WA Museum Boola Bardip’s Connections gallery highlights compelling stories of refugees from around the world who have made Western Australia home. We encourage you to visit the gallery during Refugee Week to learn of the prolific stories of those who fled their homelands in the hope of a new and safer life in Western Australia. This article highlights one of those stories: the Skele family who fled Latvia, arriving in Fremantle in 1949.

Wedding photograph of Karlis and Daina, 1940. Courtesy Skele Family. 

Karlis and Daina Skele arrived in Fremantle in 1949 as Latvian refugees on the Anna Salen; one of many cruise liners chartered by the International Refugee Organisation to transport displaced peoples to Australia.

The couple lived in Latvia at the beginning of the Second World War.  Karlis was a trained pilot, while Daina had studied philosophy and linguistics. By the war’s end, little was left of their home and former life.  When Soviet Russia took control of Latvia, they fled to Germany with their young son Egils and remained in a displaced persons camp for a number of years. In that camp, the Skeles applied for asylum in Australia. While waiting, they welcomed their second child Karlis (Charlie) and their third child Dagmara.

Daina holding Egils (John) and Karlis holding Karlis (Charlie). Courtesy Skele Family. 

Finally, after four years in the camp, the young family was granted permission to resettle in Australia as part of the Displaced Persons Scheme in 1949.

Once they arrived in Fremantle, the Skeles were sent to a displaced persons’ camp in Northam. There, Karlis worked for the government for two years clearing land in Narrogin and cooking for the camp in Northam.

The couple welcomed their fourth child, Gunda, in that camp, meaning three of their four children were born in displaced persons camps. It was not until 1952, after Karlis fulfilled his two-year work contract, that the family left that camp and moved to Innaloo.

Australian cultural conventions and prejudices created obstacles for postwar refugees. Daina's qualifications were unrecognised in Australia. She retrained as a librarian, but was still unable to find work, most likely due to conventions that discouraged married women from working at the time. Without naturalisation, some of the Skele children would have been registered as migrant aliens under the Aliens Act of 1947-1959.

But the Skeles prospered when Karlis found employment as a bus driver in 1957, which eventually led to the family applying for naturalisation as Australian citizens – all the while never losing touch with their roots by becoming key members of the Perth-Latvian community.

In the Second World War, an estimated 30 million people were displaced by the destruction and social upheaval.  From the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, the International Refugee Organisation resettled more than 170,000 people in Australia as part of the 1947 Displaced Persons Scheme.

Western Australian immigrants often came from war-torn European countries like Latvia, and though many Western Australians were sometimes wary of these new arrivals, the migrants brought new life into the state and changed the social and cultural landscape into what we know today.

Some of the Skele family's treasured belongings can be viewed in WA Museum Boola Bardip's Connections gallery. Courtesy WA Museum