Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians by Jayne Persian

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with all external stickers removed. Remnants of date due slip on inside page, now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker. Wear to book corners and edges. Book corners are now protected with book tape. Interior and binding are still very good.

Over 170000 Displaced Persons arrived in Australia between 1947 and 1952, the first non-Anglo-Celtic mass migrants.

Under the slogan of 'populate or perish', Australia's first immigration minister, Arthur Calwell, scoured post-war Europe for 'white' refugees, Displaced Persons he characterised as 'Beautiful Balts'. Yet, as this book shows, many of the 'Beautiful Balts' were not Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian.

Amid the White Australia Policy, the tensions of the Cold War and the national need for labour, these people would transform not only Australia's immigration policy but the country itself.

Beautiful Balts tells the extraordinary story of these Displaced Persons. It traces their journey from the chaotic camps of Europe after the Second World War to a new life in a land of opportunity where prejudice, parochialism, and strident anti-communism were rife. Persian investigates who they were, why Australia wanted them and what they experienced after migrating halfway across the world. (back cover)