'I feel I am at the stage now of really learning something': Esma Banner post-WWII migration worker and photographer

Australian woman Esma Banner (1910-2001) was a keen amateur photographer who was employed by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). Banner worked in Germany with displaced people from 1945 until 1951 and held positions as a secretary, welfare officer and employment officer. Her education and working life were punctuated by familial responsibilities – leaving school aged 14 to care for her mother, and resigning from her position with the IRO to return to Australia to run the family business when her father and a sister became ill.

While posted in Germany Banner kept a diary, wrote over 100 letters to her family and took many photographs. Banner photographed and wrote about children in displaced persons camps and the Wartenberg Children’s Center where Polish children who had survived concentration camps were housed. Photography and family were important to her. She said in a letter home: ‘You are all always in my thoughts – every picture I take is for you’.

This paper will examine the photographs taken by Banner of displaced children, and read them alongside her letters and diaries to reveal the range of political and gendered representations and understandings of her work life, her family and the children around her that Banner created. This rare collection of personal sources will be used to consider how histories of children’s displacement and experiences of war can be written as well as the place of visual sources within such histories.