‘The Dirty Vat’: European Migration to Australia from Shanghai, 1946–47

Abstract

At the end of World War II, European residents of Shanghai included Jewish displaced persons and ‘White’ émigrés. While the Jewish refugees were initially viewed by Australia as a humanitarian crisis, they then became a controversial sideshow to a planned mass resettlement of displaced persons from Europe. This article contextualises the actual and proposed Jewish and Russian migration from Shanghai with regard to Australian attitudes towards postwar European migrations from the East. This argument traces the anti-Semitic and anti-Russian sentiments that pressured Calwell into ultimately blocking Russian migration from Shanghai as well as placing a tight curb on the migration of Jewish displaced persons from both Asia and Europe.