Triangle Shirt Fact­ory NY fire tragedy 1911.

Shirtwaist designs, The Modern Priscilla Needlework Magazine, 1906

5 Minute History

Russians Max Blanck and Isaac Harris immigrated to the U.S in the early 1890s and, like hundreds of thousands of other impoverish­ed Jew­ish im­migrants, they began working in the garment industry in sweat­shops. Har­ris became familiar with popular fashion designs while Blanck became a garment contractor. They made a partner­ship, founding the Triangle Waist Co in 1900. In time, The Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory was located in the top 3 floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. They hired 500 work­ers, mostly female Jewish and Italian immigrants, half of them teens. It was a true sweat­shop; the immigrants worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines for 12 hours a day. These young women worked 6-7 days a week for tiny wages and little ventilation. The male owners gave male workers the higher-paid jobs, ass­uming women were less skilled.

In 1909, the USA was advancing towards greater mass production and in­creasingly dangerous working conditions. That year the Uprising of 20,000 Strike was organised mainly by Yiddish-speaking garment workers female due to their horrid conditions, long hours and low wages. Their primary motive was to get attention paid to the mist­r­eat­­ment of imm­igrant work­ers. While there were short term agreements to meet their dem­ands, the strike ultimately failed. How­ever it DID succeed some­what in exposing poor working conditions. Progressives and unionists cal­l­ed for different reforms, but Tammany Hall opposed them; the polit­ical machine stalled any legislation that might have benefitted the workers.

Fire danger in factories was common, but corruption in both the industry and city government generally ensured that few useful precautions were taken. The Triangle factory was burned in 1907 and in 1910, the owners appar­ently torching their own work­places before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not unknown practice in the early C20th. While this did not cause the 1911 fire, it contr­ibuted to the tragedy, as Blanck & Harris refused to install sprinkler systems.

Women workers pre-fire

Barbara's Bookstore

 

In 1911 Triangle Shirt­waist Fact­ory had 4 elevators accessing the fact­ory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to go along a narrow corridor to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but they were locked from the outside to prevent the workers steal­ing.

The fire escape was so narrow, it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even if it had not burned down.

In Mar 1911, there were 600 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Fact­ory when a fire began in a material bin. The manager tried using the fire hose to extin­guish it, but the hose was rotted and its valve rust­ed shut. The fire spread and panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it only held 12 people and the operator could only make four trips before it stopped in flames. Young women bec­ame trapped by bulky equipment as flames enveloped the 8th, 9th and 10th floors of the Asch Building. As people struggled to escape, sev­eral fell into the flames, their bodies piling by blocked exits. In a desper­ate at­tempt to escape, the girls still waiting for the elev­ator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells found the locked door at the bottom of the stairs, and were burned alive.

Fire­fighters arrived & saw their lad­ders reached only 7 floors high but the fire was on the 8th floor. So the girls who did not make it to the stairwells or elevator were trapped by the fire inside the fact­ory; they began jumping from the wind­ows to es­cape and died on the conc­rete below. Within 20 mins they found 49 workers burned to death, 36 died in the elevator shaft, 58 died from jumping from the 8th floor and 3 more died in hospital. 146 people were killed altogether.

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union had fought for better working con­dit­ions for all sweatshop workers. The union didn’t gain real attention until after the Triangle Waist Co owners were indicted for first degree manslaughter, but were found to be not guilty by the grand jury. To settle lawsuits against them, the owners DID pay $75 in compen­sat­ion to each victim’s family, a frac­t­ion of the $400 per death that they were paid by their insurer.

Nonetheless the tragedy led to the growth of a series of laws and regu­l­ations that better protected workers’ safety. The fire unified organised labour and reforming polit­icians like N.Y Gov. Alfred Smith and Sen Ro­b­­ert Wagner, a le­g­isl­ator in Pres Franklin D Roosevelt’s (1933–45) New Deal agenda. And the Factory Investig­ating Comm­ission in N.Y was set up af­t­er the fire. The workers union set up a march on 5th Ave NY to prot­est the conditions that had led to the fire, attended by 80,000 people.

The huge death toll for which they were responsible DID finally compel the city to enact reform. The Fire Prevention Law passed, and N.Y Democrats took up the workers’ cause; both were crucial in lim­iting similar disasters in the future.

Desperate women threw themselves down from the 8th storey to death

New York Herald

March 1911

Conclusion 

In this era, progressive movements sought to red­uce the impacts of the deplorable working conditions brought by industr­ial­­is­ation and inequality between rich and poor. The 1911 day became the deadliest indust­rial disas­ter in Manhattan history, when 123 women and 23 men died. Workers, union leaders, progressive reformers and political lead­ers all begged for higher environmental standards fitting for US. The Triangle Factory fire DID help create laws for a better workplace to keep employ­ees safer, but at an unthinkable cost for the immigrant families.

Brisbane's noble 1886 Synagogue/shule

The first Jews in Brisbane were convicts in Moreton Bay penal colony in 1824 - home to repeat offenders who moved from larger NSW convict colonies where c1% of Moreton Bay convicts were Jewish. When Brisbane’s penal colony closed, a free settlement opened in 1842 with no ex-convicts. Instead some families came north from Sydney, seeking new prospects with Qld’s 1859 separation from NSW.

Byzantine minarets & circular stained-glass window 

Beautiful white building, the twin towers soared above the nearby buildings in 1906. 

Brisbane Synagogue in State Library’s collection 

In 1859 there were just enough Jewish men to form a 10-man minyan for worship but by early 1865, services were so popular that private homes were needed. More settlers came and the community needed a proper synagogue/shule. Most of the new Jewish residents settled around North Quay, meeting in each other’s homes on Sabbaths and holy days.

Ads Brisbane Courier, Mar 1865 said: All members of the Jewish community are requested to attend a meeting at Mr B Benjamin’s Queen St to form a Congregation. A committee was created, to find a fitting site and to recruit members. For 10 years the new group used a leased rooms in Queen St business buildings each Sabbath. Bulcock’s Building Queen St even has a historical wall plaque.

Congregation leaders approached the colony’s Surveyor General to secure land but unlike many Christian neighbours, Jews lacked the infrastructure & land holdings of Anglican and Catholic churches; Jews needed to raise building funds. But young Qld colony’s economy was unstable in the 1860s, closely tied to UK banking investments and agriculture. From mid-1866, a Depression caused financial disaster for many members who returned to Sydney bankrupt; the building fund ended. The other Jews used in rented rooms, buying ritual objects and helping fellow Jews who’d suffered in the Depression. However worship in a rented hall was uncertain eg women needing to sit upstairs.

Men's seating downstairs, women upstairs

 
Rev Jonas Myers moved to Brisbane in late 1865, as President, Treasurer, teacher and kosher butcher. A George St cottage in 1867 served as a synagogue and minister’s home, plus he travelled far up north in the Qld colony to serve their needs. But members who lived in central city liked Adelaide St while members settled in a commercial district Fortitude Valley didn’t. A long weekly journey by horse-cart was too long, so Rev Myers sold Adelaide St. Another man, business man Samuel Davis, built a small shule hall in the grounds of his big North Quay home in 1870, now Mater Misericordiae Hospital. But the Committee needed a permanent site.

In the 1860-70s many churches went up in Brisbane as part of the civilising role of the new colony’s architecture. Mean-while Jewish members renovated the Masonic Hall in 1876 and stayed until the new synagogue opened. Most early gentlemen’s social clubs excluded Jews from membership; only freemasonry’s universal outlook gave the chance for Jews to socialise widely. These men from Brisbane rose in the Freemasons’ ranks, incl President Adolphus Hertzberg.

To find a architect, some men offered design proposals. But the Building Committee’s decisions led to conflicts. The official Qld Government heritage register for the shule listed British Arthur Morry, engineer-architect-parliamentarian as designer in 1884.

Alas financial struggles continued when the Shule Building Committee asked for ambitious plans. Their minutes showed plans for a schoolroom, board rooms and upper Ladies’ Gallery, plus seating for 600 people within a budget of £3,000. Morry assured the committee that he could deliver their financial requests, but by Jan 1885 when the tenders were returned, the cost blew out. Using an image of the sh-ule’s planned design to raise subscriptions, they advertised in Jewish Chronicle newspaper in London and in the British Empire. The congregation was eventually able to raise £6,450 in private donations from local and overseas Jewish donors, incl from London’s Rothschild and Mocatta banking families. In July 1885 the Building Committee led by Rabbi AP Phillips laid the foundation stone to commence building, in a grand public ceremony reported in local papers. The Brisbane Courier newspaper discussed R’ Phillips speech about the importance of a fixed shule to the Jewish community, esp for the lonely immigrants.

In July 1886 the shule was finally consecrated in Margaret St. In the history of Qld Jewry, there was no more brilliant function than the historic opening of the new synagogue. It was full to capacity with congregants and public dignitaries, including the colony’s Chief Justice, Attorney General, Mayor and members of the Qld Legislative Assembly.

Raised platform & reading table holding Torah scroll while facing the ark.

Surrounded by prayer books for congregants to read in their seats

Holy Ark, the most sacred part of a synagogue,

resting place for Torah scrolls

 

Brisbane was an ornate & exotic marker of Jewish presence. The structure’s elegant design was referred to in reports as Byzantine style, like the public architecture across Europe deriving from C13th–14th Islamic design elements eg Spanish Alhambra. See a pair of minaret-style turrets out front, octagonal columns & horseshoe-shaped buttresses supporting the Ladies’ Gallery. The exterior had a Romanesque style ornate gable & circular tracery, while the interior had a Gothic cathedral style. The members belonged both as Jews and British Subjects in the colony.

As the community grew, school rooms were added in 1906; in 1920s a newly-built hall with a retractable roof was used for Sukkot harvest festivals. Then as time passed, a large new group of Russian Jews, culturally distinct from the older Anglo-German Jews, arrived in the early C20th. They had different identities, speaking Russian and Yiddish, and not feeling comfortable in Margaret St Synagogue. So they created South Brisbane Hebrew Congregation, their own timber shule in Woolloongabba, 1915.

 

When German Nazism rose in 1930s, some cultured artistic & religious Jewish refugees fled to Brisbane. Their experiences had a profound effect on the community, esp when Brisbane became the epicentre of WW2’s S.W Pacific campaign. Hundreds of American Jewish servicemen flooded into Qld and sought the comfort of Jewish religious practice in shule.

Stained glass

In 1955 a grand 2-storey Memorial Hall opened for social events and learning. In 1986 new and elegant stained-glass windows were based on Torah stories; and a Star of David behind the Rabbi. The shule remains a testament to the early pioneers who dedicated themselves to Brisbane’s community. Thanks to Morris Ochert for History of the Brisbane Hebrew Congregation, 1984

Vikings' North Exhibition in York !!

As the premier museum in North England for ancient objects, The Yorkshire Museum in York is displaying the Viking North Exhibition from July 2025-July 2027. In partnership with the British Museum it explores the world of the Vikings and the North’s Power Base from 800-1066 AD. Dr Adam Parker, Curator of Archaeology York Museums Trust wrote: “Viking North is a story of geopolitical change & clash of cultures. When the Viking Great Army arrived in North England in 866 AD, everything changed. Anglo-Saxon kings were defeated, new territories and allegiances rose and fell, new identities were forged and new connections made. The true story is brought alive by the emergent research into these temporary towns in the late C9th as these settlers expanded their geographical locations and made England home. 

Yorkshire Museum

Little Vikings

Based on new archaeological research and new technology, the exhibition combines objects from Yorkshire Museum’s own collection, the Vale of York hoard and specially loaned national and regional items eg objects from Viking Army Camp at Aldwark Nth Yorkshire. Many of these items in gold and silver are valuable and prestigious, showing the power, wealth and skills of the Vikings who lived in Nth England.

York helmet, c760

Yorkshire Museum

The York Helmet is an impressive star in the Viking North Exhibition, possibly the best-preserved early medieval helmet in Britain. This iron cap with brass edging and a chain mail neckguard, beautifully decorated with tiny animals, displays how these helmets were made, used and stored. Latin across the two bands reads: “In the name of our Lord Jesus, the Holy Spirit and God; and to all we say Amen. Christ.”  The helmet was a great status symbol for the owner, Oshere, a nobleman and a ?member of the Northumbrian royal family, the most powerful dynasty in England then.

The Ormside Bowl was discovered in 1823 in St James’ Churchyard in Great Ormside Cumbria, just where a Viking warrior grave was also discovered decades later. Was the bowl looted from York by the Viking warrior and then buried with him in his grave alongside his sword & shield boss? This gilded silver and bronze with glass bowl was the ?finest piece of silver work, with remarkable craftsmanship, surviving from Anglo-Saxon England.

The 2 shells are intricately decorated and fused, making a unique luxury item. It would have been treasured by its original owner for its beauty, quality and value. It is decorated with vine scrolls in the outer design, being a common Christian theme. This suggests that the delicate outer shell started life as a religious vessel. It was owned used by monks for religious services in a Northumbrian monastery, likely looted by Viking raiders, or given to them in tribute. A religious object could be adapted by Vikings as a drinking vessel (850-900). When an inner bowl was added, it was used at celebrations with friends.

The inner bowl was made later made from gilt-bronze and riveted with studs of blue glass and silver with an internal bowl and 16 circular pieces of glass in a ring of cloisons-partitions. The base plate of the internal bowl and features five further rivets, of which the central is missing.

Ormside Bowl, c775

Esmeralda's Cumbrian History

 

The bowl is a double-shelled cup made from 2 pieces joined with dome-headed rivets and beaded collars. The bowl’s interlaced cruciform surface is decorated with a chased repousse technique.  The gilding on the bowl was added after the other decoration. The inner bowl could have been made in York where a matching blue-glass stud was found.

Bird and vine decorations

Instagram

The original outer shell was made of gilt-silver decorated with Anglo-Saxon style interlaced creatures in Continental vines. Note plants, fruit, animals and birds in decoration. The outer bowl decoration was done using the chase repousse method where the design was hit from the reverse side, creating it in relief outside of bowl. The rim had a strip of ungilded silver although this has now mostly been lost. This strip was first attached using some clips in the shape of animal heads. The frontal gaze of some creatures was a familiar occurrence in carvings of this type, with both naturalistic & grotesque decorations.

After seeing Christians wearing crosses around their necks, Vikings wore pendants in the shape of Thor’s hammer from their own pagan beliefs. And other religious symbolism. A collection of late C10th-mid C11th stone crossheads is currently on display in the monks’ dormitory at Durham Cathedral, found and reused at building materials or found during excavation of the 1891 Norman Chapter House (so note that Durham borders Yorkshire but is separate). The scenes depicted include the Baptism & Crucifixion of Christ, and an ordination scene.

memorial cross, found in 2nd century foundations

Durham Cathedral

 

Dr Parker, Viking North is telling new stories about the Vikings 

BBC

Thanks to Esmeralda's Cumbrian History & Folklore; I recommend reading her posts.

Amsterd Antwerp Sth Africa Brasil N.Y TAviv diamonds

When the Jew­s were expelled from Portugal from 1497, the specialist jewellers and others fled North and ended up in Ant­werp­. Antwerp was still un­der Spanish rule but it had a milder form of the religious opp­res­­sion than that found the Iberian Peninsula. At first, Antwerp seemed a safe place for Jews to settle down and con­tinue their jewell­ery art. Alas religious intolerance reached Antwerp a few years later and another home was needed.

diamonds
displayed by The Diamond Trading Co., Amsterdam

In time the refugees reached the Republic of the Neth­erlands which had rebelled against Spain in the 1570s, won its freedom and gave its citizens considerable freedom. The Netherlands was then the most tolerant country in Europe, so a large part of the Jewish population moved there. With them came the specialist know­ledge and craftsmanship of diamond cutting and polishing.

At the time, Jews and Conversos were creating a trading network that tied together ports in Portugal, Netherlands and Brasil. This network became the chief Dutch commercial circuit in the early C17th and offered support to Jews etc. This circuit enabled Brasilian Conversos to return to Judaism in Am­st­er­dam, and Ams­terdam Jews to establish a port in Brasil. In the process, the Jews of Recife Brasil and in Amst­er­dam remained closely con­n­ect­ed, especially after war closed off acc­ess to the network's Portuguese ports . 

Amsterdam Jews arrived in force in Recife during the 1630s, but travelled back to Amst­er­dam in 1645-54, since the Dutch colony in Brasil was shrinking and event­ually captured by Portuguese troops. Jews had contributed commerc­ially and militarily to this brief colony.

In 1725 diamond fields were discovered in Brasil, and Amst­er­dam gained the monopoly on diamond imports. From then on, Amsterdam became the City of Dia­monds! When the diamond fields of Brasil began to dry up, unempl­oy­ment hit the industry and many diamond cutting/pol­ishing factories went bankrupt. Thankfully diamond supplies were discovered in South Africa. Perfect timing!

Cape Town Diamond Museum
Mapping history of the South African diamond industry back to 1897

After Belgium won independence in 1830 several diamond pol­ish­ers from Amsterdam settled there, maintaining a limited level of market activity. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe after the pogroms of the early 1880s, a policy of industrial encourage­ment adopted by the Antwerp municipal government and the crisis in Holland brought about a reawakening in the Belgian diamond industry.

In 1890, Dutch King William III approved legislation for the Fair Society for Diamond Trade. Thus the wor­ld’s first Diamond Exchange could open in Amsterdam. In fact until WW2, Amsterdam remained a world centre for the trade.

The first dia­mond in South Africa was found in early 1867 on the land of a poor Boer farmer - on the Orange River in the Cape of Good Hope Colony where thous­ands of Dutch and English settlers trav­elled, to farm and raise livestock. The farmer’s family collected pretty stones, show­ing one to the civil commissioner in Colesberg. He pron­oun­ced it a 21.25 carat diamond, which was purchased for £500 by Sir Phillip Wodehouse, Cape Colony Governor!

In 1870 diamond workers in Amsterdam were receiving good wages. But the in­cr­easingly high customs duties were said to threaten Amsterdam’s position as leader of the diam­ond industry. Amster­d­am’s diamond cutters and polishers increasingly looked abroad. 

This discovery prompted Boer farmers on the rivers to look carefully for stones. Small parties of prospectors moved into the region to search. Over the following months, additional diamonds continued to be found, and by 1869 these river diggings had yielded hundreds of diamonds. Soon thousands of people laid claim to land, exploring for diam­onds over the Cape Colony. Rich deposits were found, la­t­er becom­ing the famous diamond mines of South Africa. And bec­ause of the special relationship which existed between Holland and South Africa, Amst­er­dam was the heart of the diamond trade

De Beers Group was founded in 1888 by British busin­essman Cecil Rhod­es, financed by a South African diamond magnate and the London-based Rothschild Bank. This international cor­poration spec­ial­is­ed in diamond exploration, diamond min­ing, diamond retail, diam­ond trading and industrial diamond manu­fact­ur­ing sectors.

Royal Coster Diamonds,
opened 1840, Amsterdam

Estab­lish­ing factories & importing workers from Netherlands by the hund­reds, the Dutch exodus to the USA transformed New York. Within a few years, the new entrepot had super­seded that of Ams­terdam to become the dia­mond market of the world. Centred in down­town Manhattan, the emerg­ing diamond trade of the late C19th added another thriving centre of jewellery making and distribution

In 1926 Ernest Oppen­heimer (1880–1957), a German-South African who had ear­lier founded mining company Anglo Amer­ic­an with American fin­ancier JP Morgan, was elected to the board of De Beers. Oppen­heimer con­solidated De Beers until his death. By the early C21st, De Beers control­led 80-85% of rough diamond dist­rib­ution in 35 count­ries incl Bot­swana, Namibia, South Africa, Canada, India, Israel and Austral­ia. Competition has since dis­mant­led any monopoly, though De Beers still sells c35% of the world's rough diamond product­ion globally via The Diamond Trading Co.

We buy gold and diamonds, jewellers cashing in on gold's rally, 

Diamond District New York, 

Wall St Journal

Towards the late C19th and early in the C20th, art­icles about the US diamond trade frequently appeared in the Amer­ic­an press, incl­uding Scientific American and Ladies’ Home Journal. The published articles noted the very large numbers of Dutchmen in the industry, both as businessmen and as workers. Historians were pleased to fin a complex, dynamic and global Jewish economy that bound Cape Town and London, Amsterdam and New York together.

By the early 1920s, more diamond merch­ants began to con­t­emplate a move uptown, to midtown Manhattan. The prospect of in­hab­iting up-to-date quarters was one incen­tive; Grand Central Station’s prox­imity was another. Plus the downtown jewellery trade was incr­eas­ingly pushed out by the growing financial services industry.

Israel World Diamond Centre

Wiki

In Israel, the diamond industry began in 1937 when a quality polishing plant was opened by WW2 refugees from the Netherlands. In 1938 the 15% import duty on imported rough stones was removed and within a few years the diamond industry employed 3,300 skilled workers. It is the world's largest trading centre for buying, selling, cutting and polishing large diamonds.

Australia thanks Karl, Slawa & Eva Duldig

                     

Slawa on Sigmund Jaray furniture in the Duldig flat in Vienna in 1931

Slawa, with her sister Rella in Vienna, 1938.

Slawa and Karl in Vienna in 1938.

Karl Duldig (1902-1986) was born in Przemysl (now Poland). In 1914 his family moved to Vienna where he learned to love sculp­ture, studying later at Kunstgewerbeschule under An­ton Hanak (1921-5). Karl saluted Hanak’s teaching in Crouch­ing Fig­ure 1923, car­v­ed from soapstone.

He continued studying at the Akademie der Bildenen Künste (1925-9). In 1931 in Vienna, Karl married fellow art student Slawa Horowitz (1902-75). Sigmund Jaray, famed Austrian furniture des­igners, was com­miss­ion­ed by Slawa to design furniture for their flat, decorated in the Vien­nese Workshops style. Mean­time Sl­awa invented amodern foldable umbrel­la, hold­ing the patent for 10 years.

The musical examined pre-war Vienna, with fluky ev­ents that helped them survive, starting from Nazi Austria af­t­er the 1938 Anschluss. And 1938 was the year daughter Eva was born! In 3 con­­tinents & 3 gen­erat­ions, the musical reflect­ed both the losses that dis­located fam­il­ies suff­er­ed, and the ch­all­enges faced when ad­apt­ing to new lives.

Like others in 1938 & 1939, the Duldigs had to give their surviv­ing assets to Nazis and flee! Sl­awa's adored sister and bro­ther in law Aurelie & Ignaz Laisné survived the Holocaust by hiding in Paris, with Karl’s artworks stashed in their cellar.

There was a brief time in Switzerland when Karl was playing in a ten­n­is tournament. In 1938 the fam­ily grabbed the chance to get to Singa­p­ore, working in an art school in the British colony. But in Sep 1940 they were decl­ared Enemy Aliens by the Br­it­ish who dep­ort­ed them to Aus­t­ralia.

Because Australia was also at war, the family was interned at Tatura Camp in rural Victoria for 2 years, The camp was peace­ful but isol­at­ed. While Karl did kitchen duty in 2nd AIF 8th Employment Co., he carved Mother and Child 1942 from pot­atoes with a pocket knife. Later he cast them in bronze.

Released in April 1942, the family settled in urban Melbour­ne and be­c­ame Aust­ral­­ian citizens post-war. Karl held his first solo show at Koz­minsky’s (1947) and became art master (1945-67) at a prominant Mel­b­our­ne gram­mar school, while creating a small ceramics busin­ess. Karl ex­hib­ited re­g­ularly with the Victor­ian Sculptors’ Soc­iety and the imp­ortant Ad­el­aide Festival of Arts from 1960. Slawa’s work app­ear­ed in the major NGV 1990 exhibition, Vienna & Early C20th.

Eva de Jong-Duldig's book, 2017

Driftwood: escape and survival through art, was a book written by Eva Duldig in 2017. It followed the artists’ lives in pre-war Vien­na and their es­cape from Europe to Melbourne. And it offered an insight into the cultural life of Aus­t­ralia at a time of enormous political and art­is­tic change; a profound tran­­­sforming cont­rib­ution to the life of the nation through tal­ented immigrants. Note the enormous contr­ib­­ution mid­dle Euro­peans made to the national art scene. Yosl Berg­ner (left War­saw 1937); Wolfgang Siev­ers (Ger­many 1938); Ludwig Hir­schfeld-Mack (Berlin 1938); Mark Strizic (Germany post-war).

Driftwood was a new Australian musical, based on Eva’s book. Ad­ap­t­ed for the stage by play­wrig­ht Jane Bodie, it featured original music by Anthony Barn­hill, with lyrics by sop­rano Tania de Jong, and a fine cast directed by Wesley Enoch. Note that Eva’s real daught­er, Tania de Jong with the fabulous voice, played Eva’s mother Slawa in the musical. 

Karl and Slawa continued their art careers. Af­ter high school, Eva did physical educat­ion and arts at Mel­b­ourne Uni and worked as a teacher. Then her father, himself a highly ranked sports­man, en­couraged her into competitive tennis. The family moved near the Kooyong Tennis Courts, and in 1961 she reached Wimbledon’s quarter finals.

At the 1961 Maccabiah Games in Israel, she met her Dutch husband Henri and went to live in Holl­and. She became Nether­l­ands’ Na­tional Champion and repres­ented her new country at Wimbledon. They didn’t move back to Australia until after the bir­th of Eva’s first child in 1964.

With the talented European artists who were liv­ing 12,000 ks from home and speaking little English, Dul­dig helped de­fine the place of sculp­t­ure in Aust­ral­ian culture. He was very supp­ort­ive of younger artists, bec­oming first president (1962) of Ben Uri Society for the Arts aka Bezalel Fel­lowship of Arts. He was pre­s­id­ent (1977) of the Assoc­iation of Sculptors of Vict­oria. His last work was the Raoul Wallenberg monument 1985 at Kew Junction.

Duldig Studio in Melbourne

Before Karl died in 1986, he and Eva discussed what would hap­p­en to the house and collection. As custod­ian of her parents' leg­acy, Eva opened the home, sculpt­ure garden and art Studio in Malvern East up as a pub­l­ic mus­eum in 1996, showing the large coll­ection of fine and de­c­orative arts. And in the National Gall­ery Victoria.

In Karl Duldig and Vienna, Alison Inglis presented a paper at Vienna Art and Design symposium, NGV 2011. She show­ed his experience as an art student-scul­p­tor in Vienna pre-1939 was full of Secessionist values. The unex­pected recov­ery of all their Vien­n­ese art and other possess­ions in Mel­bourne suggested the Duldigs’ old lives wouldn’t be lost forev­er.

See artist Karl Duldig: Mitteleuropa in Australia

British Brothers' League 1901-5, London

Britain’s monarch could expel foreigners to protect the security of the realm in the late C19th, but free movement of labour was gener­al­ly unquestioned. Migration wasn’t an urgent issue until Conserv­ative politicians agitated in the 1880s-90s, and the media got on board. 

Migrants in a crowded Poplar market, 1904

The Guardian

The feared immigrants were mainly East Europ­ean Jews. In the Pale of Set­tlement, they were allowed to live on a permanent basis. From 1880s on, with the terrible anti-Semitic pogroms, many fled. 150,000 settled in the UK, including my Russian grandmother. Then there were other Russ­ians and Poles, Ital­ians and Ger­mans who moved to the East End, and were seen to lower living standards in the UK.

Emerging trade unions were worried that low-skilled migrants acc­epting long hours and low pay would undermine real English workers’ struggles. During the 1890s, the Trades Union Congress/TUC passed 3 resolutions calling for immigration controls.

Jewish trade unionists wrote the remarkable Voice from the Aliens to counter a nasty resolution at the 1895 cong­ress. They unionised themselves and made strenuous efforts to co­op­erate with existing labour bodies. Influential non-Jewish activ­ists in William Morris’ Soc­ial­ist League support­ed them, as did tailors’ leader George Mac­donald etc. But the dockers’ leader, Ben Tillett, described Jewish immigrants as the "scum of the contin­ent who made slums even more foetid and congested".

Maj Evans Gordon MP and Parliamentary colleagues

to address restricting further immigration of destitute foreigners

BBL Poster, 1902

The migrants organised their own public meetings to challenge BBL propag­anda through an ad-hoc Aliens Defence League, temporarily housed in Brick Lane. They proposed practical solutions: unionising migrant workers so they could fight alongside indigenous workers for better conditions for all, and creating fair rent courts to deal with landlords.

The Daily Mail continued its campaign against the arrival of Jews from Russia: "In Feb 1900, a British liner called the Cheshire moored at Southampton, carrying refugees from anti-Semitic pogroms in Russia. They had breakfasted on board, but they rushed as though starving at the food. These were the penniless refugees and when the relief committee passed by they hid their gold, and fawned and whined, and in broken English asked for money for their train fare."

In 1901, hatred continued. Bishop Cosmo Lang of Stepney in East London accused immigrants of swamping areas once populated by Eng­lishmen. Major Will­iam Evans-Gordon, Conservative MP for Stepney in 1900 elected on a strong anti-immigration platform, ag­reed. Along with neigh­bour­ing Conservative MP Samuel Forde-Ridley and Capt William Stan­ley Shaw of the Middlesex Regiment, Evans-Gordon forged a pop­ul­ist anti-immigrant movement called the British Brot­h­ers’ League/BBL. It was launched in the East End in May 1901.

Init­ially the BBL was most int­erested in protectionism, although it soon emphasised more rabid anti-foreigner rhetoric. Henry Norman Wolverhampton MP publicly deplored the UK being made into the "dump­ing ground for the scum of Europe". He joined the campaign and advised other nations to "dis­in­fect their own sewage".

The Eastern Post and City Chronicle happily reported BBL activities and demanded that the government end the foreign flood which had submerged East London. Within months the league claimed 45,000 members, although a member was anyone who signed the BBL's petition. The League promoted its cause with large meetings, with guards whose role was to eject disruptive opponents.

The BBL’s East End strongholds in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Limehouse solidified around the immigrant ghetto of Aldgate and White­chapel. BBL members, mostly local factory workers or unempl­oyed, were convinced by BBL propaganda that their precarious work sit­uation (low pay, overcrowded housing, poor sanitation) was caused by immigrants. But Captain Shaw also boasted of his elite recr­uits: Oxford grad­uates, city merchants and 40 Tory MPs.

The league’s opening rally in 1901 drew opponents. BBL supporters wrote to the press about socialist foreig­ners upsetting the meeting. Local newspapers noted that 260 big brawny stewards roughly ej­ected foreigners. So when the BBL held another large rally at the People’s Pal­ace Mile End in Jan 1902, the 4,000 supporters were again protected by guards. [A technique later used by the British Fascists]

BBL supporters filled a petit­ion pressing MPs to halt immig­ration. When the government launch­ed a Royal Commission on Alien Immigration in 1903, Evans-Gordon chaired it and set the agenda. The Royal Commission inves­tigated the BBL’s own charges - that immigrants:
ar­rived destitute and dirty;
practised insanitary habits;
spread in­fectious diseases;
were a burden on the rates;
disposs­es­sed nat­ive dwellers;
caused native tradesmen to lose trade;
worked for rates below local workers;
included crim­in­als, prostitutes and anarch­is­ts; and
formed a non-assimilating commun­ity.

Britain is the Promised Land and immigrants are undesirable

The 1905 Aliens Act satirised

The Royal Commission struggled to back up its charges in its 1903 report. After all, the immigrants themselves lived in overcrowded conditions and mostly worked 12+ hours a day. Their dedication to educ­ation and self-improvement denied claims that the migrants low­ered living standards. 

Still the Tory government passed Br­itain’s first modern immigration law, 1905 Aliens Act. Alth­ough the word Jew did not appear in this Act, the legislation was large­ly seen as a success for the BBL, which could then close down.

This Act put an end to the Vict­or­ian Golden Age of migration which had benefited from cheaper trans­port costs and growing labour dem­ands. The Alien Act’s most important provision was that Leave to Land would be refused to those migrants who could not support them­selves. To screen the migrants properly, the Act allowed them to disembark only in app­roved ports where an Immig­ration and a Health Officer could in­spect them.

By the time the Act passed, the Tories had fallen to Lib­erals in a landslide. The discretionary powers were transfer­red to the new Home Secret­ary, Herbert Gladstone, who used them to instruct all members of the Immigration Board. From 1906 the press was allowed to attend board meetings and in 1910 im­m­igrants were permitted legal assist­ance. The refusal rate under the new Act was low alth­ough some groups, eg gypsies, were disprop­ort­ionally af­fect­ed. The act remained for eight years before being subsumed into the more stringent 1914 Alien Restriction Act.

Tailoring workshop, East End c1910

The Guardian

Nothing is new; the League left behind a legacy of support for far-right groups. Enoch Powell warned of rivers of blood, Oswald Mosley wanted forced repatriation of Caribbean immig­rants who flooded in, Margaret Thatcher spoke of Britain’s towns being swamp­ed and Nigel Farage said parts of Britain were like a horrid foreign land.

Gertrude Stein & friends: life in art.

Gertrude Stein at her salon, 1920

Invaluable

Baby Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) and the family moved to Vienna and Paris, so Gertrude spoke German, French and English well. Her father moved them back to USA in 1879 but died in 1891, so older brother Michael supported them. Brother Leo moved back to Europe, immersing himself in art and in 1903 Gertrude also returned to Paris, sharing a left bank art studio. Michael sent money each month, making their bohemian life-style sustainable.

Thus Rue de Fleurus became the first permanent home for the Steins, with Gertrude remaining there for 40 years. They provided the informal focal point for contemporary art in Paris, inspiring, supporting and buying art. Their home became a salon, where art works by Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin and Cezanne shone. Saturday evenings enabled young, impoverished artists to examine the family’s notable art collection in their salon.

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

 1923 

How did Leo & Gertrude become so learned about art? Art scholar Bernard Berenson introduced Leo to Paul Cézanne and helped Leo buy a work from Ambroise Vollard's gallery. In 1904 Berenson welcomed and taught the Steins in Florence. In 1905 the siblings saw the Manet Retrospective in Paris and bought Portrait of a Woman with a Hat by Henri Matisse. This purchase encouraged Matisse, just when avant-garde artists were being criticised by the press.

In 1905 Pablo Picasso met the Steins at Clovis Sagot’s informal art gallery. The first Picasso oil paintings that Leo bought was Nude on a Red Background! Then they bought some Renoirs, 2 Gauguins, a Daumier, a Delacroix, an El Greco and Cézanne water colours. The friendship with Matisse cooled only when Gertrude developed a greater interest in Picasso. Fortunately Michael Stein continued to collect Matisse.

Etta and Claribel Cone were wealthy, elegant, educated Baltimoreans who inherited vast wealth in their 20s. The Steins and Cones travelled to Florence in 1905 where Berenson introduced the Cones to Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck’s art. The Steins took Etta to Picasso’s studio while he was doing Gertrude's portrait, and she urged Etta to buy Picasso drawings.

The Steins were introducing artist to artist, patron to artist, patron to patron. In 1905-6, Leo and Gertrude invited Picasso and Matisse to their studio to meet each for the first time. In Jan 1906, Michael and Sarah Stein took Etta and Claribel to meet Matisse at his Seine flat, and both sisters bought as many works as they could. Gertrude also sold the Cones some of her prized pictures including Delacroix, Cézanne and a Stein salon group portrait by Marie Laurencin.

In the US, Harriet Lane Levy (1867–1950) had been a popular journalist in San Francisco. She’d already visited Paris before, the first being with her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. But this time she sailed to Paris with friend Alice B Toklas. They arrived in Paris in 1907, living together until Toklas met Gertrude Stein.

Toklas was invited to a weekend party at Steins’. She was besotted, soon becoming a regular visitor and going to the galleries with Gertrude. In 1910 Alice moved into rue de Fleurus home and became Gertrude's right hand woman, reader, critic, typist and publication handler! She was Stein’s lover & assistant for ever!

By 1909, photographer/gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz was introduced to the Steins. By then Stieglitz knew the works of Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne well, and began to negotiate with Leo and Gertrude to exhibit their huge collection. Other young modernist painters joined in eg Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Robert Delaunay and Guillaume Apollinaire.

New Eastern Europe Jewish artists arrived in Paris from 1904 on. Starving in their Paris garrets, Steins’ salons filled with food-drink were much appreciated. The Americans were all secularist Jews, but they wanted to help the Jewish artists, especially Max Weber, sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, Sonia Delauney and Italian Amedeo Modigliani. The fact that the Steins, Cone sisters, Alfred Stieglitz, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Alice B Toklas spoke Yiddish or German from home must have helped the lads integrate.

Levy returned to the US in 1910, at 43, and lived her life collecting and art philanthropy. We know which artists Harriet patronised in Paris and which paintings she bought in the USA, because she became a very important benefactor at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. See Derain’s Paysage du midi 1906; Matisse’s Corsican Landscape 1899 and La Table au café c1899; and Pablo Picasso’s Scène de rue 1900.

Readers will love Paris Portraits: Stories of Picasso, Matisse, Gertrude Stein and Their Circle by Harriet Lane Levy, 2011.

Gertrude understood the radical implications of Cubism and was keen to link her status with it. Spanish cubist Juan Gris visited in 1910s, finding Stein accepted the more radical art styles that others quickly rejected. But a family rupture followed. Leo was a dedicated Matisse patron, not a Cubist fan. Gertrude and Alice visited Picasso’s studio where he was at work on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the work that marked the end of Leo's support for Picasso. In 1912 Leo took the Renoirs and many of the Cézannes to Italy, permanently! NB the Steins had established the first Museum of Modern Art at rue de Fleurus but the salon wound down with Leo leaving and war breaking out in 1914.

On her return to Baltimore in 1921, Claribel Cone rented a large flat in Etta’s building and arranged it as a private museum for their growing collection. This excellent Cone collection entered the Baltimore Museum of Art when Claribel died in 1929.

27 Rue de Fleurus, Paris

Note the plaque, next to the door

Leo Stein died in 1947, Gertrude Stein died in 1946 and Alice B Toklas in 1967. Gertrude and Alice B Toklas were both buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

The Stein collection had been constantly divided among relatives, friends, dealers and collectors, making it difficult to track. American collectors John Quinn and Albert Barnes both had access to the Stein collection and acquired significant paintings from them. In 1913, Gertrude traded large, early Picassos to dealer Kahnweiler in exchange for other paintings she wanted. Thus I’m sure the Steins were hugely successful as salonieres and patrons, more so than collectors. The 2012 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's exhibition brought together important paintings for the first time since pre-WW1 Paris.

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, 2025. Wade wanted to uncover the woman behind the celebrity, as cultivated by Stein herself. But it was this very celebrity that eclipse her work. Wade found new archive material to shed more light on Stein’s relationship with Alice B. Toklas, and on the origins of her undeniably radical writing.

Wade examined the creation of the Stein myth eg posing for Picasso's portrait; central to Bohemian Parisian life hosting people eg Matisse & Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with Alice Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography. But admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she begged Toklas to secure her place in literary history. Using unseen material, Wade uncovered the origins of Stein's radical writing, the real Gertrude Stein as she was when alone.

Migrants welcome to Australia - Bonegilla

Bonegilla is a rural area on the western shore of Lake Hume in N.E Victoria. The nearest large township is Wodonga Vic, 9 km to the west and c12 km from Albury NSW, on the southern bank of Murray River, the border between the two states. Bonegilla primary school opened in 1876, a railway connection (1889) to Wodonga, and 2 hotels in 1910.

  huts in Bonegilla Rd, Bonegilla

VHD

Children enjoy the games and the fresh air

Albury City Council

Children in primary school

Albury City Council

In 1940 a large army camp and military hospital were built at Bonegilla and a huge ordnance base was built nearby, the camp being used to train troops during the war. The hospital cared for them and for wounded soldiers returned from the battle fields. The ordnance base stored and supplied military equipment and vehicles. This was a convenient location for such activities because there was a change in the railway-gauge between the two states. 

 During WW2 a military camp was established at Bonegilla for the training of infantry and bomb disposal personnel. Some Italian prisoners-of-war were also held there, and after the war some Australian and American prisoners-of-war from Japanese prisons were brought there. In 1947 the military camp was acquired for a reception centre for migrants, mostly from Europe. There were 24 camp blocks, comprised of 800+ buildings.

It was post-WW2 when millions of war-damaged people seeking peace looked to Australia. An army camp at Bonegilla was transformed into a migrant reception and training centre where new arrivals lived while they were processed and allocated jobs.

Bonegilla Migrant Reception & Training Centre received 300,000+ migrants from 30 nations during 1947-71, opened to provide temporary accommodation for newly arrived migrants. In the years after, more camps or hostels were set up around Australia to meet the demand of increasing numbers. Most migrants stayed in these for 4-6 weeks, although some stayed for months and even years.

So the Bonegilla Army Camp was re-used as a reception and training centre for the first contingents of displaced persons who Australia admitted under an agreement with the International Refugee Organisation, Europeans who couldn’t return to their former countries post-war. My Czech parents-in-law and their children sat in a Displaced Persons’ Camp in Austria, until they were accepted in a refugee camp in rural NSW.

Many migrants had not socialised since WW2 started in 1939.

Group activities were greatly enjoyed

Albury City Council

From 1960 it was retitled as the Bonegilla Reception Centre and took in more migrants and refugees, largely from European countries. Altogether to 1971 when it closed, Bonegilla proved to be the largest and longest-lasting reception centre in post-war Australia, at a time when the economy was growing rapidly. These new arrivals changed the face of Australian society; they and their families helped shaped Australia.

The Reception and Training Centre consisted of 24 blocks. It had its own churches, banks, sporting fields, cinema, hospital, police station and railway platform. Today, Block 19 is all that remains of the original site so the Bonegilla Migrant Experience Bonegilla is an excellent tour. 

Block 19 today

Big4 Holiday Parks

In May 1990, Block 19 was put on the Victorian Heritage Register. As a registered place of special value to future generations, it is protected from any major change. In 2002, it became a commemorative place and tourism venue. In Dec 2007, it was included on the National Heritage List as a place of outstanding heritage value to the nation. A plaque declared the old reception centre was a symbol of post-war migration which transformed Australia’s economy, society and culture. Block 19 is now a special place which attracts visitors wanting to reflect on the experience of being a migrant; and was recognised as a place with powerful connections for many people here and a symbol of post-war migration which helped change Australia's economy, society and culture.

In the middle of sunny fields and on the banks of Australia's greatest river lies Bonegilla, the reception camp established by the Australian Government for European citizens. The travellers spend their first weeks in their new homeland here in order to become acquainted with its customs and thereby ease their passage into the Australian way of life. (Ad encouraging Displaced Persons to come to Australia).

Between 1947-71 Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre was the first home in Australia for the migrants. It was the largest operating migration reception centre. It is of national significance as a place associated with and demonstrating a defining change in Australia's immigration policy following the war.

For years Albury City has been collecting objects owned by former residents of the migrant reception centre; things that people brought from their homeland to give them comfort, photos, kitchen items, toys, books and clothing. Albury actively collects written memories from Bonegilla migrants.

The 1,295 oral, written and pictorial records in the Bonegilla Collection at the Albury Library clarify post-war immigration policies/procedures that changed the national origins and size of Australia’s population. These photographs, documents and memorabilia, provide insights into post-WW2 migration and refugee occurrences. The collection displays immigration policies and procedures that changed the composition and size of the Australian population, and thus transformed the nation economically, socially and culturally. To locate and identify a immigration record, including individual Bonegilla cards held by the National Archives, use the Making Australia Home programme.

In Dec 1987, a Back-to-Bonegilla day was held to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the migrant reception centre opening. Another was held in 1997. Numerous published histories and reminiscences followed.

Most of the migrants and refugees who passed through Bonegilla were drawn from non-English speaking European countries but with diverse arrival and settlement experiences. Some migrants recalled arriving lonely, unsure of where they were going and what they'd be doing. Others saw Bonegilla as a place of hope, symbolic of a new start. Even more importantly, the shift from prioritising Anglo-Celtic sources helped change political and social expectations, and thus the cultural diversity of Australia.

The Reception and Training Centre consisted of 24 blocks. It had its own churches, banks, sporting fields, cinema, hospital, police station and railway platform. Today, Block 19 is all that remains of the original site so the Bonegilla Migrant Experience.

The reception centre was temporary home for 320,000+ migrants. Some had short stays, but others remained there for a year or more, often because of non-recognition of their overseas qualifications. Disturbances in 1961, mainly caused by unemployed migrants who expected better food, climate and job prospects 15 years after the war, resulted in police action which fizzled out and migrants were transferred to hostels in metropolitan Melbourne. During that time a primary school (1952-71) managed changing student populations and many languages.

The arrow points to Bonegilla, half way between Sydney and Melbourne

Read Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre by Alexandra Dellios, 2017 revealing the centre's other, more difficult history that included control, deprivation, slow job locating and dismal food.