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Other Stories

  • Werner and Ilse Baer: A family on the Queen Mary
    Werner and Ilse Baer: A family on the Queen Mary
    Werner and Ilse Baer: A family on the Queen Mary

    Miriam Gould tells the story of her parents, Werner and Ilse Baer.

  • Phillip Benjamin and the Dunera boys
    Phillip Benjamin and the Dunera boys
    Phillip Benjamin and the Dunera boys

    ‘I didn’t really know that many of the people that I had met or had connections with were Dunera boys’, Phillip begins. ‘It only really emerged later.’

  • Hans John Lorraine, 19 March 1923 – 14 August 2012
    Hans John Lorraine, 19 March 1923 – 14 August 2012
    Hans John Lorraine, 19 March 1923 – 14 August 2012

    Hans Lorraine was not an internment artist. He started painting in the 1950s, creating a visual chronicle of peacetime Australian life. But he was a Dunera artist.

  • Klaus Friedeberger
    Klaus Friedeberger
    Klaus Friedeberger

    Klaus Friedeberger (1922-2019) was among the most talented, dynamic and thoughtful of Dunera artists. He was unusual among Dunera artists, and European artists generally, in seeing the mysteries and beauty of the Australian landscape.

  • Erwin Fabian
    Erwin Fabian
    Erwin Fabian

    Erwin Fabian died in Melbourne on 19 January 2020, aged 104. Erwin, one of Australia's pre-eminent artists, came to Australia on the Dunera, though he rarely said so. The Dunera boy label was not for him.

  • Interviewing Bern Brent
    Interviewing Bern Brent
    Interviewing Bern Brent

    In May, 2019, two of our team travelled to Canberra to interview Bern Brent – in his words, ‘one of the last Dunera boys still vertical’.

  • Hannah & Emil - The story of Heinz and Fay Castles
    Hannah & Emil - The story of Heinz and Fay Castles
    Hannah & Emil - The story of Heinz and Fay Castles

    'Am I a writer because this is the sort of thing spilling from the family closet? Or just ‘fortunate’ to be the recipient of others’ painful history?' asks Belinda Castles in an article in the Southerly Journal.

  • An enigmatic ‘vagabond’: the Dunera artist Kurt Winkler
    An enigmatic ‘vagabond’: the Dunera artist Kurt Winkler
    An enigmatic ‘vagabond’: the Dunera artist Kurt Winkler

    Kurt Hans Winkler was born in Germany on 26 February 1902, the fourth child of Protestant parents. His birthplace may have been Gransee, near Berlin, but this isn’t certain. His father, Carl Erhard Wilhelm Balduin Kurt Winkler, died about 1912...

  • The Voyage: the Testimony of Georg Chodziesner
    The Voyage: the Testimony of Georg Chodziesner
    The Voyage: the Testimony of Georg Chodziesner

    Georg Chodziesner's record of the voyage of the Dunera, told coolly and dispassionately, is probably the most important and comprehensive account available to historians.

  • From Dunera to Parliament House: Peter Danby
    From Dunera to Parliament House: Peter Danby
    From Dunera to Parliament House: Peter Danby

    Aboard the first Kindertransport to depart Germany for Britain, Peter Danby (formerly Danziger) could not have known the unlikely journey ahead.

  • Finding Emil Wittenberg
    Finding Emil Wittenberg
    Finding Emil Wittenberg

    We knew we had our work cut out when we started our search for Emil Wittenberg, one of the most prolific of Dunera artists.

  • Searching for Jack Kaczynski
    Searching for Jack Kaczynski
    Searching for Jack Kaczynski

    While some of the men who came to Australia on the Dunera chose later to speak about their experiences both before the war and on the ship itself – whether to the press, public, or simply to families and friends – there were many who remained silent.