![]() After three months fruit-picking, he donned a uniform and joined the army. Newton joined the 8 th Employment Company in 1942. Newton stands at the back of the line with his hands on his belt. Brent told him that he had received the photograph from Gaby Weyl, a photographer and a colleague of Newton’s at the studio where he had worked as a teenager.Ī photograph taken in the 1940s. Newton recognised the unique mounting of the image as the hallmark of none other than Yva, his boss in Berlin. Brent recalls that he and Newton met properly when Newton noticed a photograph mounted in Brent’s hut. One of Newton’s pupils was Bern Brent, who had been transported on the Dunera at the age of seventeen. The few photographs that capture the lives of internees – generally, cameras were forbidden in internment camps – originate from the Queen Marycamp. Newton contributed to the intellectual culture at Tatura by teaching photography. Newton volunteered for latrine duty, an unpleasant job but one that lasted only a few hours each morning and freed the rest of his day. Initially, they were placed in Camp 3 married couples, children and single women were separated from the single men. The Queen Maryinternees arrived at Tatura in September 1940. Newton shared the voyage with other escapees from Hitler’s Reich, the Duldig and Baer families among them. Though the Queen Mary carried out the same duty as the HMT Dunera in transporting ‘enemy aliens’ to Australia, the internees on the Queen Mary were considerably more comfortable. In 1940, she carried 266 men, women and children to Australia where they were to be interned for the duration of the war. The Queen Mary was an ocean liner that the British requisitioned as a troop ship during the Second World War. In September 1940, authorities identified him as an ‘enemy alien’ and ordered his deportation to Australia. ![]() As it was, he disembarked in Singapore where he worked as a reporter and photographer. Helmut, then eighteen, secured a ticket to Trieste and there boarded a ship for China. Simon, known to many by her professional pseudonym Yva, was forced to work as a radiographer before the Nazi regime ordered her deportation to Madjanek concentration camp she was murdered in 1942. ![]() His father, a button manufacturer, spent time in a concentration camp before managing to escape to Chile with Newton’s mother. Newton’s budding career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazi Party. Helmut did not tell them when he dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to work as an apprentice for the photographer Else Neulander Simon. He had been raised by German-Jewish parents in Berlin, and while they were not strict in observing Jewish customs, they frowned upon an early Aryan girlfriend. Newton, then Helmut Neustaedter, was interned in Tatura, Victoria, on his arrival in Australia in September 1940. His was ‘a talent that never looks back in time’. He described the way in which Newton was not interested in perfecting a style and sought to avoid professional stasis he moved forward, pushing up against the next boundary. Lagerfeld, who met him several times, had the same impression. To what extent did this period influence his photographs, his settings and his self-expression? His various interviews suggest that he was not a man to dwell on the past. This silence prompts wonder about how Newton remembered his internment. Guy Featherstone’s research into Newton’s experiences in Australia is a rare exception. The multitude of articles and reviews written over the course of the photographer’s life usually omit any detail of his Australian years, touching on Newton’s early life in Berlin before focussing on his return to Europe at the beginning of his career in fashion photography. Though Lagerfeld wrote this while Newton was still alive, it would seem that collective amnesia regarding Newton’s internment in Australia during the Second World War endures after his death. Karl Lagerfeld, in writing of the life of Helmut Newton, describes the years the famous photographer lived in Australia as ‘mysterious and unknown’. Before he was a world famous fashion photographer, Helmut Newton was interned at Tatura as a German-Jewish refugee.
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