In Plain Sight: 1936–1939

Chapter 4 moves on to the Australian press reception to Hitler’s new wave of tyrannical antisemitic legislation from 1935 and alarming manifestations of violence such as the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, along with Nazi Germany’s increasingly aggressive expansionism and national rearmament as it prepared for war. The chapter examines the professional trajectories of the journalists who left Australia to cover these tumultuous events (among them Elizabeth Riddell, Ronald Monson, Alan Moorehead, John Fisher and Sam White), and the journalists and activists who advocated for European Jews to a nation generally unwelcoming to refugees—especially those who did not meet the racial prerequisites for admission into British Australia. It illuminates how the reportage was compromised by a series of structural, ideological and external factors. And as thousands of Jews fled the horrors of Nazism, both the Australian government and sections of the press remained ambivalent about their fate.