Exile in art: Dunera stories

„Dunera: Stories of Internment“ in Sydney

Today, the State Library of New South Wales has the world’s most comprehensive collection on the subject of Dunera. For years, the visual work of the Dunera Boys has also been consistently concentrated there. The State Library also fulfils its mission to make its collections available to the public. A few days ago, the exhibition “Dunera: Stories of Internment” opened in Sydney.

Visitors are invited to gain an insight into the experiences of the Jews and Nazi opponents deported from Great Britain in 1940 during the 57-day horror journey on the Dunera and to share in their lives behind the barbed wire of the Hay, Orange and Tatura internment camps by means of around 200 works of art by Dunera Boys, excerpts from diaries and other contemporary testimonies. The feelings of the internees, with which they dealt with their situation in exile in different ways, also become clear through the artistic representation.

Curators Louise Anemaat (lead curator, State Library of NSW), Seumas Spark (Dunera Association) and Andrew Trigg (State Library of NSW) organised the tour in the chronological sections journey, camp life at Hay, Orange and Tatura Camps and after the camp period.

A first insight into the work and an impression of the exhibition is provided online by 55 portrait drawings made by some of the artists of their comrades and further information from the State Library on the Internet.

An echo right up to our present

The exhibition’s lead curator Louise Anemaat is Executive Director, Library Services and Dixson Librarian at the State Library New South Wales. Source: State Library of NSW.

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The adjacent text by Louise Anemaat is taken from “Dunera: Stories of Internment”, exhibition guide, State Library of NSW (2024). Copyright: State Library of NSW.

The Dunera collections are an eyewitness record of the activity and remarkable creativity and determination, and also the lethargy, boredom and despair of everyday life in Australia’s internment camps during the Second World War. They record an important aspect of Australian wartime experience; of the transportation and internment of foreigners; of the Jewish diaspora; of the attitudes of the British and Australian governments to refugees during the Second World War; and the British view of Australia as a destination for their “unwanted”, another story with a long history.

The Dunera collections document a generation rapidly fading from living memory. It is thought only one former Dunera internee remains alive today. Their stories are the connection between that period of internment and our present. The explicit intention of gathering and preserving the record of Dunera is not just to archive the past, but to understand how this now distant history echoes, and at times repeats, our present.

Georg Teltscher painted the barbed wire fence of the Hay camp (New South Wales) with guard box in 1940. Copyright: Mitchell Library, State Library New of South Wales.

The exhibition “Dunera: Stories of Internment” is shown free of charge at the State Library of NSW at Shakespeare Place in Sydney. There is an accompanying programme.

Service info on the exhibition