The Malta Independent on Sunday
Urned away from Billy Hughes
left Malta on 12 September, before passports had stopped being issued, this group of 214 Maltese – of whom 165 were of military age – were, unfortunately for Hughes, scheduled to arrive in Sydney on 28 October: the eve of the referendum.
The government response to hearing of the impending arrival of these Maltese was one of sheer panic. Hughes instructed the Commonwealth censor to declare that reports about the arrival of the Gange and its passengers were prohibited and pleaded with the Governor-General Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson to tell the British Colonial Office that if the Gange was to arrive on schedule, it would kill the referendum and cause a ‘great national disaster’. Hughes wanted the ship stopped, diverted, or delayed: anything to avoid it arriv- ing before voting day.
The choice to censor any news related to the Gange backfired in spectacular fashion. The censorship notice was leaked and, as a result, more and more people subscribed to the idea that cheap labour was entering the country in droves. Suddenly rumour had it that 2,500 Maltese were working on the Transcontinental Railway, and one speaker at an anti-conscription mass meeting informed that crowd that 4,000 Maltese had just made landfall in the Northern Territory. Senator Edward Millen later summed it up best, saying of the censorship notice that “a more stupid or more suicidal instruction could not be imagined” and that it had caused so much hysteria that “in the popular imagination, it was not 200 Maltese that were arriving”, but rather it was at least 200,000, all at the behest of the Prime Minister himself.
Hughes was forced to hold a press conference, and in that conference he admitted that a group of 200 or so Maltese was on its way to Australia onboard the Gange. He stated that – in view of the fact that he had promised no ‘coloured labour’ was to be allowed into the country, the Maltese were not going to be allowed to disembark.
Indeed, Hughes kept his word. The Gange was in Fremantle on 21 October to stock up on supplies, with the ship’s captain being under express instructions not to allow the Maltese to disembark. When it reached Melbourne, the ship was given an armed guard and the Maltese onboard were administered the dictation test in Dutch. Naturally, that meant that all of them failed, and hence became ‘prohibited immigrants’.
The process began to try and arrange the deportation of the Maltese back to Malta, but there was a problem. There was a war on, and that meant that there were no ships available to take the Maltese back to their country. The Gange itself could not return the exiled passengers, as it would be filled with French reinforcements from the front, and there were no British ships with space for 214 immigrants either.
With the Gange now in Sydney harbour, some Maltese tried to make a break for it and escape. Seventeen-year-old Emmanuel Attard was one of them. “I was thinking of my mother”, he said later, “She needed the money.”, The Argus reported on 13 November that, in all, 15 escapees had been rounded up and put back onto the Gange. It was good timing for the authorities one could say: the next day, the Gange left Sydney for New Caledonia – where it would drop the Maltese off and replace them with the French reinforcements it had been sent to carry.
The Maltese arrived in Noumea, where they were housed in a disused warehouse. They were fed and taken care of by the Australian government, whilst the same government tried to arrange for their deportation.
Meanwhile, the conscription referendum had been defeated and as the news spread of the treatment to which the Maltese – who were, one must not forget, British subjects – had been subjected, a certain segment of people began to spring to the defence of the Maltese.
That segment was the ANZAC veterans who had fought at Gallipoli and found medical refuge in the ‘ Nurse of the Mediterranean’ – Malta. One returned soldier, for instance, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald questioning why the Maltese were being rejected from the country: “Are they not British subjects? Are they not white? Maybe they are whiter than some who at the present moment call themselves Australians,” he said.
The most stirring account, however, came from an anonymous wounded officer, who wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald about the “goodness, hospitality, cordiality and warm heartedness” of the Maltese and that “if the doing of good deeds means the storing up of eternal treasure then indeed Malta is a community of spiritual millionaires.” He ended his letter by saying: “From an Australian heart I say, God bless thee little island – thee and thine.”
These accounts contributed to the Maltese gaining a sense of credibility. After 10 weeks in New Caledonia, Prime Minister Hughes had no option but to arrange to move the detained Maltese to Australia. Before that, however, they were detained on a decrepit old hulk of a vessel called The Anglian. This was in January 1917, and there was a tangible reaction against it. The Sydney Morning Herald, for instance, published no fewer than eight pro-Maltese letters in the first 11 days of January, in which citizens explained that they were donating money to the Maltese cause.
It is important to note that the Maltese also gathered support from the Australian political class as well. When the Maltese were put on The Anglian, for instance, one MP – Bruce Smith – quizzed Hughes about the legal implications of holding the Maltese onboard the hulk, whilst also pointing out that, at the time, one of Australia’s states was even being governed by a Maltese – that Maltese being Gerald Strickland who was Gov- ernor of New South Wales.
It was only after renewed pressure in Parliament, and from notable Maltese figures in Australia such as Father William Bonett, that Hughes relented. He said that the Maltese would be allowed entry into Australia on condition that all of them would be found employment. By the end of April 1917, in fact, all the Maltese had been found work and had made it into the country.
The Gange episode remains one of the most legendary in the history of Maltese migration and it had a positive conclusion for the 214 Maltese involved. That group remained affectionately known as the Children of Billy Hughes.
By July, however, the Australian government had advised the Colonial Office that they did not want any Maltese immigrants at all for the remainder of the war, thus meaning that the admission of any Maltese into the Antipodes was totally and absolutely barred. It was not until 1921 that the ban was lifted, only to be replaced by a yearly quota of 240 immigrants. Such was the effect of the incident on Maltese prospects in Australia that Henry Casolani – who would later become an important figure in official migration spheres – wrote that even in 1930: “Malta still painfully gathers the crop of that baneful seed.”