Research Catalog

Title

Beautiful balts : from displaced persons to new Australians / Jayne Persian.

Author

Persian, Jayne

Publication

Sydney, N.S.W. NewSouth Publishing, 2017.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

250 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some colour), portraits (some colour); 21 cm.

Summary

170,000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952 - the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants. Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as `Beautiful Balts'. Amid the hierarchies of the White Australia Policy, the tensions of the Cold War and the national need for labour, these people would transform not only Australia's immigration policy, but the country itself. Beautiful Balts tells the extraordinary story of these Displaced Persons. It traces their journey from the chaotic camps of Europe after World War II to a new life in a land of opportunity where prejudice, parochialism, and strident anti-communism were rife. Drawing from archives, oral history interviews and literature generated by the Displaced Persons themselves, Persian investigates who they really were, why Australia wanted them and what they experienced.

Subject

• Reconstruction (1939-1951)
• 1939-1951
• Einwanderung
• Flüchtling
• Europäer
• Einwanderungspolitik
• Immigrants > Australia > History
• Refugees > Australia > History
• Reconstruction (1939-1951) > Australia
• Europeans > Australia > History
• Europeans
• Immigrants
• Refugees
• Australien
• Australia
• Australian

Genre/Form

History

Note

• Includes index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction -- Deserving victims -- 'Chifley liked them blond' -- 'A hot Siberia' -- 'New Australians' -- Inside the Cold War -- Conclusion: Memory and multiculturalism.

ISBN

• 9781742234854
• 1742234852

OCLC

• 973924975
• SCSB-11311599

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library