Lemmon was aware, though, that the Commonwealth did not have the power to compulsorily acquire land for the scheme—that was the state’s function. Playing on the rivalry between Evatt and Jack Dedman, the Minister for Post-War Reconstruction, Chifley made plans to put the Snowy scheme under the aegis of the Defence Act and declared, ‘Of course, Jack Dedman said you can’t use the Defence Act for things like this.’ Immediately Evatt announced that the option should be explored as a hopeful lead. So Lemmon introduced into Parliament a bill to set up an authority ‘with adequate power to construct the largest public works undertaking ever conceived in the history of our country’.
Under the scheme, the Snowy River and a number of other eastern watercourses were to be channelled westwards by means of tunnels to ungate the interior and generate electricity on the way. The scheme was envisaged as having two distinct sections—the Snowy–Tumut development in the north of the mountains, and the Snowy–Murray development to the south. The Snowy–Tumut section entailed the diversion of the Eucumbene, the Upper Murrumbidgee and the Tooma rivers to the Tumut River—itself a tributary of the Murrumbidgee. The Snowy–Murray development involved the diversion of the Snowy River to the Swampy Plain River, a tributary that then flowed into the Murray.
The scheme, developed in rough and precipitous terrain, would require two main water storages, Jindabyne and Adaminaby dams (Adaminaby Dam would later become Eucumbene Dam), and from them accumulated waters would pass through a system of tunnels and reservoirs, and by falling from higher to lower levels, would generate energy to be tapped by power stations built at various stages of the scheme. In all, it was estimated that the scheme would require the construction of 225 kilometres of tunnels, pipelines and aqueducts, sixteen smaller dams, seven major dams and seven power stations (most of them underground), and 800 kilometres of race lines to intercept subsidiary mountain streams.
There were several applicants for the post of managing the scheme. Bill Hudson, New Zealand–born, was chosen. Hudson had built dams in Scotland, and in Sydney he had worked for the Water Board. Also in his favour was the fact that he was willing to be based in the Snowy Mountains, where others wanted to run the process from Sydney and visit the projects once a month. However, Lemmon thought that before appointing him ‘the trade union blokes’ should be asked about him. According to Lemmon, he was told, ‘He’ll listen to you. He won’t be like some tin pot boss.’ Dedman, war’s Mr Austerity, disliked the way Lemmon had managed to retain control over the Snowy scheme, even though it had originally got through under the auspices of Dedman’s former portfolio of Defence. Now, in the selection process for chief engineer, Dedman complained that there should be three nominees, not just one. Lemmon, who like the others had not seen Hudson yet, passed the prime minister a piece of paper with ‘Hudson, Hudson and Hudson’ written on it. So Hudson was appointed.
Lemmon’s subsequent first impression of Hudson was that he was a little frail, carrying himself to one side. He confessed to Lemmon that he had a ‘sleeping appendix’ and it was one of his bad days. ‘But if I’d told you I was crook, you probably wouldn’t want to see me anymore.’ He quickly showed Lemmon a map of Cooma and indicated where the headquarters could go. Lemmon insisted he have his appendix out as a condition of his holding the post.
Prime Minister Chifley, according to his hopeful visions, predicted that Cooma or Tumut would be transformed into ‘a Quebec arising in the south eastern corner of our Continent’. He emphasised the defence aspects, for the Snowy Mountains scheme would be less vulnerable to attack than the industrial plants on the coast. The official ceremony to mark the beginning of the scheme took place on 17 October 1949, before invited guests in a deep gorge on the Eucumbene River. The entire population of nearby and soon-to-be-drowned Adaminaby turned out for the occasion. No member of the parliamentary Liberal Party attended the opening, but a few months later Menzies would inherit it. Lemmon, who would lose his Western Australian seat, would be so depressed that he ‘was in bed for a month later . . . I’d worked too damned hard pushing it [the scheme] through’. But at least he had hired the major administrators and engineers on high salaries with the deliberate intention that ‘if they [the Liberals] tried to toss it out, they’d have a mighty lot of money to pay out!’
The scheme in itself was extraordinary in scope, but would not fulfil Chifley’s or Lemmon’s predictions of utterly transforming the interior. However, as an adventure in absorbing newcomers into a nation of eight million Anglo-Saxon/Celts, it would have a startling impact. It is a little surprising to find that only some one hundred thousand people worked on the Snowy Mountains scheme, but the immigrants who worked there, the ‘wogs’ and ‘reffos’, made an impact on the popular imagination because they were new people.
In May 1950, Roy Robinson, a young engineer with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority, was sent to Europe with instructions to select over six hundred tradesmen and as much of the top engineering and surveying talent as he could muster. The bulk labour needs were being met from three areas—displaced persons from the refugee camps of post-war Europe, assisted migrants from Europe, and Australians. In a refugee camp in Italy, where he had lived for three years, Ivan Kobal, a Slovenian, rushed with others to sign a two-year contract to work on the scheme: ‘We were so wrapped up in the desire to get away, it wouldn’t have mattered [what it was]. We were prepared to agree to anything.’
Kobal owed his chance to the remarkable Sir Robert Jackson, former Australian naval officer and, from 1945 to 1947, the senior deputy director-general of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) the body that looked after the displaced persons’ camps and futures. Jackson was one of the most influential and noble-hearted Australians of his generation. He had powerful associations, as his letters held at Columbia University show, and they included Fiorello La Guardia, who served as head of UNRRA for most of 1946; Anastas Mikoyan, Soviet Minister for Foreign Trade; and Sir Frederick Morgan, appointed in 1943 Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander before the Supreme Allied Commander himself was appointed. (The Supreme Allied Commander was envisaged to be British but was in fact always a phantom. This did not reflect on Morgan’s work, though, and he was UNRRA head from 1945 until in 1951 he accused others of diverting funds to the Zionist movement, whose aim was the creation of the state of Israel.)
Born in Melbourne on 8 November 1911, Jackson had served in the Australian navy from 1929 to 1937, when he transferred to the Royal Navy in Malta. He planned the Malta Combined Defence Scheme and was involved in planning the delivery of food supplies to the civilian population. Then he was appointed director-general of the Middle East Supply Centre and principal assistant to the UK Minister of State from 1942 to 1945, coordinating civilian supply operations as well as military ones. He helped the British organise their aid supplies to Russia. By 1945, still only in his early thirties, he was in charge of UNRRA’s operations in Europe, including care for 8.5 million displaced persons.
Henry van Zile Hyde, an American official, worked for Jackson at the headquarters of the Middle East Supply Centre in Cairo, which determined civilian requirements for every country in the region, and licensed the import of supplies. Van Zile Hyde described the director of the supply scheme as ‘a very remarkable 35-year-old Australian, then a Commander in the British Navy . . . He was able to keep on top of every detail of that vast operation, while at the same time concerning himself with its impact upon the post war economy in Europe, America and the rest of the world.’ The general commanding the Middle East at the end of the war had received a cable saying, ‘Do anything Jackson asks. Signed Churchill.’ Van Zile Hyde wrote, ‘I had the opportunity of working under a man I consider a great man.’
Jackson later recalled the chaos in Europe at the time. ‘At the end of the war, apart from the tragic survivors of the concentration camps in Germany, we had eight and a half million Displaced Persons—you know, flotsam and jetsam of the war. We managed to get about six
million of them back to their homes in Europe and the Middle East, but we had the best part of three million who did not want to return, and no government would take them. So I went to see Mr Chifley.’ Chifley asked how many they wanted Australia to have and Jackson said, ‘Well, Sir, can you take 100,000?’ Chifley asked why Australia should take a hundred thousand and was told that whoever took them would get the cream of the crop. But he did also say, ‘Hold on though, not too many Poles! We don’t want another Buffalo City over here.’ So Jackson said, ‘We needn’t take too many Poles, there are plenty of Balts as well.’ Chifley said he would have to convince Calwell, the Immigration minister.
In fact, 170,000 displaced persons came to Australia between 1947 and 1952, bearing their United Nations displaced persons/refugee identity cards. According to Jackson, Chifley’s alacrity in accepting displaced persons had global repercussions. Jackson attributes the eventual solution of the refugee crisis in part to ‘Mr Chifley’s immense contribution at that point’.
Though by the mid-1950s the ‘Populate or Perish!’ principle honoured by Calwell had attracted a further two million assisted migrants, they all ran the risk of being spoken of as displaced persons (DD), since the term DD bulked so high in the Australian imagination. Few people could say exactly how many of the new ethnic arrivals, considered by many traditional Australians to be threats, belonged to the ‘displaced’.
But the displacement was real. Some of them had been drafted to Germany as forced labour during the war and did not want to return to the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. Some were ex-POWs, and there were even some who were afraid to return to their homelands because of possible retaliation for supposed or real collaboration with the Germans. To be welcomed by Australia, the displaced had to be healthy and politically acceptable, which in a small margin of cases meant former pro-Fascists crept into the mass. The year 1948 was one in which a lot of people arriving at Australian ports had either lost or discarded the names they were born with. Some had chosen to anglicise their Eastern European names, which in many cases had in any case been transcribed incorrectly by officers of the International Refugee Organization or the mobile Australian migration selection teams who moved around the displaced persons camps of Germany and Italy. Some refugees gave false names deliberately, shedding old identities to slip into the camps in war’s chaotic aftermath.
Mark Aarons, a writer who would become chief advisor to a future Labor premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, has argued that there were significant numbers of displaced persons who had sided with the Nazis—such as Ukrainians, anti-Communist Balts, Poles, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Scandinavian Quislings (Nazi collaborators)—and not a few demobbed German soldiers and their families. Konrads Kalejs of Latvia was one of the Nazi collaborators allowed into Australia at the end of World War II. Kalejs, it was claimed much later, was the commander of a Latvian killing unit that murdered at least thirty thousand Jews, gypsies and Communists between 1941 and 1945. He belonged to the Latvian Auxiliary Security Force, also called the Latvian SS. Much later, in 1987, Rudolf Soms, another member of the commando unit to which Kalejs had belonged gave Latvian authorities a statement in which he described how Lieutenant Kalejs had led an attack on Sannaki, a Russian village, ‘burnt it down and annihilated the inhabitants’. This was one of three villages Kalejs was accused of torching. He became commandant of the Nazi slave labour camp at Salaspils, south-east of Riga in Latvia, where some twenty-five thousand Russian Jews, undesirables and Soviet soldiers were shot or starved to death. Kalejs went to Britain after the war, but anti-Communist authorities there sent him to Australia since it was believed Australia would not pursue him for his crimes. He would take Australian citizenship in 1957.
Years later, Andrew Menzies QC would report to the Federal government that between July 1947 and December 1951, ‘it is more likely than not that a significant number of persons who committed serious war crimes in World War Two had entered Australia’. Menzies would give the government the names of seventy suspects.
Since men like Kalejs had to share immigration camps in Australia with many Jews and others, it would be interesting to know what their inner feelings were like. Amongst Kalejs’s co-immigrants at Bonegilla migrant camp in Victoria was a man named Ivanovic, a Croatian who was a block supervisor in the camp. When in 1950 the Yugoslav government requested his extradition as a war criminal, the Australian government refused to hand him over and this gave a Communist regime, Tito’s, a victory. The Commonwealth Investigation Service (CIS) informed the government that Ivanovic had admitted to being the under-secretary for Transport and Communication in the Nazi-controlled administration of Yugoslavia from May 1942 to the end of 1944. The CIS had reported soon after his arrival in Australia that Ivanovic ‘is very anti-Communist’ and ‘claims to have worked with the Intelligence Services of England and America while domiciled in Austria’.
In 1951, ASIO’s director-general, Brigadier Charles Spry, advised the Federal government not to hand over two well-known Yugoslav Fascists, Milorad Lukic and Mihailo Rajkovic, because of their capacity to report on left-wing Yugoslav immigrants. ‘They are unceasing in their campaign against Communism and can and do assist ASIO to the limit of their ability,’ wrote Spry.
Former Fascist leaders also helped supervise mass labour forces on construction programs such as the Snowy Mountains scheme. For example, Lyenko Urbancic, a Slovenian Nazi collaborator, was protected by the British authorities from Yugoslav government requests for his extradition in 1946. He was accepted for immigration under Australia’s Displaced Persons Scheme just eighteen months later, though he did not work on the Snowy River.
Immigration minister Calwell received bitter complaints from working-class refugees, including liberated slave labourers, that they had discovered Nazis on their refugee ships and in their migrant camps. When the CIS reported to him that some displaced persons were indeed former SS men, Calwell described it as nonsense. His head of department wrote to the CIS instructing it that SS tattoos, or the existence of scars where they’d been erased, were not grounds for rejecting potential immigrants. Calwell was forced to say that the lie had already been given to claims made about a ship named the Volendam, which had transported displaced persons to Australia. He accepted the word of Captain Kleyn, the master, that he had heard no report of the presence of a supposed thirty-three former SS officers on the ship. The captain also denied rumours that a fight broke out on the ship between displaced persons who were former concentration camp prisoners and former Nazi guards. A man who had identified a fellow passenger as a Nazi guard claimed that there had been five hundred other former Nazi guards he had seen at one time or another in displaced persons camps.
But overall the displaced were genuine cases and often came from a number of European countries that had been subsumed into the Soviet Union through Russia’s military successes in the east. Some of them came from Estonia, a country of 1.25 million; one of the Estonian refugees, Ksenia Nasielski, lamented, ‘On the new maps, it doesn’t exist anymore.’ She had a fairly characteristic displaced-persons background and reason to escape the Soviets—both her parents had been sent to Siberia.
Latvia and Lithuania were subsumed also. Many Latvians were shipped out to other Western countries by the Soviet Union as early as 1939 and replaced within their former countries with Russians. In the winter of 1944, one of the worst of winters, further Latvians set out westwards towards Germany, escaping the Russians. With his mother and his siblings, eleven-year-old Ivars Freimanis travelled in railway trucks beneath Tiger tanks being shunted back into Czechoslovakia and on into Germany, near Thüringen. They tried to reach Switzerland, and managed to get within ten kilometres of the border. For four years, from 1945 to 1949, they lived in a refugee camp run by UNRRA at Ravensburg near Lake Constance. At last they were offered the option of Venezuela or Australia. Freimanis turned fifteen on the boat to Australia, which meant that he could still attend school instead of fulfilling the two-year work req
uirement.
Joe Morgan was an assisted migrant to Australia, a Pole whose name had previously been Joseph Blyszczyk. He and his family had been taken to the Soviet Union forcibly in 1939. Following the invasion of Russia in 1941, Morgan was able to get out and join the Free Polish Army, and he fought in the Middle East and at the Battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. He spent fourteen months as part of an Allied occupation force in Italy and then went to Britain where he worked for a year in a coal mine. One Sunday morning, a friend saw an ad in the paper stating that single men were wanted for Australia. ‘We applied for immigration, and two weeks later got our papers to go.’ He was a migrant rather than a displaced person, but the contract was about the same for both.
Jan Klima had fought for the partisans in Czechoslovakia; after the area in which he was engaged was taken over by the Russians, he was attracted by the Communist message, though Czechoslovakia was still independent. In 1945 he joined a prestigious military academy in Moravia to train as an officer. But by 1948 the Communist and pro-Soviet line was beginning to sour for many Czechs. The Communists within the army and the national government, however, took over the country, with the Russians standing by to help if necessary. Now Klima’s academy received Russian advisors. Klima graduated as an officer in 1949 and spent a lot of time watching old people and young being rounded up for re-education, including members of his family. He heard from a fellow officer that he was slated for re-education, which for army officers generally involved working in uranium mines. It was easier for Klima and some of his colleagues to escape than for a civilian, since they had permits to be in the border area and a friend of Kilma’s had provided him with a timetable of patrols. They were able to cross the border and turn themselves in to a German border officer. Klima began to look around for emigration opportunities. Farmers went to Argentina, said Klima, blacksmiths to Brazil, and Sweden took the ones with TB. Canada was looking for forestry workers and so Klima registered, but the Canadian doctor didn’t consider him husky enough for timber felling. ‘Australia didn’t ask for any skills—once you were medically fit, they marked you down as a labourer on your papers from that day on.’