WAS Gallery in Warragul has been hosting an exhibition of the art of Hans Lorraine, who came to Australia on the Dunera. Unfortunately, coronavirus has forced the temporary closure of the gallery. It is hoped that the Hans Lorraine exhibition will continue at a future time.
The coronavirus outbreak has forced the Dunera Association to postpone its annual Tatura reunion, which was scheduled for 19 April 2020. A new date for the reunion will be fixed later in the year.
‘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 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 (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 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.
'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
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...
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.
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.