[Sunrise, Tatura camp]

During the Second World War many German and Austrian civilians and soldiers were sent to internment camps and Prisoner-Of-War camps in Australia. These camps had to be located far from Australian cities and the coast and the people in the camps were not to have contact with Australians. In the Tatura area in the north-east of Victoria camps were set up and the internees and prisoners of war received the same food and accommodation as the Australian Army soldiers guarding them. Leonhard Adam (1891-1960) was an anthropologist and lawyer, born in Berlin. The Nazis' anti-Semitic laws stripped Adam of all official positions in 1933. Five years later he sought refuge in England where he taught at the University of London and published Primitive Art (1940). He was interned on 16 May 1940 as an `enemy alien' and dispatched to Australia. Among the most eminent of the scholars who arrived aboard the 'Dunera' in September, he became pro-rector of `Collegium Taturense' in the internment camp at Tatura, Victoria, and gave lessons on primitive religion and ethnology. On 29 May 1942 he was released on parole to the National Museum of Victoria, given residence at Queen's College, University of Melbourne, and placed under the supervision of Professor Max Crawford to embark upon a research project on the Aborigines' use of stone. He went on to work as a research scholar (1943-47), lecturer (1947-56) and part-time curator (1958-60) of the ethnological collection at the Museum in Victoria.