I had a most heart-warming experience on Facebook yesterday. The original post is heart-rending if you go to the link and listen to the testimony of this particular woman and what she faced as a girl in state care in NSW. She was imprisoned at Hay. As well as re-posting the original post in the hope that people would become more aware of what has happened to this nation's children in the past, I asked the question if the prison at Hay could be the same place that the Dunera Boys were sent to in 1940.
I often cite the Dunera Boys when speaking of the way refugees and asylum seekers have been treated by successive Australian Governments since the 1990s. Australian Governments and large sections of the Australian population have shown across decades that they dislike receiving people fleeing from all manner of hardship and life-threatening situations.
The Dunera Boys were people who had sought refuge in England from the vicissitudes of Hitler's Europe. They were a mixed bunch. Many of them were Jewish. Many of them were well educated. Australia finished up being well blessed by those who came on the HMT Dunera when eventually the evacuees were settled into the broad Australian society and made lives for themselves.
Portrait of Fred Gruen
Erwin Fabian, like Fred,
is a 'Dunera Boy'.
I always cite Fred Gruen. Fred Gruen became a great and influential economist. His son Nicholas Gruen, is one of Australia's leading health economists. The blessing continues.
....and so it was that when I was sounding off once again on Facebook and did the usual mention of the Gruens - Nicholas himself entered the conversation and inserted links to material he had written about his father.
For me, this was yet another warm social blessing brought about by social media.
Thank you, Nicholas Gruen for making my day.
Cruelty, exploitation and hardship was not only the province of Christian organisations - as this recording makes clear.
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