Beautiful Balts, from displaced persons to new Australians, Jayne Persian
Type
Label
Beautiful Balts, from displaced persons to new Australians, Jayne Persian
Language
eng
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-238) and index
Illustrations
portraitsplatesillustrations
Index
index present
Literary Form
non fiction
Main title
Beautiful Balts
Nature of contents
bibliography
Responsibility statement
Jayne Persian
Sub title
from displaced persons to new Australians
Summary
Over 170000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952-the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants. Under the slogan of 'populate or perish', Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for 'white' refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as 'Beautiful Balts' - yet as this book shows, many of the 'Beautiful Balts' were not Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian. Amid 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 the Second World War to a new life in a land of opportunity where prejudice, parochialism, and strident anti-communism were rife. Persian investigates who they really were, why Australia wanted them and what they experienced after migrating halfway across the world
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