Some of his notable films are The Dunera Boys (1985), Georgia (1988), The Favour, the Watch, and the Very Big Fish (1991), and most recently The Sessions (2012), for which he also wrote the screenplay, based on an essay by Mark O'Brien.
The 813 surviving prisoners were subsequently included in the 2,500 men transported by HMT Dunera for internment in Hay, New South Wales.
Three high-security camps were constructed in 1940. The first arrivals were over two thousand refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria, many of them Jewish; they had been interned in Britain when fears of invasion were at their peak and transported to Australia aboard the HMT Dunera.
Printmaker and projection artist Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack graduate and professor of the Bauhaus was deported to Australia as an "enemy alien" on the ship HMT Dunera, spending time in internment camps in Hay, Orange and Tatura, before being sponsored for Australian citizenship by (Sir) James Darling, headmaster of Geelong Church of England Grammar School.
The Dunera Boys is a 1985 Australian mini series based on the Dunera incident.