The White Australia policy was behind thousands of deportations, many of them illegal, which took place at the end of the second world war. Families were torn apart, Australian-born women were stripped of their citizenship and Asian-born men who had served in the Australian armed forces were ordered to leave the country they had fought for.
It is a part of Australia’s dark history that has been largely buried for decades.
Forgetting is crucial to the creation of a nation, 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan once observed. Now, 150 years on, another Ernest on the other side of the world is exhuming the buried history of government-enforced racism, often implemented in the face of public resistance.
A research paper will be published by Ernest Koh, a historian specialising in south-east Asian history, later this year, with a book to follow. The University of Canberra academic’s work – titled Stateless Love: War, Interracial Marriage, and Australia’s Asian Deportations 1946-1950 – has already been the subject of a documentary produced by CNA in Singapore and broadcast by PBS America in the UK, but which is yet to be screened in Australia.
Five years ago, Koh began researching Chinese merchant sailors living in north-west England who were recruited into the British merchant navy in the 1940s. The Royal Merchant Navy’s mariners numbered about 150,000 when war broke out in Europe, and about 8% were Chinese recruits.
These seamen played a vital role in Britain’s warfare, but were deported at the war’s conclusion. During his research, Koh came across archival material suggesting a similar scenario took place in Australia.
“I was trying to find out what happened to these Chinese sailors from Liverpool who were deported to Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong,” Koh says.
“I didn’t find answers; what I found instead were all these newspaper reports and parliament papers about these Asian men from Australia who were being deported, in many instances with their Australian wives and children, to Singapore, to Malaya, as the colony was referred to at the time. The Chifley government didn’t really know what to do with them either.”
Koh tracked down the descendants of some of these ex-servicemen, adding oral histories to his bank of research. What he recorded was a pattern of intergenerational trauma.
With the creation of new nation-states across Asia after the war, many of the sailors had become effectively stateless, and had been deported by the Australian government to countries they had no connection to.
“The act of removing someone and placing them in another place where they don’t belong has all these horrible effects that go on for generations,” Koh says.
Seaman Tony Ang Kai Ming, who carried more than two hundred European women and child refugees to Australia from Penang after the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1941, went on to serve in the Australian army before being recruited by the US army as a foreman for its Civil Construction Corps based in Brisbane.
It was there he met his future wife, 19-year-old shop assistant Marjorie Pettit.
When Ang received his deportation orders in 1949 the couple had three Australian-born sons. Although from mainland China, Ang and his family were deported to Hong Kong, where the family lived in squalor in the Walled City in Kowloon.
Youngest son Kerry Ang told the Guardian his Australian mother’s deportation to Hong Kong left her permanently traumatised, with a deep-seated fear of authority.
“But she just refused to talk about any of it,” says Ang, today a high school history teacher in Melbourne.
“It’s hard to believe really, I’ve spoken about it with some of my classes and … they find it really difficult to even believe it ever happened, that a government could just use people and then when they’re no longer useful, get rid of them because they don’t fit into a white Anglo-Saxon racial group.”
Mavis Ada Anderson was a 17-year-old Sydney waitress when she met Abdul Samad Amjah, who had arrived in Fremantle on the SS Klang after the siege of Singapore a year earlier.
He joined the Royal Australian Navy and the couple met in Sydney in 1943, where Amjah was recovering from severe injuries after his ship was attacked by Japanese bombers.
Amjah received his notice to leave Australia in October 1947. Mavis, born in the south Sydney suburb of Sans Souci, learned at this time the Australian government had reclassified her as an alien. She was pregnant with the couple’s second child.
Both Amjah and the Ang family managed to eventually gain re-admittance to Australia.
“A lot of the Chinese [people] dad worked with didn’t fight it, they just did what they were told and left,” Kerry Ang says. “But he was married, he had his Australian wife and three kids, and he fought against it.”
In his own research, Ang found records of Australia’s first minister for immigration, Arthur Calwell discussing his father’s case.
“Calwell was arguing that dad really wasn’t in the Australian Army … and we know that’s not true because we’ve got his Australian Service Medal.”
In September 1948, the Singapore-based Amjah signed on as crew on the SS Marella, and upon reaching Sydney deserted the ship to re-join his family. He avoided immigration authorities for three months and was subsequently charged with being a prohibited immigrant.
Both men’s cases captured media attention.
Several of the women who were married to Chinese sailors formed the Australian Wives of Chinese Deportees’ Association. Koh says their strategy was simple: “Keep the story in the newspapers, focus on the Australian-born children and on the war service performed by their husbands in defence of Australia.”
Like events that would unfold in the small rural town of Biloela in Queensland decades later, public sentiment, Koh says, was turning.
“A lot of the pushback actually came from not the sailors themselves, but from the community who rallied around the wives,” he says. “You have the churches, the unions and even the RSL all telling the media the same thing – they’ve earned their right to stay here through war service, they have families, they have children. Let them stay.”
Carol Marshman, one of Abdul Samad Amjah’s daughters, told the Guardian if it wasn’t for the support of the RSL and the World Council of Churches, she may have never seen her father again.
“It turned out that because my father could speak English, [immigration authorities] gave him the compulsory dictation test in French,” she says. “But that wasn’t what finally won him the case. That test had to be given to immigrants within a five year period, and my father’s test happened a few weeks after that period, so legally, they should never have deported him in the first place.
“He won on a legal technicality, rather than on any point of justice.”
Koh says as many as 20,000 Asian refugees and mariners arrived in Australia in the aftermath of the Japanese conquest of south-east Asia. But unlike their European counterparts, once the war ended most of the Asian immigrants were ordered to leave, and many mixed Asian and Australian families were never able to return.
When US navy seaman Ahmad bin Osman was ordered to leave Sydney in 1947, his Australian wife, Phyllis Frater, left for Singapore with him. But the government would not allow her to bring her three children from a previous marriage with an Australian man, who had played no role in their upbringing.
The children were placed in an orphanage and she never saw them again.
Australian navy seaman Jacob Abdullah and his Torres Strait Islander wife, Mercia, were deported with their four Australian-born children in 1948.
Like a number of Australians who accompanied their husbands back to Asia, Mercia succumbed to malaria in Singapore the same year.
Five years later, Abdullah died, and the children, now numbering five, were rejected by his family. They spent a period living on the streets before being placed in foster care, continuing a pattern of abuse that left lifelong scars.
With a prewar population of less than 7 million, Australia was never going to be capable of sourcing all its war effort from an exclusively white population.
It was not the only country in such a position. By the war’s end, Koh says, it is estimated nearly 30,000 Chinese sailors were serving on US vessels across Europe and the Pacific.
It was not uncommon for a Japanese warship to be attacked by a US vessel crewed by Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese recruits.
“But the second world war became the bedrock for postwar, nationalist creation stories, and this racial diversity has become a lost history,” says Koh.
“When we think about who was fighting to defend Australia at the time, the enduring images of the second world war are very stereotypical.
“In the retellings of the second world war, its armies are almost always of a single colour, such is the monochromatic nature of second world war histories.”
While forgetting may be crucial to the creation of a nation, Australia cannot deny that there was a “banal cruelty” with the racially motivated deportations that followed the deadliest war in history, Koh says.
“For all of its progressiveness, post WWII was not simply a celebratory watershed moment in Australian immigration history. It had a darker side to it.”
• This article was amended on 1 April 2024. A previous version said Kerry Ang lived in Brisbane, rather than Melbourne.
