With time on hand recently, I was going through historical records of the small Australian village where I grew up and spent my childhood and got a profound shock. I discovered the sleepy little village I’d believed to have been a cosy resort town for day trips out of Melbourne had also been a breeding ground of Teutonic terror in the years immediately before World War II.
Belgrave is located about 40 km east of Melbourne’s central business district and is a tourist-commuter town to this day with the bulk of its visitors coming to ride on the Puffing Billy Railway, a steam train that starts its trips from the village.
Belgrave has something of a bohemian feel to it. Something even magical, mystical or surreal. The town was the home of Kerry Kulkens, Melbourne’s most famous witch (who predicted that I would become prime minister of Australia). Even today, Kerry’s daughter operates a magic shop in Belgrave, and Babi Desi, an elderly wizard, is famous for roaming its streets.
Belgrave was much more milquetoast when I was growing up, showing some remnants of the splendour of its 1920s heyday when it had lodges catering to wealthy visitors from the city who had trekked up to enjoy the glorious Sherbrooke Forest filled with mountain ash and tree ferns surrounding the area.
Puffing Billy had just resumed operations as an all-volunteer railway and was an integral part of my childhood as I lived immediately opposite the station. We hated the weekends because they brought all the tourists and the train’s soot dirtied mum’s washing and its piercing whistles filled the air.
Dad used to complain that the thousands of tourists the train drew to Belgrave were terrible for the town because they visited via byways that led directly to Puffing Billy instead of the Belgrave traders who could have done with their spending.
But the tracks and surrounding forests were my playground and I loved exploring them, sometimes rewarded with views of wallabies, lyrebirds and even a platypus. And it was exciting to have a relic of the distant past bringing people from all over the world into the town.
For me, Belgrave is, and always has been, idyllic. Probably because it signifies childhood and I was blissfully ignorant of reality, or because the town actually is just that: the lush greenery, general quietness and bustling but not overbearing township truly do make it a tranquil spot, even now at probably four or five times the size it was when I was growing up there.
I guess for me Belgrave is a place of innocence. It was somewhere I was shielded from reality by virtue of having been a child with limited exposure to the world, growing up in a family typical of the times and society. My view is even more tinted by having spent most of my life in a land distant from Belgrave. Not only do I therefore have a view heavily imbued by nostalgia, I also see things through the rose-colored glasses of an emigrant.
Given the forest setting, tranquillity, background and delusional sentiment, Australia for me, as an Aussie who has not lived there permanently since the 1980s, and Belgrave, in particular, is a kind of fairytale world.
Imagine my shock, then, that Belgrave’s past has a very dark shadow. I was mortified to learn that in the leadup to World War II, blissful Belgrave had been home to a Nazi club.
The Deutsche Arbeit Front (DAF) Club house was built in Belgrave, apparently around about 1934 the year after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany. German migrants to Australia built the club as a weekender.
Authorities believed the members would go to the club and engage in social activities supportive of the Nazi regime.
The Melbourne Age would report in later years that the Belgrave club had been a focal point for dissemination of German culture and Nazism in Australia well as the “scene of curious rites.”
The Age noted the club was adorned with swastika flags and life-sized portraits of Hindenburg and Hitler. The newspaper said weekend gatherings ended with what was said to be on old pagan ritual involving throwing branches onto a burning fire.
As relations with Germany deteriorated as the 1930s moved on, attitudes toward Belgrave’s Arbeiter House, as the members called the club, became icier.
On May 2, 1938, Carlo Lazzarini, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, urged Australia’s then Prime Minister Joseph Lyons to take action regarding Belgrave’s Nazi club.
Lazzarini, who was known as a bit of a firebrand, claimed that Hitler had officially opened the club via radio broadcast, a claim for which I have been unable to confirm the veracity.
Lyons refrained from taking action, arguing that many communist groups were also active in Australia. Others were apparently less reticent.
The day after reports of Lazzarini’s demand for action, the Age was reporting that a group of Melbourne University students had been planning a raid on the club. The uni’s Medical Students Society admitted suggestions had been made “purely as a rag” by “a few irresponsible students.”
Reticence was unthinkable with the commencement of hostilities. Australia declared war on Germany on Sept. 3, 1939. Authorities seized Belgrave’s DAF Club house. Club officials and members were largely rounded up and interred with other “enemy aliens” at the Tatura Internment Camp.
Despite Belgrave’s link with Nazism, most of the “enemy alien” Germans that Australia interred were refugees from the Nazis.
Within 10 days of Australia going to war there were reports of a request that the club be made available for use as a children’s home or convalescent area for returning defense service members.
I haven’t been able to discover what finally happened to Belgrave’s Nazi club.
But I never saw the building when growing up, even though I often passed by its location as a child.
A nondescript, brick veneer suburban home like thousands of others occupies the site of the club now.
Whatever happened, the club is gone and people never spoke about it when I was growing up.
I don’t think there was anything sinister or shameful behind the silence.
Most people simply had no idea the club had been there.
And that was what it was like for me, too, until the realization recently that I was closer to sharing my hometown with fascists than fairies.
