Lot 73
WWII
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Notes:
- The Hay Internment Camps in outback New South Wales were set up 1940 to house some 2,732 German & Austrian internees that had been rounded up in Britain at the start of the War. Many were professional men of Jewish heritage who had escaped Nazi Germany only to be dispatched to Australia aboard the H.M.T. Dunera, their only crime being that their identification papers were German and Austrian passports. As 'enemy' aliens they were confined to Camps 7 and 8 at Hay but quickly made life more bearable by establishing a leadership group that organised camp rules and even entertainment including a theatre. The inmates of Camp 7 also printed a short-lived monetary system consisting of banknotes with declared "legal Australian Currency" values of Sixpence, Shilling and Two Shillings. However, the notes were quickly deemed illegal by the Australian authorities and withdrawn. They were designed to a very high standard by an Austrian Georg Telcher whose previous work had appeared on Austrian coins and cheekily include many hidden and humorous features that protest the unfair imprisonment of the camp internees. Concealed in the fleece of the ram on the front of the notes is the name "Eppenstein" the leader of Camp 7. Numerous names of other internees are hidden in the fleece of the sheep on the reverse including "Katz', "Brach", "Heckroth", "Schmitz', "Lehner", "Fabian", "Kitzinger", "Stahl", "Oppenheim", "Wolpe" and "Lowenstein". At the foot of the wooden camp fence shown on the front of the notes the poignant words "H.M.T Dunera Liverpool to Hay" are secreted. But perhaps the most telling message are the words that are hidden in the barbed-wire perimeter - "we are here because we are here" summing up their bemusement of their circumstances. In a world now preoccupied with walls and barriers it is an important reminder of man's inhumanity to man. Condition:
- Small paper loses on the left-hand side where it had been stuck down in an album
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