Cirrus@Austlit

'The story of the 'Dunera Boys' is an intrinsic part of the history of Australia in the Second World War and in its aftermath. The injustice these 2000 men suffered through British internment in camps at Hay, Tatura and Orange is well known. Less familiar is the tale of what happened to them afterwards. Following on from volume one Dunera Lives: A Visual History (2018), Dunera Lives: Profiles continues the saga in life stories.

'This second volume of Dunera Lives presents the voices, faces, and lives of 20 people, who, together with nearly 3000 other internees from Britain and Singapore, landed in Australia in 1940. All over the world there were Dunera lives, those of men and women who passed through the upheavals of the Second World War and survived to tell the tale. Here are some of their stories.

'A contribution to the history of Australia, to the history of migrants and migration, and to the history of human rights, these two volumes put in the public domain a story whose full dimensions and complexity have never been described.' (Publication summary)

'Inga Clendinnen was a historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children in a working-class family in Geelong in 1934. She read English and history at the University of Melbourne, coming under the influence of Max Crawford, and earned a first-class degree in 1955. In that same year, at the age of twenty, she married John Clendinnen, a philosopher of science at the University of Melbourne. They had two sons. She was tutor in the history department at the University of Melbourne from 1955 to 1968. In 1969 she took up a post in the newly-founded La Trobe University, where she worked in the congenial company of colleagues open to global history informed by the social sciences.'  (Introduction)

‘Inga Clendinnen, who died in Melbourne on 8 September 2016, was an historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children, in Geelong in 1934. Her father had a cabinet and furniture workshop, the income of which he shared with his workers during hard times. The family lived on a precarious footing, with frugality built into Inga’s early life.’ (Introduction)