About

The year 1956 was an important year in world history, Hungarian history, Australian sporting history and so it was an important year for the Beer family. Its importance began with the Suez crisis in which Australia played a controversial supporting role to Britain throughout the dispute, driven largely by its fervently Anglophile prime minister, Robert Menzies.

The flow-on effects of the Suez adventure were serious and numerous. It consolidated United States leadership of Western interests in the Middle East, especially its patronage of Israel. Most importantly to the Beer family, it distracted world attention from the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary following the anti-Soviet revolution there in November 1956.

The Suez crisis did not attract much attention in my class at Lindfield Public School. The Melbourne Olympic Games were another matter. They were real news as far as my teacher was concerned. They could be watched on the newly inaugurated television. The TV was only in black and white so that the “blood in the water” of the Hungary-Russia water polo match had to be envisioned rather than chromatically visioned.

But the Hungarian revolution attracted much attention around the dinner table. My parents fled Hungary in 1948 (with the help of people smugglers) when the communists seized power. Suddenly, in 1956 there was a window of opportunity for others to flee across porous borders. Even though my uncle and grandmother took the opportunity, the digitised records of the National Archives are missing the arrival of the1300 Hungarian refugees on board the MV Fairsea that left from Bremen and arrived in Melbourne on 10 May.

About Tom Beer: Tom Beer AO, DSc, PhD, FRSV, director of Safe System Solutions Pty Ltd, is a past president of Melbourne’s Leo Baeck Centre and a former chief research scientist at the CSIRO. In 2021 he was made an officer (AO) of the Order of Australia for ‘distinguished service to science’. He was born in Budapest, then arrived in Australia in 1952 via the Suez Canal. Then in 1956 he watched his parents anguish as the Suez crisis distracted international attention from the Hungarian Revolution, their joy as his uncle and grandmother fled and eventually arrived in Australia, and their total conviction that Hungary would beat Russia in the Melbourne Olympic Games of 1956. 

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