Shadowline

The Dunera Diaries of Uwe Radok

Edited by Jacquie Houlden and Seumas Spark
Published by Monash University Publishing
RRP $34.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781922633620

First thing to note is that Jacquie Holden, co-editor of this book, is Uwe Radok’s daughter and, in a generous gesture, the editors will donate royalties from the book to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, to help protect and support those seeking asylum in Australia today.

BACKGROUND

In September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany, and the life of Uwe Radok, a young German-born engineer working in Scotland, changed forever. Classified as an ‘enemy alien’, Uwe was deported to Canada on the Arandora Star. When the ship was torpedoed, drowning more than 800, Uwe and his brothers survived – only to be marched onto the infamous Dunera, bound for Australia.

From 1940 to 1943 Uwe kept a series of diaries. Their pages offer a remarkable account of the effects of displacement. The harrowing voyage and the tedium of indefinite detainment are rendered with clarity. Over time, this gives way to an exploration of the contours of love, as Uwe formed a sustaining connection with another male internee.

Edited by Jacquie Houlden and historian Seumas Spark, the diaries offer a very personal insight into life in wartime internment. In depicting the barriers to homosexual and bisexual love in the 1940s, they reveal a new element to the Dunera story that has gone unexplored.

CONCLUSION

I think it’s fair to say the diaries were almost certainly never meant for a wider audience.

Today we can’t really know what living as an internee was like.

In Uwe Radok’s case there is an inevitable thread of self pity and self examination running through the diaries which does not however stop him expressing his condescending and patronising views of those he considered below his level of intelligence.

I am sure however that, for his family, the diaries have been a revelation. Transcribing them and being able to read them in their entirety would, I am sure, help them understand the experiences that moulded the man he became.