‘The Nazis are coming, Hurrah! Hurrah!’ wrote an excited young journalist, Ronald Selkirk Panton, to his parents the same month that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, the same month that Dachau was created, and the same year that the racial laws against Jews and other minority groups were enacted. Panton was one of a small but enthusiastic cohort of Australian journalists who went to Europe and filed stories about the Nazi dictatorship and the persecution of Jews. Most did not share Panton’s admiration for Hitler. Indeed, as Wilfred Burchett, one of the more political among them, later recalled, he found journalism about Hitler and Nazism elusive in Australia, amid ‘horrifying distortions’ of Hitler as a ‘man of peace’.

Fay Anderson’s new book, The Holocaust and Australian Journalism, examines the Holocaust as a subject of Australian media attention during the 1930s and 1940s, and the efforts of individual journalists and editors to bring attention to the ‘long, long story’ of twenty years of escalating persecution of the Jews in Europe. Her book is especially commendable because of her careful scrutiny of the broader Jewish history of this period in Europe and Australia, and the part played by individual journalists and editors in either assisting or combating the almost universal lack of sympathy for European Jewry in Western societies.