Contemporary Australia and its Jewish Past, by Gillian Polack

 I’ve been explaining Jewish Australia to many people recently. This is because the antisemitism here is hurting.

Why is this emerging right now?

At the special memorial event at the Opera House on the Day of Mourning (yesterday, from where I’m typing), many Australians were shocked when they heard the perfectly normal (for Jewish Australia) reminder not to hang around and chat, to keep an eye out, to leave quickly. Until that moment, I think everyone thought their Jewish friends lived as freely as they themselves did. On top of the murders at Bondi Beach, this was an eye-opener. Why was it an eye-opener? 

Jewish Australians have not been treated well for a while now.

Bigots are saying that Jews should leave Australia. We’re not considered Australian. A new migrant said that to me personally last week. That they're working towards citizenship makes them more Australian than my five generations of family. I love it that they are becoming citizens, but my father’s mother’s family were citizens at Federation, and were here decades before then. They don’t know this. It’s not actually conceivable to them that any Jews might be born in Australia.

When someone tells me this, I talk history. History helps lead into a discussion of what is Jewish Australia and what its origins are. It also helps us understand that narratives about Jews in Australia help support the bigotry.

So what is the Jewish history of Australia?

It began in 1788 with the First Fleet and the initial colonisation of Australia by the British. There were a number of Jewish convicts on the first Fleet and at least one Jewish free settler.

That free settler was a baby, Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was a 15 year old convict, Esther Abrahams. Esther fell into an arrangement with Major George Johnston, one of the leaders of the Rum Rebellion and they became one of the power couples of the colony. To put the rebellion into perspective of British history, the governor they deposed was Bligh, the same Bligh who suffered the mutiny on the Bounty. Bligh’s daughter kept the rebels at bay with a parasol, but that’s another story. 1808 was an exciting year for the colony.

Eventually Esther married George, but they had children together before that. Those children were baptised, but their older half-sister remained Jewish, to the best of my knowledge. When Johnston was on trial in the UK for his role in the rebellion, Esther managed his holdings and pretty well managed the whole of the colony of NSW, to boot. A friend once drove me down a wide road and announced, “This is the road Esther used to race on.” She raced carriages, of course, and I cannot think of a better start to Jewish life in Australia than Esther winning her carriage races.

I was going to give you a proper potted history, but the carriage racing has led me astray. I’ll tell you about just a few of the more interesting people. I shall eschew chronology and wander wherever I feel like… until I reach the point I intend to eventually make.

First, let me wander back to the UK. A book was published there in 1890. It brought English fairy tales to life and it was written by Joseph Jacobs, who wasn’t an Australian citizen - he was a subject of the British Empire, since Australia didn’t exist at that time - but he was born in 1854 in Sydney. He wasn’t the only Jewish writer from Sydney (not by a long way), but he was one of the most influential. He gave so much of the world their standard versions of English fairy tales. He had a splendid career as a folklorist, and he also spent much of his life fighting antisemitism. He died in New York in 1916, from memory.

I don’t know why I must move from a renowned teller of fairy tales to orcas, but I must.

Last year I spent a week in Eden, exploring several subjects for my fiction. Eden is a beautiful town in the very south of NSW. It was a whaling town for a long time, since before European settlement, I suspect. Why do I suspect this? Its whaling process included locals from old Yuin families. Teams of orcas work with teams of humans. The death rate of humans in this type of whaling was phenomenally low and the orcas punished the humans if the humans didn’t behave and… I need to find out more. While I was exploring, I discovered… one of the whalers was Jewish. His name was Solomon Solomons and I am currently trying to work out if one of his relatives married one of mine.

The important aspect of Mr Solomons was not the whaling. That’s just a curiosity. His importance was that he represents a number of families who, when they came to NSW or to Victoria, set up shops and trade and even hotels in the new country towns. Without these Jewish families (including mine) Australia would have been an entirely different country. From the 1820s through to the 1930s, a single large family would help hold together a whole region. Smaller families (my mother’s grandfather’s, for instance) would connect two or three towns. Colonial Australia was all about farming, and the farmers needed goods. Not all goods were provided by Jewish traders, but that connectivity was terribly important.

It led to bright young Jewish men being brought up rurally, who then went to the Big Smoke and made it big. One of these men was Isaac Isaacs, from Yackandandah, who helped bring about the White Australia Policy (where Jews were never quite White) and who was also Australia’s first home-grown Governor-General.

Jews were not considered White in Australia under the White Australia Policy, but individual Jews were given a kind of honorary status under it. Sir John Monash (who is the main reason many in Australia’s military right are not antisemitic) didn’t benefit from this. When I chatted with locals in the Somme region a few years back, they were very surprised. They had no idea that he was Jewish. 

He nearly didn’t get the job that saved all those lives because of those lobbying against a Jewish solder becoming a general and leading at such an important time.

How did this antisemitism operate? How does it still operate)?

Violent antisemitism used to be much rarer in Australia than it is now. The quiet discrimination against individuals, even those as acclaimed as Monash, was far more typical.

There was some violence (a letterbomb led to a cousin of mine being unable to walk half a century ago, for instance), but mostly it was graffiti, and snark and discrimination. The nicer side of antisemitism was “Keep your differences to yourselves and avoiding being to obvious and we’ll accept you.” This is why so many people were surprised by the closing comment at the memorial: they had no idea that our everyday was different to theirs.

I always describe this as a Gentlemen’s Agreement variety of antisemitism, because it has a fair amount of overlap with the style depicted in Hobson’s novel. It goes right back to the early colonial days. It meant that Jews were accepted in places and professions, but not all. My great-uncle was unable to join the same golf club as his friends, for instance, and, years later, I was told, “You don’t have the right background” for certain other activities. This is a deep current in Australian culture, and still applies. Chanukah on the Beach, the event where so many people were murdered, was criticised just last month because “If Jews hadn’t been out there, celebrating, they could not have been killed.” We’re denied speech in this place and that right now because, “It won’t be safe.”

I can’t help but thinking that this would be a lovely element in an historical novel. That small thing, that trifle, that can change a whole plot. However… while it’s easy to write about the famous people in Jewish history. It’s not so easy to write about the rest of us. We’re not in historical novels. In fact, not even the famous Jewish Australians are in most historical novels. I did some research into Jews in novels by Australian historical fiction writers years ago, and there were few and none of them were major characters. No Esther Abrahams, no Rosanna, not even John Monash.

This is part of the hiding. Historically, some events expose us and make us visible. The Holocaust was one such thing. Bondi Beach in December was another. Yet the work of Linda Phillips to get Australian singers known and to compose and to give cheek to the very misogynistic journalists she worked with is only known to her family. How I know it, in fact, is because she was my father’s first cousin. She lived across three centuries and changed the world around her… but she was Jewish.

I will be writing more about our history, I think. There’s so much fodder for novels… but not if it’s hidden alongside most of Jewish Australia.

T