Mabel Freer
Mabel Magdalene Freer (née Ward, later Cusack) was a British woman whose exclusion from Australia on morality grounds in 1936 became a cause célèbre and led to a political controversy.
[2] In 1936, Freer began a relationship with Edward Dewar, a lieutenant in the Australian Staff Corps who had been seconded to the British Indian Army in Lahore for a year of training.
[6] Dewar's commanding officer Philip Myburgh disparaged Freer's moral character and suggested that attempts be made to prevent her entry into Australia.
Interior minister Thomas Paterson accepted his department's recommendation that Freer be excluded from Australia as an "undesirable person", with Myburgh's correspondence as the primary evidence.
[8] The dictation test used to exclude Freer was developed to enforce the White Australia policy, allowing customs officials to deny non-white visitors entry without engaging in explicit racial discrimination that could have implications for international relations.
[10] In the absence of other legislation, it was also used to exclude foreigners on political grounds, notably in the attempted exclusion of Egon Kisch in 1935 when the test was administered in Scottish Gaelic.
[18] He made no public statement on the matter until 11 November 1936, more than three weeks after her exclusion, when he spoke in the House of Representatives and stated she had been excluded as "a person of undesirable character".
[19] He elaborated on his decision the following day, asserting that he had intervened to protect the institution of marriage and attacking Freer as an "adventuress" and homewrecker of suspect moral character.
[21] Paterson was surprised by the negative reaction, which according to Martens (2019) prompted "a belated, frantic scramble for corroborating evidence to justify both the use of the dictation test to exclude a white Englishwoman and the minister's disparagement of her character".
[22] Paterson requested further information from Hunt, who falsely asserted that Freer was a mixed-race woman – "half-Sinhalese" – who had had relationships with multiple men and conceived a child with an Armenian.
[23] By late November, largely relying on Hunt's letter, the Department of the Interior had prepared a summary on Freer which concluded that she was a "cunning and utterly immoral woman [...] little better, if at all, than a common prostitute".
[24] Paterson largely accepted Hunt's claims at face value and sent cablegrams to authorities in India, Ceylon and the United Kingdom, seeking to obtain confirmation of her past relationships and racial identity, which under the White Australia policy would have fully justified her deportation.
[2] Additionally, on 28 November tabloid newspaper Smith's Weekly revealed that Hunt had previously served a jail sentence for perjury, which the department had failed to uncover.
She gave extensive interviews to journalists and cultivated a narrative that "elicited widespread sympathy and successfully cast her prohibition as unwarranted, unfair and contrary to the White Australia policy".
[13] Paterson's actions were characterised as an arbitrary misuse of his ministerial powers and an infringement on personal liberty, with commentators defending the principle of non-interference in private relationships.
It contributed to the failure of its March 1937 referendum proposals and surprise defeat to Labor at a May 1937 by-election, with A. W. Martin concluding in his biography of Attorney-General Robert Menzies that "the extent of the damage which the Freer case caused the government can scarcely be exaggerated".
Robertson (2005) describes the Freer case as "an illustration of the tendency of Australian governments of various political stripes to manipulate immigration laws for ends unrelated to their original aims".
[38] Martens (2019) concluded that the incident stood as "an example of successful public mobilisation against government overreach that simultaneously challenged patriarchal assumptions about marriage and respectability, and reaffirmed the racist practices and principles underpinning the White Australia policy".
