Australia

What is told here is a recruitment: governments that needed hands for the cane, a Basque grower who went back to Bizkaia to look for his fellow Basques and a few hundred men who went off to cut cane on the other side of the world. Most of them came back, and once in Euskal Herria they set up associations so that that emigration would not be forgotten.

A grower from Ingham goes to Bizkaia to look for his fellow Basques

After the Second World War the Australian sugar industry ran short of hands: few Australians were interested in work so hard that lasted only one season. The growers asked the Queensland and Commonwealth governments for help, and these sent recruiters to Europe, above all to southern Italy. One of them was a Basque grower from the Ingham district, Alberto Urberuaga, who travelled to Bizkaia to recruit his fellow Basques.⁴

The expeditions were called “Emu”, “Eucalyptus” and “Kangaroo”. How many went depends on whom you ask. Douglass speaks of 712 men in all, some of them not Basque, recruited to cut sugar cane. Totoricagüena, who interviewed Urberuaga himself, gives other figures: in 1958 two Australian immigration officers travelled with him to the north of Spain and recruited 159 workers; in 1959 another 169 left; and between 1958 and 1960, 387 people emigrated to Australia.² According to El Diario Vasco, three ships took them: the Toscana, the Monte Udala and the Montserrat.⁹

Behind the men went at least one group of single Basque women. They went, in principle, to work as domestic servants, and with them the hope was that they would marry there and that the single men would stay in Australia instead of going back.⁴ Totoricagüena documents the Plan Marta: the women selected lived together in Madrid and were given two weeks of English classes before travelling. First they underwent a medical examination, naked before Australian and Spanish officials, and that procedure is among the hardest memories she gathered.²

Trebonne, pelota and Saint Ignatius

In the cane field the work was done in gangs, and the gangs were formed by affinity: whoever was already settled sent for his relatives and his friends from Bizkaia. The Basque cutters were few, but much sought after, with a reputation for being strong, for holding out, for keeping their word and for being honest. The pay was piecework, so a gang that gave its all could put together a good sum of savings in a single season.⁴

Away from the cutting there was pelota. At the house of the Mendiolea Uriguen family, a high concrete wall served as a fronton until the one at Trebonne was built in 1959.² In Ingham, every 31 July, the feast of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the Basques held a Basque festival, and in 1958 a Basque priest who had come with the cutters was appointed itinerant chaplain to the Spanish community of North Queensland.⁴ Out of that, in time, came the Spanish Society of North Queensland, which went on organising events with a Catalan and Basque accent.⁴

Johnny Mendiolea did the sums in the mid-sixties: his family had signed papers for some 120 Basques to emigrate, and between the end of the Second World War and 1967 some 1,000 people from Spain had moved to the Trebonne area, 85% of them Basque.²

The return

Most of the post-war cane cutters ended up going back to Europe.⁴ In 1994 a group of returnees from Navarre set up the Asociación Navarra Boomerang, which the Government of Navarre approved on 29 September that year, and on 14 January 1995 some ninety returnees met in Villafranca at their first gathering.² In 2018 the Euskal Australiar Alkartea was born in Bizkaia, chaired by Amaia Urberuaga, a Basque Australian born in Ingham, to make known and research an emigration less known in Euskal Herria than the one to America. Its first event brought together some 250 people in Gernika in November 2018.⁸