Betwixt and Between: Experiences of Intra-War Displaced Lithuanians Fleeing the Soviet-Annexed Baltic States in 1940 to a White Australia.

• In Event: Diasporic Identities

Abstract

World War Two migration of Baltic people to Australia from the Soviet-annexed Baltic states in 1940 is examined through an empirical case study. Lithuanian refugees endured othering and faced new challenges to their sense of themselves and belonging in a British dominion with a British-Australian imperial culture. Methodology interrogated British and Australian governments’ archival files, TROVE’s newspaper articles, personal documents and oral histories through the White Australia policy and Orientalism and Whiteness theory. The Lithuanians were amongst 168 persons – Britishers, Baltic people, Jews and Anglo-Russians – evacuated from the Baltic states by the British government, as British nationals, following Soviet closure of British consulate offices. The Baltic people’s legitimacy as British subjects was immediately questioned on arrival, after journeying via the Trans-Siberian Express to Vladivostok and then on SS Haitan. Non-Britishers were unmentioned in the press. Britishers regarded others as foreigners. They reported Lithuanians as communist sympathisers and NKVD agents. Lithuanians were unambiguously the most inferior in an immigration official’s hierarchy of Baltic people’s whiteness and desirability relative to British-Australians. Racial science ideology was evident in Lithuanians’ assessment by immigration officials, and subsequently by policing authorities. Suspicions exacerbated the Lithuanians’ sense of non-acceptance, as they sought to affirm their integrity and status as white refugees amidst Australia’s discriminatory immigration and employment laws and expectations of cultural assimilation. Amendment to the Immigration Restriction Act 1925, which had partly been implemented in Australia to exclude eastern and southern Europeans, was directly influenced by racist restrictions implemented in the USA and continued to resonate in Australia in late 1940.

Short Bio

Eve Puodžiūnaitė Wicks was born in Brisbane to Lithuanian parents who fled to Australia from Soviet-occupied Lithuania in 1940. Her book, "Saulėje ir šešėlyje: In Sunshine and Shadow," is the Winner of the Inaugural Book Award, International Oral History Association (IOHA) 2021. The book is the creative component of Wicks’ Doctoral Dissertation awarded in creative writing as an inter-disciplinary scholar in history and visual arts – photography. The exegesis expands and situates the significance of the creative work’s illumination of the marginalised Lithuanians’ experience of silencing and cultural isolation through an exploration and critical application of Orientalism and Whiteness to the context of Lithuanian displacement and resettlement. Current research addresses othering experiences of recent Lithuanian immigrants to Australia. Creative research projects with Lithuanians include a major storyboard exhibition, "Refuge Under a Southern Cross," at the Queensland Museum, South Bank, Brisbane, 2005, while undertaking post-graduate history study at The University of Queensland (UQ) and a MAVA degree at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University (GU). Earliest studies were in Medical Laboratory Science, B App Sc MT, lecturing in Immunology, and counselling at QUT; and in post-graduate educational studies, M Ed Std, Dip Ed, at UQ.

Author

• Eve Puodžiūnaitė Wicks, Adjunct Research Fellow, The School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University