A Spanish-Australian at the Aragon Front

This photograph, taken in late December 1936, shows 28-year-old Australian volunteer Ramón Jordana Escobar on the Jaca Road near Huesca.

Jordana’s Australian driving experience was identified in September 1937 at the time of his enlistment in the Spanish Army. Assigned to a motorized division, he eventually became the driver for the Commander of the Medical Corps of the Spanish 27th Division who travelled widely supervising the transport and management of the wounded. In areas that were under constant fire from the air, it was a perilous business where much of the driving took place at night with the lights off. 

Ramón had been born in Mataró. His father, part of the small but steady trickle of emigrants, predominantly Catalan males, had left Spain in the aftermath of the Barcelona ‘Tragic Week’ in 1909. In Australia he was drawn to far north Queensland where there was plenty of hard physical work to be had, clearing virgin land for what would become the expanding Australian sugar industry. Ramón and his mother arrived from Mataró in 1920 to the isolated village of Mena Creek, becoming part of an emerging community of Spanish and southern European immigrants who brought with them to Australia the political traditions of anti-authoritarian activism and anti-fascism. 

Franco’s uprising evoked a strong response among these settlers. Newspapers in the south reported that by January 1937 there was an ‘Hispanic-Australian contingent’ of 48 Spaniards who were ‘ready to go’ if financial assistance for fares could be arranged. In the end, there were at least ten named Spanish-Australian volunteers from far north Queensland. Most made their own way to Spain and enlisted in the Spanish Army. All were connected in some way or another with the Aid Spain movement in the north. Such groups tended to gather at the local Spanish club or at places for socializing within settlements around the railway and the sugar mill. In the crushing seasons, during the years of the civil war, mill workers in Innisfail and Ayre raised a weekly levy from their wages, committed to Spanish aid. Trini García Montero was the energetic secretary of the Innisfail Spanish Relief Committee. Her husband, Jesus/‘Jack’, a boilermaker at the Innisfail mill, took six months leave of absence in order to volunteer in Spain, enlisting in June 1937 and was invalided out in March 1938.  

The money raised in north Queensland was sent directly to the CNT-FAI in Paris via the Solidaridad Internacional Anti-fascista (SIA) the international relief organisation set up by the anarchist Minister of Health, Federica Montseny, in 1937. Although the Queensland Trades and Labour Council was opposed to such independent action and the Spanish Relief Committee in Sydney urged the Queenslanders to contribute to the centralisation of all funds for the Spanish government, Spanish-Australians maintained their separate and extraordinarily successful fund-raising, despite the poverty of most of their donors. Indeed, their efforts carried on well into the early years of World War Two. By then the focus was on supporting Spanish refugees in exile.