Ann Beaglehole: NZ’s refugee history
Ann Beaglehole is a historian and writer. She has written or contributed to over nine books and numerous articles. In this podcast, Beaglehole discusses issues of identity, New Zealand’s refugee history, what being Jewish means to her and the process of dealing with a traumatic past.
Ann Beaglehole’s family came to New Zealand in the 1950s as refugees from communist Hungary. She discusses how her parents survived the Holocaust and the circumstances which led to their flight from Hungary. Given a choice between Brazil and New Zealand, Beaglehole’s parents opted for New Zealand, which was known as an egalitarian society in which the government looked after the people. Ann tells how she, as an 8 year old, settled into her new life in New Zealand. She found that identifying as a Hungarian refugee was more straightforward than identifying as Jewish.
Beaglehole has undertaken much research on the topic of refugees, publishing A Small Price to Pay: Refugees from Hitler in New Zealand, 1936 -1946 in 1988 and Refuge New Zealand: A nation’s response to refugees and asylum seekers, in 2013. She has also written about the children of refugees in her 1990 book, Facing the Past, Looking Back at Refugee Childhood in New Zealand 1940s–1960s. For this book, she interviewed the children of wartime immigrants, whose perceptions and experiences of both the old and the new world were very different from their parents. She explored the different expectations from the culture and parents and the competing loyalties children had to navigate.
Beaglehole has also researched Women and Welfare Work. In discussing women’s rights, she commented that women’s rights and feminism never applied in her family. Under Communism, women had to work and many would have preferred to stay home. Upon arrival in New Zealand, Ann’s mother got a job straight away as a photographer and there was absolute equality between her parents. Beaglehole found that the middle class phenomenon of suburban neurosis was never relevant in her life.
Ann Beaglehole is a full member of the Wellington Orthodox Jewish congregation. Her parents and grandmother belonged to the Orthodox Jewish community and she continues to do so in their memory.
Listen to this wide-ranging interview.