 27 February 1946 (Canberra: L.F. Johnston, Commonwealth Government Printer).49 Haylen, Notes. Haylen continued to edit the Labor newspaper, the Standard, after he gained pre-selection for the federal seat of Parkes in 1943. R.E. Northey, 'Haylen, Leslie Clement (Les) (1898–1977), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 14, 1996.50 William Hitchcock, Liberation (London: Faber, 2008), 312.51 There were exceptions. See for example 'Jewish Refugee Family', Daily News, 9 March 1946, 17.52 'Polish Jews' Landing Here Held up', Daily Telegraph, 26 November 1946, 9.53 'Press Ejected from Refugee Ship on Brisbane Orders', Daily Bulletin, 21 January 1947, 1.54 'Jew Migrants Arrive', Mercury, 15 April 1947, 24; 'Calwell's Report on Migrant Ship', Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1947, 13.55 'Calwell Denies Ban on Photographers', Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1947, 1.56 Brian Penton, 'Editorial', Daily Telegraph, 14 April 1947, 8.57 Arthur Calwell, 'War Cabinet Agendum', 12 June. Australia's Overseas Defence Forces – War Correspondents, War Records and Broadcasters. Press Photography in Combat Areas. 20 June 1944. NAA: A5954, 610/1.58 'Prosecutions Withdrawn', SMH, 2 June 1944, 4.59 Calwell also sued Penton in a libel suit, which was eventually settled out of court. For a full account, see Patrick Buckridge, The Scandalous Penton: A Biography of Brian Penton (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1994).60 'Australia: Fabulous Mecca of the Migrant', Argus, 24 January 1948, 2.61 T.H.E. Heyes to Department of External Affairs, 3 and 7 March 1947, NAA: A443, 1952/15/3553.62 Rutland and Encel, 497, 511. See also Rutland, 'Conflicting Images'.63 Rutland and Encel, 518.64 Emotionally powerful close-ups of individuals and small groups play a crucial role in the symbolic representation of political crises. See Bleiker et al., 406.65 'Faces Tell Stories of Refugees' Trial', Melbourne Herald, 18 March 1947, 3.66 Ibid.67 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 127.68 'Australia Will Be Their New Home', Argus, 14 November 1947, 3.69 '700 Jews Arrive, Bring Expensive Furs and Jewels', Courier-Mail, 17 March 1947, 1.70 'Jewish Migrants Reach Sydney', West Australian, 19 March 1947, 13.71 Rutland, 'From Hell', 149.72 'Fugitives from the Stern Gang', Smith's Weekly, 15 February 1947, 2.73 'Illegal Jewish Immigrants at Haifa', SMH, 9 July 1946, 3.74 See 'Polish Jews Create Problem in Berlin', Advertiser, 23 January 1946, 6; 'The Jews Move On', Mercury, 30 July 1946, 20.75 'Jew Migrants in Germany', Adelaide News, 16 September 1947, 1.76 'Jews May Come in Own Ship', Sun, 5 March 1946, 2.77 John Hetherington, 'The Flood of Aliens', Adelaide News, 12 February 1947, 2.78 'Calwell Says News Is Fascist', Adelaide News, 18 February 1947, 3.79 The notes were not distributed to the press, but used as background information in Haylen's meetings with the press and radio representatives. Haylen, Notes.80 Markus, 'Jewish Migration', 19.81 Haylen, Notes.82 CIAC Minutes, 28 January 1948, NAA: A436, 1948/5/330.83 'Misr's Passengers Take First Look at New Land', Daily News, 14 April 1947, 1.84 Ibid.85 'Jewish Migrants Arrive to Settle in Australia', Adelaide News, 14 April 1947, 11.86 'Misr's Passengers Take First Look at New Land'.87 Ibid.88 'Immigrants', Brisbane Telegraph, 15 April 1947, 3; 'Jew Migrants Arrive', 24; See 'Misr' Navigation Company', NAA: A443, 1952/15/3553.89 Heyes to Department of External Affairs.90 F.J.R. Penhalluriack, Report, 6 May 1947, NAA: A443, 1952/15/3553.91 T.H.E. Heyes, Notes, no date, NAA: A443, 1952/15/3553.92 See 'Glad Hand in a New Land', Daily Advertiser, 23 April 1947, 2; 'Mr Calwell and the Migrants', Adelaide News, 22 April 1947, 1.93 Blakeney, 292.94 Rutland, 'Conflicting Images', 109.95 A.C. Williams to Arthur Bazley, 'Press and Radio Attitude to Immigration', 30 October 1947, NAA: A436, 1948/5/330.96 Ibid.97 'Ship Brings New Australians', 3 July 1947, Melbourne Herald, 1.98 CIAC Minutes.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number DP200100088].
Referência(s)