Mark Edele, ‘The history of their family, the history of their community’ Early Cold War Migration & its Impact on Australia

The dismantling of the White Australia Policy was a long process, but its tentative beginning may be dated to the initial wave of post-war migration which served to expand the definition of ‘Australian’ beyond descendants of the British Isles. An early and large proportion of these migrants were displaced persons from Eastern Europe who did not want to return to homes that had been absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Many had to lie about their identity in order to avoid forced repatriation, and their stories are personal, intriguing, and multi-faceted. Collectively they helped to transform their adoptive country, playing an important role in informing contemporary fears of communism which were a defining aspect of the Menzies era. 

This special episode of the Afternoon Light Podcast is a recording of a talk delivered by Hansen Professor in History Mark Edele on ‘Early Cold War Migration and its Impact on Australia’, presented at the University of Melbourne on 31 August 2022. The talk is also available to view as a video on our YouTube channel (124) Early Cold War Migration and its Impact on Australia - YouTube.

Mark Edele is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia. A former Australian Research Council Future Fellow, he is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History as well as a Deputy Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He was trained as a historian at the Universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow and Chicago. He is the author of Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (Oxford University Press 2008), Stalinist Society (Oxford University Press, 2011), Stalin’s Defectors (Oxford University Press, 2017), The Soviet Union. A Short History (Wiley Blackwell, 2019), Debates on Stalinism (Manchester University Press, 2020), and, with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant, The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative History (Cornell University Press, 2020). His latest book, Stalinism at War, published by Bloomsbury in 2021.