*The following copy has been taken from the book Migrant Workers and Ethnic Communities (Their Struggles for Social Justice and Cultural Rights – The Role of Greek Australians):
Bonegilla, some 300 kilometres from Melbourne in north-eastern Victoria, and other similar facilities were called by the Federal Government ‘Migrant Reception Centres’. Most of those who lived there knew Bonegilla as either a detention centre or a concentration camp. In 1952 and 1961 it was the epicentre of two migrant revolts for jobs and freedom. From 1947, when it received its first occupants, until it closed in 1971 more than 320,000 refugees and migrants knew it as their first home in Australia. Their struggles in the new country for settlement and equality of rights began there, before they came near the factories and other workplaces.
At least 35,000 Greeks went through Bonegilla from the early 1950s. Italians were by far the largest group. At any time Bonegilla would hold 10,000 people of many nationalities crowded into 30 corrugated iron blocks, each with 350 people. Guards and barbed wire fences protected the camp against unauthorised entry or exit. Internees were issued with personal utensils, bedding, towels, etc, and unless they were returned in good condition, the cost was deducted from their unemployment benefits, from which authorities had already deducted amounts for living expenses.
Coming under the Inter-Governmental Committee for European Migration (and earlier the Displaced Persons Settlement Policy), migrants were required by contract to work as directed by the Immigration Department for two years. Failure to do so could result in penalties including refunding fares to the Commonwealth in the event of being returned to their country of origin. The obligation in the same contracts for the Australian government to find work for migrants was treated with contempt if it was ever brought to light. When it came to jobs, there was no choice. Jobs in rural areas, where internees were destined, were few and mostly unsuitable. Escape to the city, with more job opportunities, was inevitable despite many efforts by the authorities to stop it.
Bonegilla was run on military lines. Those in top positions were army officials. Many supervisors and patrolmen, selected from among the internees, were in fact former Nazi concentration camp guards and SS officials, as confirmed by Bob Greenwood, the head of the Special Investigations Unit into War Criminals appointed by the Hawke government in 1987.
Plutarch Deliyannis, a retired teacher, who arrived in Bonegilla on 16 April 1954 told Neos Kosmos journalist Kostas Nikolopoulos (16 April 2004) that “the living conditions of the new migrants were of no concern to the government. I must tell you we had often found worms in sausages and whether we liked it or not we had to eat them after removing, as sausages were the basic food”. After 33 days of waiting without a job, Deliyannis, his two brothers and three others decided to escape one night, walking to “either Wodonga or Albury, then catching the train to Melbourne where we returned to civilisation and started to live like people”.
Thanassis Koukias, who arrived in Bonegilla on 12 December 1954, said in the same Neos Kosmos article that he considered himself lucky as he stayed only two weeks “in that strange, isolated place where the heat, the dust, mosquitoes and flies made our lives unbearable”. But his escape did not lead him to freedom. He was apprehended and, along with 37 other Greeks, was sent to work in Queensland.
“We travelled by train for a week, arriving in the small town of Mareeba, north of Cairns. We were met by farmers who took as many as they needed for their farms. I was last. I finished up with an Italian tobacco farmer. Tired as I was, I soon fell asleep, waking up the next day with tears in my eyes – alone, a stranger among strangers, without a word of English. I tried to communicate in signs. But the people were good. They tried to make my life easier.”
Another person quoted in the Neos Kosmos article was Alekos Panayiotopoulos who arrived in Bonegilla in 1955 and was kept there for three weeks. “Bonegilla was a concentration camp where fear and daily denigration of human dignity reigned supreme. What can I remember? The freezer like units they threw us in? The countless ‘not allowed to do this or that’, the terrible beds and straw mattresses – and the food? For a few, the food may have been OK, but for most of us it was neither tasteful nor enough. ‘Can I have some more bread?’ was a constant demand. Such was the longing for Greek food that in one of the very few excursions, we chased with sticks and caught 17 rabbits. We had a feast of stifado. Our hearts and minds were reaching out to our homes and country. In short, they were throwing us a slice of bread to make sure we survived but ignored all of our needs.”
Panayiotopoulos was so badly traumatised that he refuses to this day to visit what’s left of Bonegilla. And he cautions people “not to be taken in by those who now try to beautify this so-called ‘Migrant Reception Centre’. It was a concentration camp where fear was daily driven deep into the new migrants’ psyche.”
Another Bonegilla internee, Kostas Mimidas, who arrived in 1954, told Neos Kosmos that “every block was controlled by supervisors and patrolmen to maintain law and order. One day I was asked by the police officer to swear on the Bible that I will tell the truth as to why so many Greeks escape, who is hiding them and who is finding them work. Are the helpers individuals or organisations? I tried to convince him, in vain, that Greeks find it natural to help each other, that many had an acquaintance or a friend in Melbourne.”
The separation of married couples into male and female dormitories was another trauma in Bonegilla. This policy did not apply to English-speaking migrants. Glenda Sluga, in Bonegilla: A Place of No Hope (1988), wrote that: “The Menzies government treated migrants as a mass of people who would be controlled and directed easily to meet the needs of industry and the economy.”
George Hatzis is another Greek Australian with a story about Bonegilla, which he told me in an interview (Oct 4 2005). George came to Australia aged 11 with his parents, a younger brother and two sisters. They went straight to Bonegilla on September 23 1955. There they were first asked to surrender their passports. Then the children were separated from their parents, and were put in a dormitory with childless couples. George vividly remembers the freezing nights of late October and the unbearably hot days. The kitchen smells had penetrated everything; it took his sister years to recover from this.
Having come from a large house in Peleponnese, they found the crowded accommodation in the tin army huts a shocking experience:
“There was no privacy at all. As young kids we would witness for the first time in our lives couples making love behind the hastily installed blanket partition. As for the food – although bread and butter were adequate – the meat was tough and often had maggots. The grown-ups thought it would be good to show them to the officials. They sent us back with a lolly – but no remedies. Once I cracked open a boiled egg only to find a chick in it. That put me off eggs for life. One day, some grown-ups caught a kangaroo and were about to roast it when the guards and the police arrived, accusing us of causing cruelty to animals. On another occasion some 10 to 20 Greek migrants staged a demo outside the office and smashed a couple of windows. The police arrived, and soon after the army and four heavy army vehicles. They did not do anything physical; they just tried to scare us. Our lives were very miserable. We were surrounded by insecurity, seeing our parents worried, not knowing where to next.”
George and his family stayed in Bonegilla for two months. They decided to escape and walked all the way to Albury. They caught a train to Melbourne where his father had an acquaintance. He found work easily; no papers were needed. A year later he went to Immigration and was registered as a alien. George recently found some papers of his father’s dated prior to coming to Australia. They were stamped in English: FIT FOR WORK.
The most authoritative account of Bonegilla from an eyewitness is from Giovanni Sgro, in numerous interviews, talks and finally his autobiography. Sgro went to Bonegilla immediately on arriving from Calabria in April 1952, aged 21. He is now a retired ALP Victorian parliamentarian and has been a prominent socialist and ethnic community leader for more than 50 years, closely associated with the Federation of Italian Migrant Workers and their Families (FILEF) with whom the Greek Australian Left have worked closely for decades.
Almost within weeks of arriving, Sgro found himself in the leadership of the first struggle for jobs and dignity for migrant workers.In his autobiography Sgro, Mediterranean Son he wrote:
“There were thirty blocks, each holding 350 people, plus the recreation hall, many kitchens and offices – enormous! After we had been there for a while without any hope of work we asked the authorities to employ some Italian cooks so that we could at least eat a little all’italiana. They did that. But we were angry – not so much for ourselves, but because we couldn’t understand why the two governments, the Australian and the Italian, had made us leave Italy when they knew that there was no work.
“Word about our troubles reached Melbourne’s Italian community. They sent us the Italian priest, Father Nazzareno. Many of us went to him, to ask him to tell the authorities of our desperation. His reply was always the same: ‘Be patient, my sons.’ We had a lot of patience. After many requests, the Italian consul came from Melbourne in his 131 Fiat and in a big hall, absolutely full of people, he repeated the same message that the priest had given us. We rebelled, and only the intervention of the military police saved him. But his car was smashed to pieces. As I said, we didn’t want violence. We were only asking ‘Give us work or send us home to Italy.’ Every day after that we would lie down on the train tracks. The train had to stop because there would be hundreds of us lying there.
“We felt that all our protests up until then had been a waste of time, even the action with the consul. So a group who came from the cities, and had more experience in organising demonstrations than us Calabrians, decided to go around to all the blocks in the camp to urge all of us to rebel. Moreover, they asked each block to nominate a representative.
“Our block held a meeting and after a long debate they decided to nominate me – not because I was anyone special but because no-one wanted to do it. Later, I met three or four times with other young men like myself and we fixed the date of ‘the great revolt’, as many called it. We prepared banners. It was towards the end of June when nearly all of us marched one day, in a long procession, towards the administrative centre. Along the way we smashed many windows and set fire to some of the huts. Once they saw what was happening, the authorities alerted the police, but there were only four or five of them, not nearly enough – however, when we arrived near the centre, behind the administrative office which was our destination, four tanks appeared, followed by over 200 soldiers. When we saw them we stopped dead in our tracks – we didn’t take one step forward. A few minutes later the office manager came out, saying that he was prepared to meet with a group of ten to fifteen of us. Our request was the same as before – give us work or send us back to Italy.
“Military intervention against a civilian demonstration had been used by the English colonists when gold miners in Ballarat in far-off 1854 protested against their licences. In 1952 us immigrants were rebelling because we wanted work or repatriation. In our camp, apart from three despairing young men who committed suicide, there were no other deaths. At Ballarat the dead were many. Who knows what they would have done if we hadn’t stopped when we saw the tanks and soldiers. It certainly wasn’t a good thing for Australia to have used soldiers against civilians.
“Although the Bonegilla Revolt didn’t receive much attention from the press or public opinion at the time, nevertheless it did create great interest once those of us who had been involved began to talk about it after we had settled into the Australian community, even though perhaps ten years had passed. I spoke about it in universities and secondary schools and at many seminars and conferences. Books and theatre scripts have been written, films and documentaries have been made, but this is the first time that I have put pen to paper about it. It isn’t easy to describe the tragedy of Bonegilla – and it was a tragedy. The 10,000 of us who were there that day of the revolt saw ourselves betrayed. It happened over forty years ago but in my memory, and I’m certain in the memories of those who were there, those three months in a military camp, far from our country and our dear ones, were the worst three months of my life.”
The Bonegilla management attributed the revolt in part to “Communist activity in the centre – in the appearance of certain leaflets of Communist content and in the activities of two known Communists in the area,” wrote Sluga, who went on to say: “but the investigation done by the Special Services Branch of the police and the Department of Justice found the reasons for the revolt were the lack of money and the unemployment of migrants.” She also confirmed that “to migrate to Australia, Greeks, like Italians, must have had a clean record of socially correct beliefs – that is, not to have anything to do with Communist organisations. Yet, despite this, the Menzies government did not hesitate to characterise as ‘Communistic’ those Italians who took part in the revolt.”
Giovanni Sgro has said over many years that although many migrants had come from socially progressive and militant backgrounds, they were not politically organised on arrival. Nearly all of them were under 20 years old.
Following the 1952 revolt and later struggles, food quality and variety improved somehow and migrants were allowed out to look for work nearby, but the law kept an eye on them.
The Second Revolt
Dissatisfaction and despair over the long wait for employment, and feeling the authorities were discriminating against them in favour of blue-eyed northern Europeans, led 1000 predominantly Italians, as well as Yugoslavs and some Greeks, to stage a fiery demonstration in July 1961 in Bonegilla. The Sydney Morning Herald (23 July 23 1961) wrote: ‘They stormed the central office and caused other material damages.’ The Guardian (27 July 1961) reported: ‘When a constable tried to manhandle a demonstrator they caused a much publicised melee.’ Hot-blooded southern Europeans and Australian Communists were once again blamed by the government and the camp’s authorities.
The cries for help from Bonegilla in 1952 had reached the Greek community in Melbourne. But only the Democritus League responded. Several trips were made to Bonegilla to offer practical and moral support including some Greek delicacies. Panos Gerondakis, Dimitris Gogos and myself were the first Greeks from Melbourne to visit the camp after the 1952 revolt.
We were stopped at the gate and told to turn back, but we retreated only a short distance and managed to get in through the wire fence. The word must have gone around that Greeks from Melbourne had come to visit them and that the guards would not let them in. I remember that, as soon as we broke in, they ran to meet us as long lost brothers. The world had not entirely forgotten them; and some, on coming later to Melbourne, joined Democritus. The League protested to Immigration Minister Holt over the refusal to allow the visitors into the camp. ASIO files recorded the visit but wrongly included Basil Natsis, who was unable to make the trip at the last moment.
In 1961 Malcolm Salmon, a journalist for The Guardian, and myself, then a CPA organiser, went to Bonegilla on a press mission. This time the visit was allowed but the minders were everywhere. This didn’t stop people from giving interviews, being photographed and taking leaflets in many languages that provided information on how and where to seek assistance from community organisations and unions.
The interviews and photographs were published in The Guardian and Neos Kosmos.
Some have held the view, and certainly the authorities, that in the circumstances of postwar shortages, centres like Bonegilla had performed an essential task well in temporarily housing and sensibly distributing to industry more than one million migrants over 20 years. Such a generalisation is devoid of the human suffering. Policy makers knew very well of the volume and the ethnic composition of the incoming migrants. They took no care to understand and respond. They just ignored most of their needs.
The so-called ‘Reception and Distribution Centres’ were set up far away from capital cities to own and control migrants. Hardly any migrant found or kept for long a job in rural Australia. It was not only the inevitable overcrowding and long wait for a job but the treatment of people and the mentality behind the setting up of such centres as Bonegilla that tells the real story. People were humiliated, treated as a herd and discriminated against, as they didn’t fit the trusted Anglo-Celtic prototype. Unwillingness and inability to recognise and respond to cultural differences were rooted in the prevailing concept of the alien, until assimilation was complete. Migrant and refugee reception facilities are euphemisms for detention or concentration camps.
The Australian ruling class and its British colonial predecessors have a long history of conscripted use of convict, Aboriginal and Kanak labour. The Bonegillas of the 1950s and the refugee detention centres of the 2000s are the modern equivalents. A visit to the Immigration Museum in Melbourne does not reveal the hardships and traumas experienced by migrants. Migration is portrayed as mostly a happy adventure. The warning of Alekos Panayiotopoulos to not be taken in by those who try to beautify Bonegilla is always timely.
The decision by the Victorian state government in 2004 to fund the restoration of Bonegilla as a historical migration museum held both hope and concern. Would it show and record the experiences of the many who judged it as a detention centre, or the few who said it was OK, if not excellent? Would it display the headlines from The Age and other papers that Bonegilla was the first home in Australia for the Nazi war criminals and the birthplace of Nazism in Australia? Would it show Giovanni Sgro standing in front of tanks and the soldiers, demanding jobs and freedom?
The history of Bonegilla, like all history, should not be left to others to write and tell, but to those who lived it. A little of this has been done in this chapter.
*This article is taken from Chapter VIII of George Zangalis’s book Migrant Workers and Ethnic Communities [Their Struggles for Social Justice and Cultural Rights – The Role of Greek Australians] (p.p. 277-282). and Giovanni Sgro’s Mediterranean Son: Memoirs of a Calabrian Migrant, Scoprire il Sud, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 26-30.