The Western Australian Immigration file of papers for the arrival of the First Transport party includes a letter of thanks additional to the one from Roberts Miezitis we have looked at already.
This one's 14 December date and the phrase, "leaving for Canberra" suggest that it was written in the Bonegilla camp. The envelope filed with it is addressed to the Commander of the Graylands "Immigration Centre". You will remember that Graylands army base is where all the women were housed during their Perth stopover.
The group who went to Canberra on 14 December, according to the Bonegilla cards, were 5 women only, all destined to work in the Acton Guest House. They were 4 Latvians and a Lithuanian. Four were to work as waitresses. One Latvian became a cleaner or, in the terminology of the day, a "domestic".
The name may make you think that Acton Guest House was some sort of holiday destination but, in fact, it was a home for public servants who were yet to buy their own homes in Canberra. More soon.
Here is a copy of the original letter. There also is a typed copy on the same file.
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| Source: National Archives of Australia |
We have to wonder if this was the first time that the phrase "New Australians" was used in writing. Within months, the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, was urging the press and the public to use it instead of "Balts".
For this reason, Balts now has something of a derogatory tone about it in some people's minds, whereas there is written evidence that it had been used for decades at least as the normal description for people from the three Baltic states.
From the Second Transport on, through another 147 ship arrivals, the passengers came from a variety of Eastern European nations in addition to the Baltic States. "Balts" was now a misnomer.
SOURCE
National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Western Australian Branch; PP482/1, Correspondence files [nominal rolls], single number series; 82, General Heintzelman - arrived Fremantle 28 November 1947 - nominal rolls of passengers https://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=439196 accessed 27 June 2025.
On a quick look at Trove's records the term 'New Australian' appears to have been used throughout the war years to refer to a range of new immigrants, from British child evacuees to returning servicemens' foreign wives. It does not seem to have been a totally new term coined by Arthur Calwell or his department in relation to migrants under the Mass Migration Scheme. The first media use in relation to the Balts was at least a few months before the arrival of the First Transport: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/158783224?searchTerm=new%20Australians%20Balts
ReplyDeleteThank you for that check, Jonas Mockunas. On the other hand, the earliest use of Balts I have noted is in two 1920 file titles in the National Archives, which were about the possible resettlement in Australia of Baltic Germans leaving the newly independent Baltic States. I've tried checking the use of Balts in Trove too, but the search result contained too many OCR errors for me to want to persist.
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