UNWANTED “DUTCHMAN.”

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20455, 7 November 1934, Page 7

UNWANTED “DUTCHMAN.”

Ordered to Return to New Zealand. Per Press Association. WELLINGTON, November 6. “ I am that Dutchman,” said Gerald Griffin, of Wellington, native of Ireland and a British subject, who returned from Sydney to-day, as he showed a reporter a clipping of a newspaper cablegram to New Zealand, stating that a Dutch passenger, who arrived at Sydney by the Monowai, had been shipped back to. New Zealand by the Marama because he had failed to pass a dictation test in Dutch. Griffin said he knew nothing of Dutch, and could not be expected to know it, but surmised that advantage was being taken of some technicality of Australian law to exclude him. He was asked no questions beyond his name, even though he suggested that he was being confused with another person. Griffin did not set foot on Australian soil, but was taken across the Union Company’s wharf from one steamer to the other between the Monowai’s arrival and the Marama’s departure an hour later. “My main object in visiting Australia was to attend the coming AllAustralia Congress against War,” he said. “ I am the national secretary of the New Zealand Movement against War and Fascism, and was to have attended on behalf of that body. It is not a Communist organisation, and one of the leading figures in the Australian movement is Bishop Burgman, of New South Wales. I am not a member of the Communist Party.”