When the immigrant ship Castel Felice docked in Melbourne one breezy day last week, 63 suntanned German girls paraded down the gangplank. Like 74 "flying fraeu-leins" who arrived by chartered plane a few days earlier, they were marriageable girls brought in from West Germany by the Australian government at the demand of members of a powerful new Australian pressure group: bachelors, among the thousands of European immigrants, who have a hard time finding someone to marry in a sparsely settled land where men still outnumber women.
Fourteen years after a war in...
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