Introduction
On 2 August 1945, Arthur Calwell, Australia’s first Minister for Immigration, rose in the House of Representatives to announce a fundamental shift in national policy. “If Australians have learned one lesson from the Pacific war,” he declared, “it is surely that we cannot continue to hold our island continent for ourselves and our descendants unless we greatly increase our numbers” . Over the next two decades, more than a million displaced persons, assisted migrants, and refugees would arrive on Australian shores. They came from the Baltic states, from Greece and Italy, from the Netherlands and Yugoslavia. They were housed in converted army camps, assigned work they did not choose, and expected to shed their languages, memories, and political allegiances as though these were excess baggage. The official policy was assimilation, and its central promise was simple: if migrants abandoned their pasts, Australia would embrace their futures.
This promise was not kept. The gap between the rhetoric of assimilation and the reality of migrant experience became one of the defining chasms of post-war Australian history. Migrants were not passive recipients of a benevolent nation-building project. They were its indispensable workforce, yet they were routinely denied the dignity of being recognised as such. They built the Snowy Mountains Scheme, laid pipelines at Woomera, kept factories running in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, and staffed the canneries of regional South Australia. And in doing so, they quietly, stubbornly, refused to disappear.
This article argues that post-war migrants were not merely grateful recipients of Australian generosity but were, in a very real sense, the forgotten architects of the Menzies-era prosperity they are often said to have simply inherited. Drawing on recent historiography, archival sources, and oral testimony, it contends that the failure of assimilation was not a policy glitch but a structural inevitability—one driven by the very labour demands that made mass migration necessary in the first place. By recovering the agency of these “New Australians,” we can see the post-war decades not as a golden age of cultural consensus but as a protracted contest over who belonged, on what terms, and at what cost.
The Official Vision – “Populate or Perish” and the Problem of Difference
The post-war immigration program was conceived in an atmosphere of acute anxiety. War had devastated Europe; Britain was exhausted; Australia, though physically unscathed, was psychologically rattled. Its population was barely seven million, its manufacturing sector underdeveloped, and its sense of vulnerability to Asian invasion freshly inflamed by Japanese advances. Population, the Chifley government concluded, was the only durable defence.
Calwell’s slogan—“populate or perish”—captured the demographic arithmetic. But arithmetic alone could not resolve the cultural question. If Australia was to import Europeans by the hundreds of thousands, what kind of Europeans should they be? The answer, initially, was northern Europeans: displaced persons from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, carefully selected from camps in Germany and presented to the Australian press as “the pick of the Baltic peoples” . The first 839 arrivals at Bonegilla in late 1947 were described by the Sydney Morning Herald as “attractive, cheery, eager to work, adaptable and neatly clad” . They were, in official parlance and popular discourse, the “Beautiful Balts”—reassuringly white, visibly grateful, and presumed to be easily absorbable.
This presumption was codified in policy. Between 1947 and 1953, displaced persons arriving under International Refugee Organisation sponsorship were required to work for two years in employment allocated by the government. They could not choose their jobs or their locations. Professional qualifications were routinely disregarded; doctors became labourers, engineers became factory hands. The wage was the award rate, but the condition was, in effect, a form of indentured labour—a term used by historians including Gwenda Tavan and Egon F. Kunz to describe the compulsory two-year contracts that gave migrants little genuine freedom of occupational choice . As one historian summarised the dynamic, Australia wanted immigration, but it did not necessarily want immigrants—at least, not immigrants who insisted on retaining distinct identities .
The ideological architecture of assimilation rested on a simple binary. On one side stood the “Australian way of life”: suburban, Anglophone, temperate, self-reliant. On the other stood the migrant’s past: foreign, emotional, potentially radical, and best left behind. This was not merely a matter of cultural preference. As historian Jean P. Smith has demonstrated, medical and psychiatric literature in the 1950s increasingly framed resistance to assimilation as a health risk. Psychiatrists and general practitioners writing in the Medical Journal of Australia diagnosed migrants who clung to their old ways as suffering from “nervous tension” or, in some formulations, as possessing “inherent shortcomings” that had caused them to “fail in their own country” . Such language did not go uncontested, but its presence in mainstream medical journals indicates how thoroughly assimilationist assumptions penetrated Australian institutions.
This medicalisation of difference had profound consequences. It absolved Australian institutions of responsibility for the isolation and exploitation migrants experienced. It pathologised perfectly normal responses to displacement: grief, nostalgia, wariness of strangers. And it ensured that when migrants struggled, the fault was located within themselves rather than in the hostile environment they had been thrust into. As sociologist Jean Martin argued in her landmark 1978 study The Migrant Presence, Australian doctors and social workers became key “definers” of migrant health problems—and those definitions consistently attributed causation to the individual characteristics of migrants rather than to systemic deficiencies in Australian healthcare or society .
The Physical Spaces of Assimilation – Bonegilla, Woomera, and the Topology of Displacement
If assimilation was an ideology, it was also a geography. Migrants did not simply arrive in Australia; they were processed, housed, and dispatched through a network of reception centres that shaped their first impressions of the country and their subsequent trajectories within it. The largest and longest-lasting of these was Bonegilla, a former army camp on the New South Wales–Victoria border that processed approximately 320,000 migrants between 1947 and 1971 .
Bonegilla was never intended to be comfortable. Accommodation was in Nissen huts and timber barracks, inadequately heated in winter and stifling in summer. Flywire was absent; insects were not. Families were frequently separated, with women and children dispatched to holding centres at Cowra, Uranquinty, or Benalla while men were sent to distant workplaces. Food was based on British cooking, which many migrants found unfamiliar and bland. The camp was located in an isolated rural area that bore little resemblance to the sun-drenched paradise of official propaganda. One English teacher who worked at Bonegilla in the early 1950s recalled that later contingents of displaced persons arrived “dispirited, having lost all they had ever owned and sometimes their family as well”; they came “fitted out in similar clothes, carrying cheap cardboard suitcases and a bag of toilet articles supplied by the Red Cross” .
Bonegilla’s purpose was not merely accommodation but transformation. English lessons were offered, though often inadequately staffed and resourced. Migrants were instructed in Australian customs, Australian hygiene standards, Australian notions of punctuality and thrift. The underlying message was unambiguous: you are now here, and here requires you to become something else. The camp’s wire fences, visible in official photographs of children playing dress-up, can be read as a metaphor for cultural quarantine—the physical manifestation of a policy that sought to contain difference until it dissolved.
A different kind of isolation characterised Woomera, the secretive rocket-testing facility established in remote South Australia in 1947. Here, displaced persons comprised a substantial proportion of the initial construction workforce. According to detailed archival research by Peter Scriver, Steven Cooke, and Andrew Saniga, approximately 361 men from Baltic and eastern European backgrounds were employed in the early phases of construction; their analysis of personnel records indicates a workforce composed of approximately 30 per cent Polish, 25 per cent Lithuanian, 20 per cent Latvian, and smaller numbers of Estonians, Yugoslavs, Czechoslovaks, Ukrainians, and Russians . These men had been recruited directly from European displaced persons camps and transported to the centre of a continent they had never heard of, to build infrastructure for weapons systems whose purposes were only vaguely explained. The accommodation provided was rudimentary: “temporary camps that differed little in their frugal amenities from the DP camps back in Europe” .
Yet Woomera, like Bonegilla, produced responses more complex than simple gratitude or resentment. Scriver, Cooke, and Saniga argue that the experience of these workers can be understood through what they term a “topology of displacement”—a geography in which the physical labour of building became, for some, a means of psychological emancipation . The men who poured concrete and laid pipelines in the South Australian desert were not merely fulfilling two-year labour contracts. They were forging a relationship with place that their Australian-born contemporaries, many of whom never ventured far from coastal cities, could not claim to match.
This is not to romanticise Woomera. The work was dangerous, the isolation profound, the surveillance intrusive. But it is to insist that migrants were agents as well as subjects. They built, they endured, and in doing so they quietly refuted the assimilationist assumption that they had nothing to contribute except their labour.
The Women Nobody Interviewed – Gender, Labour, and the Limits of Community
If the “Balts” were the public face of early post-war migration, the Greeks and Italians who followed in the 1950s and 1960s were its hidden backbone. By the early 1950s, the pool of Northern European displaced persons had contracted, and the government—with considerable reluctance—turned increasingly to southern Europe to meet its demand for unskilled labour . The reluctance was openly expressed in official and popular commentary: southern Europeans, it was said, were less likely to assimilate, slower to learn English, and too attached to their villages, their saints, and their “peculiar” food.
Yet the labour market left no alternative. Greek men were recruited in large numbers to work in factories, on railways, and on construction projects. They were joined, from the early 1960s, by a smaller but significant cohort of single Greek women, recruited under a government program designed partly to address the “problem” of proxy brides—Greek women who arrived in Australia to marry men they had never met, photographs clutched in hand, to the consternation of Australian newspaper editors who found the practice unromantic and un-Australian.
The new program brought women aged seventeen to twenty-three to Australia under either government sponsorship or family nomination. Those sponsored by the Commonwealth underwent a ten-week training course at schools in Kiffisia or Thessaloniki, where they received instruction not only in English but in “aspects of modern urban domestic life” and Australian social conditions . They were then flown to Sydney or Melbourne and dispatched to pre-arranged employment—often in regional locations far from established Greek communities.
The most detailed portrait of these women’s experiences comes from a survey conducted in 1964–65 by economist Reg Appleyard and his colleague Anna Amera. Their sample of 150 single Greek women migrants, drawn from government arrival records, revealed stark backgrounds. Most had been born in villages or small towns they had never previously left; 54 per cent had left school before the age of twelve, and 43 per cent had never been gainfully employed prior to migration. Their motivations for emigrating were overwhelmingly economic: “hardship of village life, inadequate spending money, and especially their parents’ inability to provide a dowry large enough to attract a suitable groom” .
The women placed at the fruit-canning factory in Berri, South Australia—a small sub-sample of approximately fifteen respondents—encountered conditions far removed from official promises. Wages were indeed higher than anything they could earn in Greece. But they also experienced harassment from itinerant male workers, many of them also Greek, in ways they had never experienced in their villages, where informal community sanctions policed male behaviour. Within approximately two weeks, most had left Berri for the “relative protection” of the Greek communities in Melbourne and Sydney .
That protection proved partial. The established Greek communities, led by interwar migrants who had spent decades cultivating respectability, did not always welcome these village girls with open arms. Contact with Greeks outside their own newly formed associations was largely confined to Orthodox Church services and celebrations. The women worked in factories where employers, resolving their inability to speak English, simply grouped them into Hellenophone units and left them to navigate workplace relations without translation. Official employment offices provided job referrals written in English on slips of paper, with no explanation of how to reach the address. Enrolment in English classes was desultory; only one of thirty respondents in Appleyard’s 1976 follow-up sample had completed a full year of language instruction .
By 1976, however, the economic achievements of these women were striking. All but one of the follow-up sample had married—within two years of arrival, almost invariably to Greek men of similar social class and migration vintage. Ninety per cent were owner-occupiers of their homes; half had paid off their mortgages entirely. Half owned or were purchasing independent businesses, often in partnership with their husbands. Savings rates were exceptionally high, sustained by dual incomes and a disciplined postponement of consumption .
Yet English comprehension remained, in Appleyard’s phrase, “generally poor.” Social contact with non-Greek Australians was confined almost entirely to workmates, tradesmen, and customers. The village-based associations that had sustained these women through their first difficult years were, by the mid-1970s, already in decline; their continued existence owed more to “recollection and sentiment” than to active organisational life . These women had succeeded, by any measurable economic metric, but they had not assimilated in the sense that policymakers of the 1950s had imagined. They had adapted, endured, and prospered, but they had done so on their own terms, within a parallel society that the official policy of assimilation had neither predicted nor welcomed.
The Surveillance State and the Politics of Memory
Assimilation demanded not only behavioural conformity but, in many cases, political amnesia. Migrants were expected to disassociate from the politics of their homelands, to sever the emotional and organisational links that connected them to the conflicts they had fled. This expectation was enforced not merely by social pressure but by the apparatus of the state.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, established in 1949, devoted considerable resources to monitoring migrant communities, particularly those from southern and eastern Europe. Greek migrants, who arrived in large numbers during and after the Greek Civil War, were subject to especially close scrutiny. ASIO agents attended community meetings, recorded the activities of left-wing organisations such as the Democritus League and the Atlas Club, and compiled extensive files on activists who persisted in agitating about Greek politics from Australian soil .
The case of James Mitsopoulos, documented in ASIO files and analysed by historian Andonis Piperoglou, illustrates the depth and persistence of state suspicion. Mitsopoulos was born on Samos in 1906, arrived in Australia in 1923, and became secretary of the Darlinghurst branch of the Young Communist League. He distributed pamphlets at the Greek Club, corresponded with international communist organisations, and in 1941 was interned as an “active communist.” Released on condition that he not reside within fifty miles of the coast—a condition later revoked—he continued to organise, sending telegrams to StalinStalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (18 December 1878 – 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician, dictator and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. Read More, Churchill, and Roosevelt, speaking at the Sydney Domain against British intervention in Greece, and touring Queensland to screen films about Greek refugees. In 1949, taxation officials raided his premises; the ostensible charge concerned black-market cloth, but ASIO files confirm that political surveillance was the primary motivation .
ASIO’s attention was not confined to communists. Right-wing royalists, too, attracted suspicion, precisely because their passionate Hellenism suggested a failure to fully transfer loyalty to Australia. An organisation that promoted Greek nationalism, even in its anti-communist variant, was an organisation that had not surrendered its past. The ideal migrant, in ASIO’s operational calculus, was politically quiescent: a worker, not a partisan; a consumer, not a participant. The persistence of homeland politics was treated as evidence that assimilation remained incomplete.
Yet for many migrants, the choice was not between engagement and forgetfulness but between different modes of remembrance. Historian Joy Damousi, writing of Greek immigrants in this period, has argued that the assimilation ideology “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 migrants themselves” . The past was not to be mourned, because mourning implied regret, and regret implied ingratitude. Migrants who could not forget were pathologised, marginalised, or—if they insisted on organising—surveilled.
This denial of memory had lasting consequences. It consigned the traumatic experiences of war, displacement, and resettlement to the private sphere, where they could be transmitted within families but not acknowledged in public discourse. It reinforced the fiction that migration was a clean break, a one-way journey from old world to new, rather than the continuous negotiation of multiple attachments that it actually was. And it obscured the extent to which migrants were not merely remaking themselves but remaking Australia—infusing its cities with new languages, new cuisines, new political solidarities, and new ways of being.
Conclusion: The Architects Remain
The Menzies era is conventionally remembered as a period of stability, prosperity, and cultural consensus. The home, as Menzies declared in his famous 1942 “Forgotten People” broadcast, was “the foundation of sanity and sobriety”; its health determined “the health of society as a whole” . This was a vision of Australia as a nation of homeowners, breadwinners, and quietly patriotic citizens—a nation that had put the upheavals of depression and war behind it and settled into comfortable, predictable middle age.
But the homes Menzies invoked were not built by Menzies’ “forgotten people” alone. They were built, quite literally, by the displaced persons who cut timber in the Snowy Mountains, poured concrete at Woomera, and saved every shilling they earned in the factories of Fitzroy and Marrickville. They were built by women who had shepherded goats on Greek mountainsides and now operated canning machinery in Berri, by Latvians who had fled the Red Army and Estonians who had escaped the Gestapo, by Italians who had crossed the ocean with cardboard suitcases and the addresses of distant cousins.
These architects were forgotten not through accident but, to a significant degree, through design. The ideology of assimilation encouraged them to disappear—to merge, as Calwell hoped, into a homogeneous national culture. Their refusal to do so entirely was not, as the psychiatrists of the 1950s believed, a symptom of pathology. It was an assertion of dignity: the insistence that a life lived in one language could be continued in another, that grief for a lost village was compatible with gratitude for a new suburb, that political passions kindled in Europe need not be extinguished at the Fremantle docks.
Recent historiography has increasingly recovered these forgotten architects. Scholars have revisited the medical literature to expose the ideological work it performed. They have listened again to oral histories recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, hearing in them not only testimony about hardship but evidence of agency. They have traced the transnational networks that connected Bonegilla to the Baltic, Woomera to Warsaw, Berri to the villages of the Peloponnese.
What emerges from this scholarship is not a simple counternarrative but a more complex picture. Migrants were frequently victims of exploitation and exclusion; they were also active participants in the construction of post-war Australia. They endured the Nissen huts and the factory floors and the suspicious gaze of the security services; they also saved, invested, organised, and built. They did not assimilate, if assimilation meant the complete abandonment of a prior self. They integrated, adapted, and transformed—and in the process, they transformed the nation that had tried so hard to contain them.
The Menzies-era prosperity that contemporary conservatives sometimes invoke with nostalgia was not a gift bestowed upon grateful migrants. It was a structure erected by their labour, often at considerable cost to their own comfort and recognition. To acknowledge this is not to diminish the achievements of Australian-born workers or the sincerity of Australian officials who believed they were acting in the national interest. It is simply to insist that the history of post-war Australia cannot be adequately written without acknowledging who built it, and on what terms.
The forgotten architects have left their signatures everywhere: in the fabric of suburbs, the vocabulary of kitchens, the soundscapes of inner-city streets. It is time we learned to read them.
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