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3 unusual facts about HMT Dunera


Enemy alien

The 813 surviving prisoners were subsequently included in the 2,500 men transported by HMT Dunera for internment in Hay, New South Wales.

Hay Internment and POW camps

Three high-security camps were constructed in 1940.  The first arrivals were over two thousand refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish; they had been interned in Britain when fears of invasion were at their peak and transported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera.

The Dunera Boys

The Dunera Boys is a 1985 Australian mini series based on the Dunera incident.



see also

History of the Jews in Australia

Printmaker and projection artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack graduate and professor of the Bauhaus was deported to Australia as an "enemy alien" on the ship HMT Dunera, spending time in internment camps in Hay, Orange and Tatura, before being sponsored for Australian citizenship by (Sir) James Darling, headmaster of Geelong Church of England Grammar School.