This coming Thursday evening, April 6, I plan to attend a meeting to listen to a researcher report on the history of his family in Australia. Following the death of that family’s breadwinner in Russia, his children of twelve years and younger tried to work their father’s small farm. Where their father struggled to feed the family, the children failed. Following a pattern familiar to many in this immigrant country, family members trickled here, arriving as serial migrants through the 1910’s and 1920’s.
Australian immigration officials looked upon citizens of Russia, a Communist country, with deep suspicion. Very few Russians were admitted during this period. The family in question were accepted on the basis of Letters of Recommendation of the first arrival, who had shown himself an exemplary citizen, winning written and lobbying support from leaders on both sides of Australian politics.
So the family came. Within a generation their children became graduates, rising to positions of distinction in the Law and Medicine. Others started small businesses and prospered. The clan was preponderantly leftist – one at least became a member of the Communist Party of Australia – but all lived the life of the petit bourgeois.
I haven’t mentioned the family name for one curious reason – the family has never agreed on what they are to be called. Thursday night’s speaker, Michael Komesaroff, has cousins called Komesarook, others are Komisaruk, yet others are Kaye. Komesaroff, the speaker, will present a paper titled ‘Reds Under the Bed’, drawing on the files that ASIO kept on these good citizens. It must be disturbing to discover that the authorities in the country you have come to love (and in some cases, to serve in the forces) mistrusts you sufficiently to spy on you. In the case of the Komesaroff/Komersarook/Komisaruk/Kaye clan there was no sedition but reasonable grounds for suspicion. As is often the case the files show Australia’s spooks to be heavy handed and occasionally laughable.
If the McCarthy era was one of paranoia ours is also a time of anxiety and too-ready accusation. Because mistrust is once again the mood of the day in this country Komesaroff’s scholarship is highly topical.
The meeting is open to the public.
7.30 PM, Thursday 6 April
Temple Beth Israel, Alma Road, St Kilda
The talk is under the auspices of the Australian Jewish Historical Society
howardgoldenberg 
Interesting. In the mid 1950s my father, a serving army officer in occupied Germany and an ex Far East POW, was quietly squeezed out of the army. For the rest of his life he pressed the authorities (army and civil) for an explanation, but it was only when he was in his late eighties that the information became de-classified. What it amounted to was that his sister-in-law had joined the communist party at Cambridge University during the war AND he ‘continued to associate with his wife’s family’.
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Absurd
Arbitrary
Insulting to that man and his life of service
One’s blood boils
Hg
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