Two weeks after his seventeenth birthday, George Nadel was deported to Australia on the Dunera. He endured that experience and internment at Hay and Tatura, then served in the 8th Employment Company of the Australian Army. After the war, he moved to Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne, where his brilliance as a scholar and historian soon became evident. From there he won a scholarship to Harvard and went on to establish the renowned academic journal, History and Theory.
At Queen’s, Nadel was quiet and often insular, so others filled this gap in knowledge with rumour, knowing little or nothing of his forced exile from Europe and his treatment on the Dunera. It’s possible that his time at Queen’s compounded the trauma of his flight from Nazi occupied Vienna and subsequent internment in Australia. With Nadel it is often hard to be certain, for his silence on these matters was lifelong and extended to his family.
In this event, Jennifer Nadel, George’s daughter and a British broadcast journalist, commentator and best-selling author, will offer intimate and sometimes painful insights into the legacy of the trauma caused by her father’s experience on the Dunera on her generation and the implications for refugee policy across the globe. She will be joined by historian Seumas Spark, who will offer context about the Dunera and Nadel’s story.
Jennifer Nadel is an author, campaigner, barrister and award-winning broadcast journalist. She is the co-director of the UK based, cross-party think tank, Compassion in Politics and the Director of Compassionate Politics at Stanford University’s Centre for Compassion and Altruism Education and Research. Her books include the Sunday Times Bestseller, WE: A manifesto for women everywhere (co-authored with Gillian Anderson). Her father, George H Nadel, fled to the UK from Nazi Austria and was then deported to Australia during the war on the HMP Dunera and interned.
Seumas Spark is an historian with a particular interest in the Dunera internees. He is co-author of the two-volume history Dunera Lives (Monash University Publishing, 2018 and 2020), and co-editor (with Jacquie Houlden) of Shadowline: The Dunera Diaries of Uwe Radok (2022). With his colleague Kate Garrett he runs the Dunera Stories website.
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