Guided tour and floortalk
The "Dunera Boys" at NGV

Art in the exile

Sat, 26.10.2024
11:30 AM - 12:15 The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia; Melbourne

As part of German Week Melbourne we invite you to join Petra Kayser, Senior curator at NGV in a floortalk about the artworks of the so-called Dunera-Boys in the NGV collection.  

Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Erwin Fabian and Klaus Friedeberger were artists of German Jewish origin who fled to England in the late 1930s. After the outbreak of war, they were among the thousands considered as a potential threat to British security, and therefore classed as ‘enemy aliens’. They were deported on the military transport ship HMT Dunera in 1940 and disembarked in Sydney, spending the next 18 months in internment camps.

Many of the so-called 'Dunera Boys' were highly skilled and educated - they printed magazines, staged plays and concerts, and produced art in the camps. A group of works by Hirschfeld Mack, Fabian and Friedeberger, currently on display at NGV Australia, gives insight into daily life and the psychological impact of internment.