Introduction: The ‘Long, Long Story’

The introductory chapter posits a series of central questions about how the Holocaust was reported, represented and remembered by a generation of Australian journalists and editors, and the extent to which its significance was exposed and examined, downplayed and publicised, believed and denied. It introduces the individual journalists who covered the persecution of the Jews and later their destruction, and the critical role of editors who chose either to publish or ignore the accounts. The introduction cavasses the particularities of the Australian press: the local news culture, the practical realities of working journalism, the pervasive identification with Britain, and, from December 1941, the representational energies expended on covering the war against the Japanese. The chapter contends that Australian journalism was profoundly influenced by the racial ideology that underwrote the legislative preservation of Australia’s self-image in the early twentieth century. The 1901 Immigration Restriction Act and the contemptuous legislation governing the lives of First Nations Australians suggest that both the press and the nation were more aligned with the supremacist racism virulently expressed by Hitler and the Nazis than many might have assumed, and not likely to pay wholesale attention to the travails of Jews beleaguered in Europe. Furthermore, the chapter considers the dynamic relationship between collective memory, the Holocaust and the journalistic acts of remembering and forgetting.