UTS academic Sarah Demme.

The UK, in its guidance to Australia around interning the people who arrived on the Dunera, recognized that because of the hasty way that these people were classified, that there would be refugees from Nazi oppression among them, and recommended that Australia should engage in reclassification of people upon arrival, and also that Australia should treat any refugees of Nazi oppression with leniency and sympathy.

Australia, though, in response said that it had security concerns and also it didn't have enough information at its disposal in order to engage in reclassification because they didn't know really anything about the people that were arriving.

Australia was very worried about public sentiment, and that meant that even though the British and Australian authorities acknowledged that there were Jewish refugees of Nazi oppression amongst the Dunera arrivals, Australia was not prepared to release them.

But Australia was not willing to release these people unless they returned to England, which meant braving a long sea journey while war was spreading around the globe.

At this point in time in Australia, there is on the one hand a lot of public sentiment supporting increased internment of German and Austrian nationals, and there's op-eds in the paper calling for a broader internment policy.

But there's also a concerted movement for people's release as well.

So there's this sort of tension playing out in public debate.

In a bureaucratic and political role of Attorney General, Evatt's humanity is lost.

Unlike Corton, who has to wait the full five years in order to be naturalized and then eligible for admission to legal practice, Khan is able to be naturalized within around a year of arriving in Australia and then can also be admitted to legal practice.

And what this means is unlike Corton, who has a really difficult life in Sydney for those five years, he really struggles financially and also emotionally with his exclusion from legal practice, Khan is able to establish himself quite quickly as a sole practitioner and then together with another German immigrant lawyer, they create a legal partnership that appears to create a thriving legal practice within a few years of arriving in Melbourne.

Those two cases really starkly show the impact that arbitrary bureaucratic rules can have on individual lives, the real contrast between Khan and Corton in terms of their professional opportunities, but also the course of their life more generally, the impact it has on their health, their wellbeing, their sense of self and their families.

The rule that lawyers had to be British subjects in order to be admitted to the legal profession remained in place in Australia until the 1970s.

This history has enduring legacies in a very immediate sense.

The cultural composition of the legal profession today does not reflect the diversity of Australian society and we can think about that as partly the product of these exclusionary rules that have played a fundamental gatekeeping role over the course of the 20th century, right up until the 1970s really.

But I think also on a broader level, we can think about this history as a history of bureaucratic violence, the way in which official neutral categories get used to discriminate between people and to police who has access to particular resources or entitlements and the way in which these categories then are given meaning through particular sort of bureaucratic or official cultures.

UTS academic Sarah Demme.

The UK, in its guidance to Australia around interning the people who arrived on the Dunera, recognized that because of the hasty way that these people were classified, that there would be refugees from Nazi oppression among them and recommended that Australia should engage in reclassification of people upon arrival and also that Australia should treat any refugees of Nazi oppression with leniency and sympathy.

Australia, though, in response said that it had security concerns and also it didn't have enough information at its disposal in order to engage in reclassification because they didn't know really anything about the people that were arriving.

Australia was very worried about public sentiment, and that meant that even though the British and Australian authorities acknowledged that there were Jewish refugees of Nazi oppression amongst the Dunera arrivals, Australia was not prepared to release them.

But Australia was not willing to release these people unless they returned to England, which meant braving a long sea journey while war was spreading around the globe.

At this point in time in Australia, there is on the one hand a lot of public sentiment supporting increased internment of German and Austrian nationals, and there's op-eds in the paper calling for a broader internment policy.

But there's also a concerted movement for people's release as well.

So there's this sort of tension playing out in public debate.

In a bureaucratic and political role of Attorney General, Evatt's humanity is lost.

Unlike Corton, who has to wait the full five years in order to be naturalised and then eligible for admission to legal practice, Khan is able to be naturalised within around a year of arriving in Australia and then can also be admitted to legal practice.

And what this means is unlike Corton, who has a really difficult life in Sydney for those five years, he really struggles financially and also emotionally with his exclusion from legal practice, Khan is able to establish himself quite quickly as a sole practitioner and then together with another German immigrant lawyer, they create a legal partnership that appears to create a thriving legal practice within a few years of arriving in Melbourne.

Those two cases really starkly show the impact that arbitrary bureaucratic rules can have on individual lives.

The real contrast between Khan and Corton in terms of their professional opportunities, but also the course of their life more generally, the impact it has on their health, their wellbeing, their sense of self and their families.

The rule that lawyers had to be British subjects in order to be admitted to the legal profession remained in place in Australia until the 1970s.

This history has enduring legacies in a very immediate sense.

The cultural composition of the legal profession today does not reflect the diversity of Australian society and we can think about that as partly the product of these exclusionary rules that have played a fundamental gatekeeping role over the course of the 20th century, right up until the 1970s really.