In July 1940, ten months after the declaration of war between Britain and Germany, the military transport ship Dunera set out from the United Kingdom to Australia. The ship carried 2,546 men considered ‘enemy aliens’ by Great Britain, most of whom were Jewish refugees who had managed to flee the Nazi regime in Germany and Austria in the late 1930s. They settled in England only to be branded possible threats to wartime security. Thousands of people were detained, and when British internment facilities became overcrowded, ships were dispatched to take some of the ‘enemy aliens’ abroad. The Dunera arrived in Sydney in September, after a fifty-seven-day journey, during which the detainees endured terrible sanitary conditions, overcrowding and brutality at the hands of British soldiers, and were interned in camps in the New South Wales towns of Orange and Hay, and later in Tatura, Victoria.
Many of the so-called ‘Dunera Boys’ were highly skilled and educated and included numerous teachers, tradesmen, artists, writers and intellectuals. They created communities within their internment camps, produced magazines, set up a shop and café, and organised sporting events, plays, concerts, lectures and art classes. These included lessons in colour theory taught by Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, who had trained at the Bauhaus, Germany’s avant-garde school of architecture and design in Weimar, and painting sessions with the Surrealist artist and set designer Hein Heckroth.
The camps were located in remote areas where prisoners of war and civilian internees were far removed from Australian society. This isolation and displacement is expressed in Hirschfeld Mack’s small woodcut Internment camp – Orange N.S.W., printed in 1941. It depicts a man standing in front of a barbed-wire fence, the unfamiliar constellation of the Southern Cross in the night sky reminding him that Europe was on the opposite side of the globe. Another detainee, Walter Konig, wrote of his experience: ‘To see the constellations Orion, the Bull and others standing on their head created a strange impression for us. We felt as if we were in a land of magic.’1Walter Konig, ‘Internment in Australia’, Twentieth Century, vol. 18, Spring 1963, p. 7.
The barren environment of the outback could not have been more different from the familiar European landscape. For fellow internee Erwin Fabian, its otherworldly qualities were both disorienting and surreal. Fabian was born into an artistic family in Berlin – his father Max Fabian was a professional artist and, although Erwin had little training, he was a skilled draughtsman and, prior to his deportation to Australia, had worked as a graphic designer in England. During his internment, Fabian produced numerous drawings, watercolours and prints. Many of these depict the daily routine of the internees, and some are imagined scenes that reflect the psychological trauma of persecution and war. The horrific voyage onboard the Dunera, the isolation, heat and dust storms in the camps, and thoughts of the war back home are reflected in works like Beast-like creature leading a group of anthropomorphic figures, 1941, which shows a nocturnal procession of monstrous creatures. Caught in a mass of struggling heads and limbs, the profile of a giant bearded man can be distinguished in the centre of the crowd; to his right, two arms are clutching a rifle. The group is led through a barren landscape by a clawed figure, accompanied by a bird-like animal reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastical creatures.
Many of Fabian’s works are monotypes, which are relatively easy to produce with minimal resources and equipment. To make these prints, Fabian covered a board or glass plate with a film of ink, placed a sheet of paper over the surface and drew on the sheet of paper with pencil. The pressure of the line drawing picked up ink from the plate, and selectively rubbing the back of the sheet made the ink adhere to the paper, creating tone and shade. When the paper was peeled off the inked surface, the image was revealed on the reverse. Hirschfeld Mack used a very similar process, which he developed with Paul Klee at the Bauhaus, and probably introduced both Fabian and Klaus Friedeberger to this technique.
Because of the scarcity of paint, canvas and other materials, the great majority of works produced in the camps were made on paper, and Fabian recounted later that he occasionally resorted to using boot polish diluted with methylated spirits to make a substitute for ink.
The internment was a formative period for all three artists, especially Fabian, who was twenty-four, and Friedeberger, who was only seventeen when he boarded the Dunera. The eighteen months Friedeberger spent in internment were, in a sense, his education. In the camps he took lessons in art, art history and stage set design from his fellow detainees, producing over 100 watercolours, drawings, posters and assemblages. He met Fabian at the Hay camp in New South Wales, and the two artists became lifelong friends.
For most detainees, the internment lasted around eighteen months. By the end of 1941, many men were released and repatriated to England after having their cases assessed. In early 1942 those who were thought to pose no risk could also volunteer for the Australian Army’s Labour Corps. Both Fabian and Friedeberger chose this option and were briefly stationed in Tocumwal on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. Two gouache paintings in the NGV Collection were made during this period: Fabian’s Surrealist work, Sleep, 1942, showing five men asleep in a desolate surreal landscape, and Friedeberger’s Black Rock, 1942, which depicts a gigantic sleeping head lying on its side at Black Rock Beach. Friedeberger would have painted the gouache during one of his weekend visits to Melbourne while on leave from duty – his army hat can be seen hanging from the edge of a rock on the left.
Friedeberger went on to study painting at East Sydney Technical College, where his fellow students included Tony Tuckson and Guy Warren. In the postwar years, he and Fabian also became acquainted with a circle of modernist artists that included Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. In 1950 Fabian and Friedeberger left Australia for London, where they found work in graphic design and teaching. Friedeberger remained in London and passed away in 2019, while Fabian returned to Melbourne in 1962 and worked primarily in the medium of sculpture until his death in 2020. Hirschfeld Mack also stayed in Australia – his release from internment in Tatura came about through the sponsorship of James Darling, the headmaster of Geelong Grammar School, who appointed him art master at the school. He worked there until his retirement and continued to make prints and watercolours based on Bauhaus colour theory, becoming a major proponent of abstract art in Australia. He passed away in 1965.
Dr Petra Kayser is NGV Curator, Prints and Drawings.
See the works of Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Erwin Fabian and Klaus Friedeberger on display at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.
The NGV warmly thanks Julie Friedeberger and Mrs Franz Philipp for their support of the NGV Collection.
This text first appeared in NGV Magazine, Sep-Oct.
Note
Walter Konig, ‘Internment in Australia’, Twentieth Century, vol. 18, Spring 1963, p. 7.