The Hungarian-Speaking Community in Australia
Arrival and Settlement
The first recorded Hungarian-speaking immigrant is believed to have arrived in Australia in 1833. He was Isaac Friedman who spent time in Sydney, Hobart and on the goldfields of Victoria. He made significant contributions to the Jewish community and enabled Tasmania's first synagogue to be built.
According to The Australian People, edited by James Jupp, subsequent Hungarian migrants became pioneer industrialists and were likely to have been Australia's first manufacturers.
The first sizeable group of Hungarians arrived in Australia after the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1848-49. The Revolt sought to establish Hungary's independence from Austria and set up more a democratic society.
Many of this first wave of refugees joined the Australian goldrush. In the 1860s, the first formal Hungarian association came into being in Sydney.
There were many free migrants in the period before the First World War. At this time the Roth family made their home in Australia. This family produced several prominent public servants, including a Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland. Another member of the family published significant works on Aboriginal culture and yet another became a pioneer of physical education.
According to Egon Kunz in The Hungarians in Australia, there were about 450 Hungarian citizens in Australia when the First World War broke out in 1914. They were held in an internment camp during the conflict and labelled "enemy aliens".
Just prior to the Second World War, in 1938, several hundred Jewish refugees arrived in Australia from Hungary. This period of migration brought more women than men and most of the arrivals were professionally qualified.
Post Second World War immigration comprised refugees and other Displaced Persons from camps set up throughout Europe by the International Refugee Organisation. Many migrants from this group were known as "Westwarders", due to their desire to live under a Western-style democratic government rather than communism. They were later joined by "Border-Jumpers", who fled Hungary and its communist regime. Migrants from this period began arriving in Australia from European ports in 1949.
The crushing of the anti-communist uprising in 1956 created yet another group of Hungarian migrants who became known as The Fifty-Sixers. According to Kunz, these refugees settled easily into Australia.They attracted a lot of sympathy because of their predicament and they were also skilled, with professional and technical qualifications.
By 1961 the Hungary-born community of Australia peaked. Many Hungarian immigrants in the next two decades came from the Vojvodina province of Yugoslavia, which had been part of the Kingdom of Hungary until the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. This treaty saw Hungary reduced to a third of its former size.
According to the 1996 Australian Census there are more than 26,000 people living in Hungarian-speaking households.
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