GBP 100 for each immigrant, unless the immigrant was European. The Minister for Foreign Affairs was also able to detain ships which were suspected of carrying illegal immigrants. People who brought ill or insane immigrants into Australia were also liable for the costs of caring for them, on top of other penalties. Controversies The dictation test came into disrepute when it began to be used to exclude and deport individuals which the government considered undesirable. Jewish political activist Egon Kisch from Czechoslovakia, who was exiled from Germany for opposing Nazism, arrived in Australia in 1934. The Government of Joseph Lyons went to extraordinary lengths to exclude Kisch, including using the dictation test. Kisch was fluent in a number of European languages and, after completing passages in several, was finally failed when he declined to be tested in Scottish Gaelic. The officer who tested him had grown up in northern Scotland but did not have a particularly good grasp of Scottish Gaelic himself. In the High Court case of R v Wilson; ex parte Kisch, the court found that Scottish Gaelic was not within the fair meaning of the Act, and overturned Kisch's convictions for being an illegal immigrant. The failure to exclude Kisch brought the dictation test into widespread public ridicule. In 1936, the dictation test was controversially used again to exclude Mabel Freer, a white British woman born in India. She was twice set the test in Italian, which she failed. In the face of a long press and legal campaign for her admission, the government was unable or unwilling to provide a convincing reason for her exclusion and eventually she was admitted, welcomed by a huge crowd at the quay in Sydney. Interior Minister Thomas Paterson resigned from the Lyons Cabinet in 1937 as a result of the controversy. Changes to the Act At first the dictation test had to be given in any European language and the dictation test could be administered any time within the first year of a person's arrival to Australia. In 1905 the Act was amended so that the dictation could be submitted in "any prescribed language", the restriction to European languages remaining active until such prescribed language be chosen by the Parliament. This wording was used to placate the objection from Japan that only European languages could be used. As the Parliament never prescribed any language, the dictation case remained limited to