‘No longer useful’: the dark history of Australia’s post-war Asian deportations

‘This racial diversity has become a lost history,’ says Dr Ernest Koh, who is researching the little-known stories of Asian men and their families who were deported from Australia post-WWII. Photograph: Chris Hopkins/The Guardian

The White Australia policy was behind thousands of deportations, many of them illegal, which took place at the end of the second world war. Families were torn apart, Australian-born women were stripped of their citizenship and Asian-born men who had served in the Australian armed forces were ordered to leave the country they had fought for.

It is a part of Australia’s dark history that has been largely buried for decades.