The Australian Women's Register

Lithuanians came in large numbers to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s as part of the wave of refugees from the Soviet-occupied Baltic states.

While most Philippines-born settlement in Australia is comparatively recent, contact between indigenous Australians and Filipino sailors in the north of the continent extends back well before Europeans arrived. Early census data shows that some of the sojourners stayed for good: there were approximately 700 Philippines-born persons in Australia at the turn of the century, mainly in Western Australia and Queensland.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 led to the introduction of policies excluding non-Europeans from entry to Australia (colloquially known as the ‘White Australia Policy’). This resulted in a significant decrease in the number of Philippines-born settlers in Australia. The number of Filipinos was down to 141 at the time of the 1947 Australian Census, and it was not until the 1950s that the population began to increase.

Significant numbers of Filipino students were allowed entry to Australia under the Colombo Plan and many chose to stay after graduation. An immigration policy reform in 1966 allowed well-qualified non-Europeans to immigrate to Australia. The Filipino population approximately doubled between every Census (every 5 years) to 1991, making it one of the fastest growing overseas-born populations in Australia.

The final repudiation of the ‘White Australia Policy’ and the declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 led to rapid growth in the Philippines-born population in Australia over the next two decades. During the 1970s, many Filipino women migrated as spouses of Australian residents. Since then, most of the Philippines-born settlers have been sponsored by a family member.

Most Filipino migration occurred during the 1980s, peaking in 1987-1988. In the 1990s, settler arrivals began to decline and the growth in the Philippines-born population slowed. The 1991 Census recorded 73,673 living in Australia.

Most Australians of Estonian origin came here because of upheavals that occurred between 1940-50. During this time something like one in five Estonians was deported or forced to flee as a direct result of the Nazi and Soviet occupations and the associated military campaigns. Most Estonians in Australia were part of, or descended from, that group that fled westward.

The first Estonian Displaced Persons arrived on the ship the General Stuart Heintzelmann in 1947. This boatload, of whom 142 were Estonian, had been carefully chosen to show Australians that Baltic Displaced People were blond, blue-eyed and thoroughly assimilable. Young and well educated, they were determined to do well in Australia but equally determined to preserve their culture. They made a conscious effort to do so and established the Estonian Archives in 1952.

Prior to the mass migration period that directly followed the second world war, very few Estonian migrants to Australia lived outside New South Wales. Their numbers were sufficient enough, however, to form organisations and provide community support to the post-war Displaced Person community that grew after 1947. After this time, significant communities grew up in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Most of this scattered but well organised population came about as the result of a burst of immigration between 1947 and 1952, with a small number arriving until 1958, but very few after that time.

Mrs Ilona Hrubos was born in the town of Mahr, Schonberg in the Sudetenland, in 1928. At the end of the Second World War she, like millions of others, became a refugee. She, her husband and child migrated to Australia, arriving in Fremantle on 1 January 1951. They lived first in the Northam migrant camp, moving to Glen Forrest in April of 1951.

Meitka Gruszka is a member of the Polish community in Western Australia who has taken an active role in multicultural issues. As well as being a leader in the Polish community, having served as President of the Polish Association of Western Australia, she was involved in a number of multicultural organisations. At various times throughout the 80s and 90s she was a member of the Ethnic Communities Council of Western Australia, the Catholic Migrant Centre and the National Ethnic and Multicultural Broadcasters’ Council.

The Catholic Migrant Centre has been crucial to the provision of support services to immigrants to Perth for over twenty years.

Anastasia Bekas was born in Greece in the late 1930s, the youngest of four children. She liked school and was a good student, her teachers encouraged her to attend high school. Unfortunately, she could not live this dream because, as was customary at the time, she had to leave school because her help was required to run the farm. She was a good, hard worker, but in the end her father encouraged her to migrate to Australia, as a way of avoiding the dowry he would eventually have to supply should she stay in Greece. The Australian government was keen to attract single Greek girls to the country at this time. As long as she had somewhere to stay, they would pay her fare. ‘You are healthy, you are going to Australia’, she was told. ‘So I have to go.’

She migrated to Australia, where her sister already lived, in December 1963 and arrived in Adelaide, where she would settle, on January 14, 1964. Adjustment was difficult, with the lack of English language skills being the major problem.

The Panhellenic Women’s Movement was a broad-based, progressive women’s organisation established in 1977 in order to assist and represent Australian women of Greek heritage.

Although there was some Latvian migration to Australia in the aftermath of the abortive 1905 revolution against Tsarist Russia, the most significant wave of Latvian emigrants arrived after the second world war. During the war Latvia was under Soviet occupation and the Latvian people were subjected to oppression and mass deportations. By 1945, 156,000 Latvians had escaped to western Europe. They were among the 12 million war refugees awaiting resettlement in Displaced Persons camps. Approximately 20,000 Latvians arrived in Australia between November 27, 1947, and the end of 1952.

Between 1970 and 1980 and beyond, Dzidra Knochs studied arts and crafts, education and art history at Flinders University and the South Australian school of art. Having some knowledge of Russian and Italian, she worked for many years as a journalist in the area of the Arts for the Melbourne newspaper Australijas Latvietis (Australian Latvian) as well as freelancing for overseas journals and newspapers. She has exhibited her visual artwork in all Australian capital cities and also in Canada, and has organised many art exhibitions. Knochs is a member of the Royal South Australian Society of Art, Contemporary Art Society and secretary of the Latvian art society of South Australia (A.L.M.A). The most well known of her exhibitions is the Forgotten Immigrants and Australians exhibition, held in the Old Parliament House, Adelaide in October 1988, which showcased photographic images of immigrants from the late 1940s.

The first branch of the Ukrainian Women’s Association was formed on September 13th, 1949 in Cowra migrant camp. Mrs. I Polensly was the inaugural president. Ukrainian women were holding meetings in all the migrant centres across Australia, however Cowra is always considered to be the cradle of the U.W.A in Australia

Ukraine is located on the northern coast of the Black Sea in south-eastern Europe. The area of present-day Ukraine was populated only by Scythian nomads until the 6th century AD, when Slavic people begin to settle in the area. An organised political entity, known as Rus, evolved around Kyiv. (Russia, which later evolved around the principality of Moscow, did not yet exist).

In the fifteenth century Ukraine became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and then of the Polish-Lithuanian ‘Commonwealth’ (Rzeczpospolita), until the eastern half of the country was finally annexed by Muscovy in the seventeenth century. With the annexation of the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth by Russia in 1795, the whole of Ukraine came under Russia’s rule until 1918.

Ukrainians managed to establish an independent Ukrainian state in 1918, but it could not withstand simultaneous attacks by Poland from the west and Russia from the east. Ultimately the fighting ended in the partition of Ukraine between Poland and the USSR. Ukrainians suffered greatly under Stalin’s repression during the inter-war period. An artificially-induced famine, in which Ukrainians estimate about six million
people died, was used by Stalin to forcibly implement the collectivisation of agriculture in Ukraine. Ukraine remained occupied by the USSR until 1991, when the latter was dismantled.

It is believed that prior to World War I up to 5,000 Ukrainian workers had settled in Australia. Ukraine was a major area of conflict in World War II and many Ukrainians fled to Western Europe, where they were interned as Displaced Persons (DPs). The first Ukrainians began arriving from the refugee camps in late 1948. They came to Australia on assisted passages which included two-year work contracts with the Commonwealth Government. Among the migrants were priests, lawyers, doctors and engineers, but the vast majority were people from a rural background.

The 1947 census did not list Ukraine as a birthplace, but the 1954 Census recorded 14,757 Ukraine-born. After that the number of migrants from the Soviet Ukraine was negligible, apart from some Ukrainian Jews. There was also limited migration of Ukrainians from communities in Poland and
Yugoslavia. Migration from Ukraine has only been significant since independence in 1991. The 1996 Census recorded 13,460 Ukraine-born people resident in Australia (up from 9,051 at the 1991 Census). Most live in Victoria and New South Wales.

The first contact between Poland-born people and Australia occurred in 1696, when several citizens of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth were included in the crew of Captain Willem Vlamingh’s Dutch expedition which explored the Western Australian coast. The first Polish settler in Australia was a convict who arrived in 1803 and became a successful wheat farmer in Tasmania.

Later arrivals included a group of Poland born people who established a community in South Australia which grew to about 400 people by the 1880s. Some Poles joined the goldrush to Australia in the 1850s. The 1921 Australian Census recorded 1,780 Poland born residents and by the 1933 Census their number had almost doubled.

Following World War II, many Polish refugees came to Australia and during the period between 1947 and 1954, the Poland born population increased from 6,573 to 56,594 people. Many refugees worked under a two-year contract in unskilled jobs and continued in similar work for a period after their contracts ended. There was further emigration from Poland to Australia after the Polish government relaxed its emigration laws with almost 15,000 Poland born people coming to Australia between the years 1957 and 1966. By the 1966 Census, the Poland-born population had reached 61,641 people.

In the early 1980s there was further Polish emigration from Poland to Australia. The emergence of the Solidarity trade union movement and the declaration of martial law in Poland at the end of 1981 coincided with a further relaxation of Polish emigration laws. During the period 1980-91 Australia granted permanent entry to more than 25,000 Poland-born settlers, many arriving as refugees. The Poland-born population of Australia peaked at 68,496 at the 1991 Census. Since then the improvement in living conditions in Poland, as well as more stringent migration criteria, have significantly reduced the levels of Polish migration to Australia from the high levels of 1981-85.

The review of Post Arrival Programs and Services to Migrants was established by Cabinet decision and announced by the Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Malcolm Fraser, on August 31, 1977. Established in order to ensure that the changing needs of migrants were being met by available resources, the review was conducted under prime ministerial authority in order to circumvent some allegedly obstructionist senior bureaucrats in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. The first meeting of the Review Group, which was chaired by Mr Frank Galbally, C.B.E, was held on 1 September 1977. The committee of review consulted widely, seeking submissions from individuals and organisations, government and non-government. Advice from migrant community groups was actively sought.

The report brought down by the review group, Migrant Services and Programs, was submitted to
the Prime Minister on 27 April 1978 and tabled by him on 30 May 1978. It was made available in Arabic, Dutch, English, German, Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese. In it, the Review Group came down with a total number of fifty-seven recommended improvements to
programs and services involving expenditure of about $50 million in such areas as initial settlement and education, especially the teaching of English, with emphasis placed on the role of ethnic communities themselves, and other levels of government, to encourage multiculturalism.

Of particular significance to migrant women was recommendation number 43, which stated ‘the implementation of the general recommendations of the Report, which have been framed in recognition of the special problems of migrant women, should take particular account of their needs’.

Conducted at a time, according to the committee, when Australia was ‘at a critical stage in the development of a cohesive, united, multicultural nation’, the Galbally review of Post Arrival Programs and Services to Migrants marks an important development in the evolution of Australian official policy towards settlers from one of assimilation to multiculturalism. Its pointed reference to the needs of women also marked a moment when ethnic and gender politics connected.

Dorothy Buckland-Fuller was a sociologist and social activist of some longstanding, with a distinguished career in ethnic and multicultural politics, particularly as they impact upon women of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She was a peace activist, an environmentalist, a feminist and committed to the cause of reconciliation with indigenous Australia.

Of Greek heritage, Buckland-Fuller had a long involvement with the Greek Community of New South Wales, and her valuable contributions were acknowledged in 2001 when she was granted Life Membership to the Council of the Greek Orthodox Community of Sydney and New South Wales. In 1974, she established the Australian-Migrant Women’s Association, an organisation designed to bring together immigrant and Australian-born women.

She was active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, serving as president in 2002-4. As a sociologist, she taught and conducted action research. Her life has been a case of putting that theory to practice. In her own words, she was an ‘action oriented person’.

Dorothy Buckland-Fuller passed away in Sydney on 5 July 2019. She will be remembered for her words resounding in the ears of all those who knew her over her great life: “I will continue to work for equal rights for all and the betterment of our society for as long as I live”.

The Australian-Migrant Women’s Association was established by Dorothy Buckland-Fuller in 1974 to bring together immigrant and Australian-born women to discuss matters of common interest. Buckland-Fuller, who had some influence within the Greek community in New South Wales, was concerned that Greek women were often too inward looking. She wanted to expose them to new ideas and open lines of communication between them and other women of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Buckland-Fuller was assisted by International Women’s Year funding in 1975 to promote the initiative. She received a small grant to assist in running a program of monthly meetings as the premises of the Greek Orthodox Community of New South Wales in Sydney. These meetings brought together about one hundred women at a time from different ethnic communities, as well as Buckland-Fuller’s friends from the Women’s Electoral Lobby and academic circles.

The Greek Orthodox Community is one of Australia’s oldest organisations representing Greek migrants. Apart from operating churches, it provides a wide range of migrant related social services, including afternoon Greek schools, kindergartens and aged care hostels. In more recent times, it has taken on board the need to meet its members’ cultural and artistic aspirations. This has involved a shift in emphasis towards promoting and supporting cultural initiatives not only of Greek/Australians of New South Wales but of all Australia.
In the 1970s and 80s the organisations premises were used to host meetings of the Australian-Migrant Women Association, an organisation established by Dorothy Buckland-Fuller with the aim of broadening the horizons of Australian-Greek women.

Vivi Koutsounadis-Germanos is a Greek born psychologist and counsellor who helped to establish and now heads the Ethnic Childcare Development Unit based in Marrickville, Sydney, New South Wales. She has had a high level of involvement in the Sydney Greek Orthodox Community for several years and served as president of the Greek Orthodox Community of New South Wales in 2000. She helped to establish a national organisation for Greek Welfare Workers. She has also enjoyed an international profile as president of an international organisation of pre-school educators. In 2002, she went to the United Nations, where she lobbied the high commissioner of refugees about the need to tackle the problems experienced by children in detention.

The Ethnic Childcare Development Unit was established in 1980, one of many initiatives funded through grant-in-aid programs that emerged in the wake of the Galbally Review of Migrant Post-arrival programs and services. It’s aim was to train immigrant women, many whom had overseas qualifications that were not recognised, to work in child-are centres and introduce multicultural programs.

The experience of Greek-Australians is an integral part of Australian History. Since first arriving in the late 1810s, Greeks have made significant contributions to the nation’s cultural diversity and prosperity. Today, descendants of the earliest arrivals, immigrants, and their Australian-born children inhabit vital communities throughout the country, the inheritors of a vigorous Greek culture secured through the determined efforts of their forebears.

Marian Eldridge was an acclaimed short-story writer, novelist and poet, and was instrumental in establishing the ACT Writers Centre. Her legacy is the Marian Eldridge Award to nurture promising women writers.

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Marion Halligan was an acclaimed author of novels, short stories, reviews, essays and gastronomic writing.

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Dorothy Horsfield has worked as a journalist in Australia and overseas. Her published novels include Dream Run (1992) and Venom (2006)

(This entry was sponsored by a generous donation from Christine Foley.)

Dorothy Johnston is an award-winning novelist, poet, short story writer, and author of reviews and literary essays. Her crime writing portrays the darker side of Canberra.

(This entry is sponsored by generous donation from Christine Foley.)

The Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women of Australia (ANESBWA) was established in 1987, with the aim of promoting access and equity for the culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) women of Australia. The founding members argued that women could not rely on the male heads of existing multicultural, ethnic and feminist organisations to represent their interests and that they must speak up for themselves.

As well as networking with women in state and territory Ethnic Community Councils, ANESBWA sought to link up with existing organisations that catered for women, such as social, cultural and political groups. A key feature of the organisation was that it was not ethnically aligned and was therefore in a position to cut across multicultural politics to lobby on behalf of all CALD women.

According to an executive member of the organisation, ANESBWA ceased operating in 1997, due in large part to the federal government of the day removing funding. It was deemed by the Coalition government that migrant women of CALD background should simply function under the auspices of FECCA (the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia), thus ignoring the women’s need for an autonomous voice. Nowadays, CALD women are represented by the Network of Immigrant and Refugee Women of Australia.

Matina Mottee is the Australian born child of Greek migrants who arrived in Australia in the early twentieth century. Her father emigrated from Greece in 1905 as a 12 year old and eventually settled in Tasmania where Matina was born.

Mottee was instrumental in establishing the Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women and in 1987 became that organisation’s first convener. In 1988 her extensive work on behalf of women in migrant communities was recognised when she was awarded the QANTAS Ethnic Communities Award. In keeping with her egalitarian ethics, however, she chose to interpret the award as honouring all immigrant women, not just Matina Mottee.

Upon accepting her award in 1988, Mottee said, ‘I have struggled from [a young age] for equality of opportunity for both my gender and my race.’ Her continued work on the behalf women of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, at an age when others might have considered retirement, indicates that her attitude and motivation has not changed.

Born in the Netherlands in 1941, Beryl Mulder lived in Surinam and Zambia before migrating to Australia in 1982. She has worked in Multicultural Affairs for more than 20 years, in government agencies (including for the Office of Multicultural Affairs) and in non-government organisations (such as the Multicultural Council of the Northern Territory.) In 2006 she served as Senior Deputy Chair of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils.

Beryl Mulder completed a Bachelor degree in the Social Sciences as a mature age student and has a special interest in access and equity, advocacy, anti- racism, reconciliation and immigrant women’s issues. She is a founding member of the Association of Non-English Speaking Background Women of Australia (ANESBWA) and is a volunteer community worker with immigrants and refugees from non-English speaking backgrounds in the Northern Territory.