In June 1935, Edith Roll, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl from Vienna, wrote to her Australian pen-pal Jean Doig, aged 10 from Colac, Victoria. The correspondence was short-lived as Edith and her family were swept up in the violence of the Holocaust. Though Jean’s parents, Keith and Louise Doig, helped the Roll family apply to migrate to Australia, these efforts tragically failed. 

This free public lecture by Professor Joy Damousi is the Greg Dening Memorial Lecture for 2017. Professor Damousi considers why the attempt of one family in an Australian country town to assist another in Europe should be considered of broader relevance to the monumental events of the mid-twentieth century.

Unsuccessful efforts to evacuate refugees are cursorily dismissed. A different focus, however, would direct our attention to the motivations of people to act who were not otherwise politically engaged. We miss an opportunity to return to the past—as Greg Dening put it—its own present. From this perspective, the Doig family efforts are part of the complex story of Australian migration history. If we choose not to tell these stories, we cannot fully chart how a history of compassion, and more broadly humanitarianism, can be written.

Joy Damousi is Professor of History and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia; Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia; Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 and Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia's Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War. She is currently working on a history of child refugees, humanitarianism and internationalism from 1920 to the present, and, with Philip Dwyer, is the general editor of a forthcoming four-volume World History of Violence.

 

Admission is free, but seating is limited.

Bookings are required, via: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/Dening2017

 

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