FRENCH IN AUSTRALIA

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 6, 6 July 1940, Page 16

FRENCH IN AUSTRALIA

WILL TO FIGHT ON

A SECRET COMMITTEE

(By Trans-Tasman Air Man, from "The Post's" Representative.) SYDNEY, July 3. The Prime Minister is the only Australian who knows the names of three French citizens in Australia on a secret committee which is organising continued French participation in the war. A member of the French colony in Sydney explained that secrecy was necessary to prevent reprisals against their relatives in France. Chosen at a meeting at the French Consulate in Sydney, members of the secret committee have assured Mr. Menzies that French citizens in Australia are "willing to continue the fight on the side of the British Empire until final victory has been achieved." The meeting carried a resolution which stated: "The Frenchmen of Sydney express to their fellow-countrymen now victims of German and Italian tyranny their sorrow and admiration They are staggered by the terms of the armistice imposed by thf* enemy Governments. They put themselves, at whatever place may be assigned to them, at the disposal of any French Government willing to continue the fight at the side of the British Empire until final victory has been achieved. "They ask the Australian Government to recognise their resolution to assist in the task of restoring to metropolitan France her entire and complete independence, her territorial integrity, and the independence of her Empire. They ask the Australian Government to afford them as far as possible the means to fulfil these expressed desires." There had been widespread criticism a few days earlier of a statement by the Consul-General for France, M. Jean Tremoulet. It should be remembered, he said, that no Frenchman in the world thought that" England had done all that she should in regard to war preparation. "People in Australia should not criticise," he said. "You have not yet been in the war, so do not criticise .a France completely exhausted with war. I see many young men round the streets here, yet all the Frenchmen of military age in Australia were called up for service the moment war started. I am sorry to say that some Frenchmen in Australia sought naturalisation after the war started, in order to avoid military service with France. But an exhausted nation does not deserve criticism from a country which has not yet fought." Frenchmen at the Sydney meeting freely criticised this statement of their Consul. , • News was received in Sydney a day or so later that the General Council of New Caledonia had asked the British Consul at Noumea to convey to the British Government the council's decision to continue the fight against the Axis Powers on . the side of Great Britain. More than 4000 people took part in a demonstration in Noumea when attachment to the British Empire by the French population of New Caledonia was expressed.