Before the creation of Israel as the national home for the Jewish people in 1947 a raft of potential candidates for a permanent homeland for Jewish refugees from the world war cataclysm were canvassed. Comprising all human–inhabited continents, the long list of proposed likely or unlikely sites (aside from Palestine) included several in the US (one being Alaska), Uganda, Madagascar, Russian Far East, Italian East Africa, British Guiana, Manchuria…and Australia!✪

A haven for one million people in the WA wilderness?: Yes Australia…a chapter in the country’s history not particularly well known. The proposed homeland in Western Australia’s sparsely–settled Kimberley region evolved out of an Anglo-Australian plan to settle migrants from the UK overseas in the 1920s. The Group Settlement Scheme had the purpose of expanding the population and economy of Australia’s almost boundless western state. Originally it targeted migrants of British and Irish stock only but the results of the scheme were dismally unsuccessful. Nonetheless the scheme captured the interest and imagination of the London–based Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization and gained concrete form when a Western Australian pastoralist, Michael Durack, offered to sell the League a large tract of his family’s land in WA’s East Kimberley. The proposal was investigated by the League with Issac Steinberg (formerly minister of justice in Lenin’s Bolshevik government) despatched to WA to determine the scheme’s feasibility and to get as many VIPs in Australia onside with the League’s objectives as he could. Steinberg’s PR skills and adept arguments for a Jewish homeland in northern WA were persuasive, managing to snare the support of many political and public figures including the WA premier and the Australasian Unions body (ACTU).

Despite the headway Steinberg was making on his mission, Australian politicians and the public clearly had mixed feelings about a Jewish settlement on Australian soil. The government in Canberra was committed to the objective of populating northern Australia (which the 75,000 and more refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution in Europe would certainly accomplish) but there was opposition to the plan from various sectors. Xenophobia and racism played its part, some in mainstream society were fearful that the Jewish migrants would not stick it out in the harsh conditions of the Kimberleys but would swarm to the cities, take Australian jobs and their “difference” would lead to social dislocation (‘How the Kimberley nearly became the Jewish homeland’, Ryan Fraser, Australian Geographic, 27-Sep-2018, www.australiangeographic.com.au). Newspapers like the Bulletin opposed the plan and of course no one thought to ask the local indigenous custodians of the region, the Miriwoong people, if they were happy with the plan’s ramifications. Some Australian Jews themselves were against it, fearing a backlash of anti-semitism and that the settlement would undermine the Zionist cause of securing a Palestinian homeland𖤘 (Beverley Hooper, ‘Steinberg, Isaac Nachman (1888–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/steinberg-isaac-nachman-117…, published first in hardcopy 2002, accessed online 28 January 2025).

Preserving the monoculture and keeping diversity under wraps: No progress was made on the project for a few years due in part to the onset of WWII. Meanwhile conservative pressure was mounting on the Curtin Commonwealth Labor government from vested interests like the Graziers’ Association and the Australian Natives’ Association to veto the Kimberley plan. Finally in 1944 PM Curtin informed Dr Steinberg that the Australian government would not be altering its policy barring “alien settlements” in Australia of the “exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League”. Further appeals to Curtin’s (Labor) successors and to the subsequent Menzies Liberal–Country Party government met with the same negative response, which affirmed Canberra’s refusal to budge from the overarching policy of assimilation. The discouraging experience prompted Dr Steinberg to wryly publish a book entitled Australia – the Unpromised Land (Brian Wimborne, ‘A Land of Milk and Honey? A Jewish Settlement Proposal in the Kimberley’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/essay/9/text29448, originally published 22 May 2014, accessed 28 January 2025).

Endnote: An island wilderness for the Promised Land? The Kimberley region was not the only part of Australia that got a look-in as a possible home for Jewish refugees from Europe. One obsessively-determined, young Gentile from Melbourne, Critchley Parker, fostered the prospect of the Tasmanian wilderness providing a home for displaced Jews which, he proposed, would sustain itself on discovered mineral wealth in the area𖥠. Inspired by and infatuated with a Jewish–Australian journalist passionately involved in the Steinberg–led campaign for a Jewish homeland in the Antipodes, Parker set out in 1942, underprepared, on a solo expedition to find the ideal location for his own vision of “New Jerusalem”, but perished in the island-state’s southwest wilderness (‘Before Israel was created, Critchley Parker set off to find a Jewish homeland in Tasmania’s wilderness’, Rachel Edward’s, ABC News, 05-Dec-2020, www.amp.abc.net.au).

✪ not all of these were benevolent and altruistic proposals, Madagascar for instance was a Third Reich plan to forcibly remove European Jewry from the continent

𖤘 Steinberg and the Freeland League were opposed to Zionism

𖥠 the scheme with Jewish backing won the support of the Tasmanian state premier