The person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and wh

The person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and who the Australian government found far too 'revolutionary' to let in. The full story is quite fun. He was initially refused permission to disembark, which he solved by leaping five metres from the ship, thereby making landfall (rather literally). The government then tried to exclude him using a dictation test, which could indeed be in any European language, and the test he failed was administered in Scots Gaelic. Some controversy arose when it turned out that the person giving the dictation test couldn't themselves understand Scots Gaelic, but the High Court ultimately ruled in Kisch's favour for the somewhat amusing reason that Scots Gaelic was 'not a European language' (at least within the meaning of the relevant law). [0] Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions. Laws banning non-white migration persisted in one way or another until 1973, and in the subsequent fifty years Australia has done progressively more insane things to keep people out, including removing all of Australia from the Australian migration zone (so migrants never actually 'arrive' in such a way that might give them a right to seek asylum), using the navy to put people that arrived by sea back on boats and launching them vaguely in the direction of other countries, keeping people actually accepted to be refugees (!) off-shore in remote Pacific island concentration camps for years, and - during COVID - criminalising its own citizens leaving Australia for two years (and briefly even the return of Australian citizens home). [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Kisch_from_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Ki... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052