Suffering, Redemption and Triumph

Between 1946 and 1966 large numbers of displaced persons (DPs) came to Australia to escape the horrors of war-torn Europe.

Peter Brune’s latest work had its genesis in more than 40 interviews he conducted with DPs in the period 2001 - 2022. He spoke to migrants from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece and Hungary.

Inspired by their resilience, their enterprise and their determination to make a new life for themselves in Australia, the author has written about their harrowing war experiences drawing largely on their own words their reception in Australia and their first responses to an alien culture. Their subsequent reflections on the journeys they undertook and how they fared here are both moving and revelatory.

Peter also analyses the Chifley government’s immigration policies, which were driven by Arthur Calwell, and the selection criteria that were applied to assess applicants. Both Chifley and Calwell saw the need for a greater population for economic and security reasons; but they also felt an obligation to alleviate the deprivations suffered by millions of Europeans.

This book is an extraordinary exposition of how mass postwar immigration created the modern, multicultural society in which we now live. Peter makes the case that it is one of the most significant periods in the Australian story.

About the Author

Peter Brune is one of Australia's leading military historians. He is author of the bestselling and highly acclaimed A Bastard of a Place: The Australians in Papua, as well as Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: From the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach 1942, The Spell Broken: Exploding the Myth of Japanese Invincibility and We Band of Brothers: A Biography of Ralph Honner, Soldier and Statesman and is co-author with Neil McDonald of 200 Shots: Damien Parer and George Silk and The Australians at War in New Guinea.

He lives in Adelaide.