by Brigitte Lambert
As Sabine NIelsen has stated in the introduction to her book, most of the stories presented there are from adult migrants to Australia. I came here as a 9-year old, with my parents and baby sister, so my reflections on migration and the settling-in period might be a bit different in certain ways – but I daresay that overall, they are very similar to the adult version.
Children have been the focus in much migration research to date, and there are some interesting notions about them: For instance, in sociology, child migrants and especially those in the pre-teenage years could be labelled as Gen 1.5 – being somehow perceived as ‘half-way’ between one generation and the next. A basic notion is that 1.5s bring with them characteristics from their home country and then continue their development in the new one. Their identity is held to be a combination of two cultures and traditions, although of course, this aspect is hardly clear-cut, and there are many factors arising from the circumstances of migration, which affect individuals in different ways. Nevertheless, 1.5s are often bilingual and bicultural, and some studies suggest that they find it easier to adapt to the local culture and society than people who immigrated as adults.
As Sabine NIelsen has stated in the introduction to her book, most of the stories presented there are from adult migrants to Australia. I came here as a 9-year old, with my parents and baby sister, so my reflections on migration and the settling-in period might be a bit different in certain ways – but I daresay that overall, they are very similar to the adult version.
Children have been the focus in much migration research to date, and there are some interesting notions about them: For instance, in sociology, child migrants and especially those in the pre-teenage years could be labelled as Gen 1.5 – being somehow perceived as ‘half-way’ between one generation and the next. A basic notion is that 1.5s bring with them characteristics from their home country and then continue their development in the new one. Their identity is held to be a combination of two cultures and traditions, although of course, this aspect is hardly clear-cut, and there are many factors arising from the circumstances of migration, which affect individuals in different ways. Nevertheless, 1.5s are often bilingual and bicultural, and some studies suggest that they find it easier to adapt to the local culture and society than people who immigrated as adults.
In socio-linguistics, migrants can be categorised on the basis of the level of schooling reached in the first language: Thus the adult generation, 1a, is considered to have completed at least primary school, whereas the child generations, 1B and 1C, have either had some or no schooling in the language of their birth country. In this discipline, the child generations are held to be the ‘weak’ or ambiguous link in the intergenerational chain of language maintenance.
Notably, post-war German-speaking migrants next to the Dutch are documented as the most rapid shifters to English amongst both the adult and child generations.
And there is something else called ‘anomie’, which can be understood as a kind of mental state resulting from a mismatch between known and unfamiliar social values and norms. For migrants such a situation might arise when settling into the new country, and has also been linked to anti-social behaviour of young immigrants in particular.
Do any of these aspects resonate with you?
But now let me share with you my memory of a small farewell party in Germany, which took place in February, when the streets were still covered in snow.
A Farewell Party
Papi, Mutti and I are going to Onkel Rudi’s home tonight. We’re having a special party because we’re going to Australia. That is very far away from Germany.
Everybody sits around the table. On it are bread and fleischsalat and rollmops and salty pretzels. Onkel and Papi drink beer and schnapps. Mutti and Tante Grete drink wine and eierlikör. I’m allowed to taste the eierlikör. It is thick and creamy and yellow and sweet. Tante leaves some in her glass and gives it to me. I put in my finger and lick it.
Prost! says Onkel. We all clink glasses.
A votre santé! says Papi. He sometimes speaks French. He learnt it in the war. I say a rhyme he has taught me:
Le boeuf – der Ochs
La vache – die Kuh
Fermez la porte –
Die Tür mach zu!
Papi laughs and tells Onkel that I’ve been learning English too. I can already read the story of Little Red Riding Hood in English.
Tante puts a record of Freddy Quinn on the record player. She pulls Onkel out of his chair to dance.
I like it when everyone is dancing. Mutti and Papi are very good. Mutti likes dancing to La Paloma. It is a tango. Tante then dances with Papi. She says he is a better dancer than Onkel. He picks me up and we go round and round until I feel dizzy.
Papi pulls his harmonica out of his pocket. He plays the tunes he learnt in the Navy. Everybody is singing Auf Wiederseh’n, auf Wiederseh’n, bleib nicht so lange fort...Mutti starts to cry and Tante pats her on the back. She looks at me and I see that her eyes are bright and shiny.
I’m tired. Tante lets me sleep in her bed. I can still hear them singing. It sounds nice.
A few weeks later, on March 31, my family boarded the Castel Felice. My sister and I had no say in this decision of course – we were a special kind of Mitbringsel, bring-alongs – although I accepted the move quite happily, if for nothing else but the adventure of a boat trip and curiosity about a far-away country. I remember looking up the entry for Australia in the Bertelsmanns Volkslexikon, which showed three photos – Collins Street, Melbourne, an Aboriginal woman with tribal markings across her chest, and a rural scene of sheep. I also learnt about kangaroos, and knew that in this country, people spoke English.
So, in my personal luggage, I had some expectations, but certainly no particular concerns about my future. Besides that, I had with me the clothes on my back and some more in a suitcase, Mecki, a cheeky little hedgehog, my favourite books, including the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, and in my head and heart, I carried nine years’ worth of life experience, in Germany, about 3 years’ worth of schooling, family stories and a language.
If I’d known then that there was snow in Australia, perhaps I would have pleaded to bring along my sled too!
My father had instigated our move to Australia in the hope of improving the family’s material prospects, whereas my mother mainly wanted a place ‘where nobody can push you out’. My parents also didn’t know what lay ahead of them here, of course, but they had experience of turmoil and an expectation of hard work, only this time, envisaging a more stable and peaceful life in the process.
We arrived at Princes Pier in Melbourne on 5th May 1959, and a red rattler brought us to the Bonegilla camp the next day. We stayed there only three weeks because my father was quite disappointed that there were no jobs lined up, as had been promised by various authorities, and he had only £100 in his pocket. So he travelled to Melbourne on his own initiative, and with the aid of an acquaintance from Germany there, he was hired at International Harvester, and found some rooms in Richmond. Six months later, my parents put down a deposit on a house-and-land package in Box Hill North, costing £6,500. The land had to be paid off first – £3,000 – before the Bank would grant a mortgage for the rest. My parents managed to repay that first debt within three years, and in January 1963, we moved into a house in Sussex Street, where my mother still resides today.
In four years we had lived in four different places, not counting Bonegilla – two in Richmond, then in Balaclava and Prahran. I attended first Yarra Park State School and then St. Colman’s Catholic School, where one nun taught three grade levels in one classroom. I also looked after my little sister in between my parents’ working shifts, and the type of childhood I had known in Germany was no more. You can appreciate that this was a very disruptive time - which I describe as a ‘grey’ period in my life - anomie.
When we moved to Box Hill North, I was 13 years old and entered Blackburn North High School in 2nd Form, where I stayed until Matriculation in 6th Form. As an incentive to complete this level of education, I was awarded a Commonwealth Govt scholarship – but my parents used the money from this to pay for the bit of road in front of our house – so I’ve always felt that I own it!
However, this more settled phase gradually brought colour back to my life, with school becoming more fun and enjoyable, and me finding acceptance in a circle of peers, whom I still see today.
In 1967, my family trotted off to Box Hill Town Hall to be sworn in as Australian citizens. My parents had decided that our future lay in Australia, but there were also practical reasons for taking this step. I had no issue with making a commitment to Australia – except for the bit about swearing allegiance to the Queen, when I kept my fingers crossed behind my back. I really didn’t mean it.
I next chose work, marriage and raising three children – having my own family network was very important to me. I also became active in writers’ support groups, where I met many migrant women – and guess what was a common theme - yes, Heimat, the migration experience, memories, and so on. I have to confess that although I could still speak and read German quite well, and wrote letters to my grandmother, I did not write stories in German – my expressive ability had in the course of the years shifted to writing in English. And I had also lost confidence in my German vocabulary so that I did not feel able to raise my own children bilingually – but – very consciously I facilitated their connection to the language through my parents, Saturday school, and using German whenever possible, in my own way, and through contact with German relatives through mutual visits. Today I very consciously maintain an interest in German for my grandsons, and work at promoting the learning of German for children at school.
Against this background, I’ll now read you some snippets for a piece I produced for a writers’ workshop.
A Migrant Once…
I was writing to a friend: ‘I understand exactly how you feel, for I was a migrant once…’ when I re-read the sentence I leant back in my chair in a state of wonder.
A migrant once? Suddenly I felt extremely happy and I ran into my garden with spread arms, smiling widely at the bright flowers around me. At some stage, somehow, I had shaken off the migrant label and arrived – home. Clearly something had happened in my subconscious to prompt the words: I was a migrant once? But when? I couldn’t say, and so I became rather lost in thought.
I recalled that one of my classmates in Germany had written into my autograph book: Vergesse nie die Heimat
Wo deine Wiege stand.
Du findest in der Fremde
Kein zweites Heimatland.
An assumption in this innocent verse is that a person’s birthplace is also their homeland – perhaps the only one – but is this necessarily so?
My first home was a wooden barracks in a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Nürnberg. My father hailed from a small village in Oberschlesien, my mother from an even smaller one in East Prussia. They met at the Schafhoflager, my mother having survived the flight from the Russians and my father finding his family again through the Red Cross after being released as a French POW. I had two sets of grandparents at the camp, and I often heard their tales about the homelands they had to leave and to which they could not return, and the Flucht. I noticed they often became sad when talking about Heimat, and I concluded that to lose it must be a very traumatic experience indeed. About this time I formed the notion that everybody’s life began in some kind of camp, a lager, and eventually people moved out to find work and then a home of their own.
I also entertained the idea that perhaps I had no homeland of my own. My grandparents, my parents and the other adults I knew in Germany all had a Heimat, a place where their cradles once stood, where everything was familiar, but invariably it was somewhere else, far away, not where they actually were. At age 9, my identity, my security and sense of belonging were not yet tied to a location like Nürnberg or Bavaria, but were instead embedded in family members, particularly Oma, my maternal grandmother.
On my first return visit to Nürnberg in 1972, there was no tugging at the heart about the city or the region, a feeling of ;Heimat’ - although there were familiar spots, like the path to my grandfather’s grave, which I followed without thinking. I had spent many Sunday mornings there with my father, digging out weeds and planting begonias. For me the echoes of home resounded most strongly in the apartments of family – grandparents, uncles, aunties – and their memories of my childhood.
When my beloved Oma died, some 20 years after we had come to Australia, my grief was relatively brief as leaving her behind when we migrated had been my first real heartbreak, and I had already missed and cried for her then. She had regularly written letters to us, but with her death, it was now my father who kept me connected me to our roots; and it was he, who continued to speak German to me, even as my mother saw me as an opportunity to learn English. Indeed, maintaining German was a way of staying grounded, of having an anchor, when the world around me was not so comfortable and school could often be a battleground.
My first friends in Australia were Italian, Greek and Maltese. We bonded because we had all arrived by ship and were strangers – no, aliens – to this country. An Alien Certificate confirmed our status. I had a name change – Brigitte to ‘Bridget’ – and didn’t mind this as a way of fitting in, but being one of the gang proved to be quite a challenge once my classmates and neighbours included Australian children with all the claims and confidence of a British heritage.
Red-haired Norma gave me an elementary lesson in recent world events – ‘we were the goodies, you the baddies’, so I dug up Australia’s convict past, made it sound as negative as possible, and reinforced the impact of this information with a slap that bounced her head off a brick wall. I learnt not to volunteer that I came from Germany, but I refused to ‘serve the Queen’ at Monday morning school assembly, as I never understand why I should. What made much more sense to me was to ‘cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.’
It took more than developing a taste for vegemite to be accepted, of course, and in order to avoid conflicts in the school yard, I lost myself in books, which greatly aided the learning of English. I read Mary Grant Bruce, Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert, and many other authors, searching for ways of connecting with Australia, particularly its history and the Aboriginal people.
Eventually I married an Australian – albeit someone with Swedish, German, Irish and English twigs in the family tree – whose grandfather had served in WWI, as had mine. ‘They was ordinary blokes, just like us’, Pop said to me once, and I liked him very much for those words, given that Australian commemorations of war – like Anzac and Remembrance Day –invariably positioned me as an outsider right from the start. When the pupils of Yarra Park State School had to assemble at the Shrine to watch Princess Alexandra drive by, I asked what the inscription ‘lest we forget’ meant. My English was still greatly lacking after only a few months here, but I got the message: you’re from Germany, so this is not for you. It’s only for OUR soldiers.
There were of course many cheerful and interesting moments too, but I’d be lying if I said they are the first to spring to my mind when asked what coming to Australia was like. A particular strategy which helped me in the early years here came from the film Pollyanna – the Glad Game. Does anyone know of this film? To play the game, all you had to do was find something every day to make you glad, something to look forward to. I remember very well when all I could think of was the yellow vanilla pudding my mother would cook for desert. There were many other things which gave me much food for thought then and still do – but I won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of them here. Suffice to say, my writing hobby provided some ‘creative therapy’, as I once described it, in a 50-word bio of myself.
I strengthened my emotional commitment to Australia following the sudden and much too early death of my father, in a poem, which I composed in 1986:
Australia Day at Maldon Cemetery
Headstones: weathered, overgrown,
mute witnesses to sorrows past
speak grimly of the quest for gold,
the tragedy of bearing children.
On stony ground, sunbaked and cracked,
across my shoes, red bull ants
trace their ancient tracks,
indifferent to the history of men.
Relentless burning sun incites
cicadas’ shrill hypnotic fugue
and stirs within a melody, unchanged
since others stood here long ago.
I see blue mountains stretching far
on shimmering horizons –
my spirit sings, in harmony
the timeless chorus of the land.
I don’t know how these words stand up to literary criticism; important is only that on one bright hot summer’s day I lifted my gaze to the countryside beyond a cemetery fence and made a spiritual connection with the landscape, the land which has remained constant for millennia and accepted all who walk on it, regardless where they are from.
At that point, almost 30 years after disembarking from the ship, I was almost home – I just had to realise it, and that enlightenment came to me not long after, when I was writing to my friend.
And there is just one more thing. In 2007 I participated in what was to become an artistic installation entitled ‘More on Heimat’, which focussed on people whose parents were once Flüchtlinge, displaced persons – so I fitted right in. This exhibition mapped onto the commemoration of a local Heimatdichter, Josef Mühlberger, for which I wrote a story in German, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Aboriginal mythology. My artistic friend transformed this into a wooden book, which is called very simply ‘Ein Märchen’, a fairytale. When my cousin’s 10-year old daughter read it, she understood immediately that it was a metaphor for my home-coming in Australia.
Notably, post-war German-speaking migrants next to the Dutch are documented as the most rapid shifters to English amongst both the adult and child generations.
And there is something else called ‘anomie’, which can be understood as a kind of mental state resulting from a mismatch between known and unfamiliar social values and norms. For migrants such a situation might arise when settling into the new country, and has also been linked to anti-social behaviour of young immigrants in particular.
Do any of these aspects resonate with you?
But now let me share with you my memory of a small farewell party in Germany, which took place in February, when the streets were still covered in snow.
A Farewell Party
Papi, Mutti and I are going to Onkel Rudi’s home tonight. We’re having a special party because we’re going to Australia. That is very far away from Germany.
Everybody sits around the table. On it are bread and fleischsalat and rollmops and salty pretzels. Onkel and Papi drink beer and schnapps. Mutti and Tante Grete drink wine and eierlikör. I’m allowed to taste the eierlikör. It is thick and creamy and yellow and sweet. Tante leaves some in her glass and gives it to me. I put in my finger and lick it.
Prost! says Onkel. We all clink glasses.
A votre santé! says Papi. He sometimes speaks French. He learnt it in the war. I say a rhyme he has taught me:
Le boeuf – der Ochs
La vache – die Kuh
Fermez la porte –
Die Tür mach zu!
Papi laughs and tells Onkel that I’ve been learning English too. I can already read the story of Little Red Riding Hood in English.
Tante puts a record of Freddy Quinn on the record player. She pulls Onkel out of his chair to dance.
I like it when everyone is dancing. Mutti and Papi are very good. Mutti likes dancing to La Paloma. It is a tango. Tante then dances with Papi. She says he is a better dancer than Onkel. He picks me up and we go round and round until I feel dizzy.
Papi pulls his harmonica out of his pocket. He plays the tunes he learnt in the Navy. Everybody is singing Auf Wiederseh’n, auf Wiederseh’n, bleib nicht so lange fort...Mutti starts to cry and Tante pats her on the back. She looks at me and I see that her eyes are bright and shiny.
I’m tired. Tante lets me sleep in her bed. I can still hear them singing. It sounds nice.
A few weeks later, on March 31, my family boarded the Castel Felice. My sister and I had no say in this decision of course – we were a special kind of Mitbringsel, bring-alongs – although I accepted the move quite happily, if for nothing else but the adventure of a boat trip and curiosity about a far-away country. I remember looking up the entry for Australia in the Bertelsmanns Volkslexikon, which showed three photos – Collins Street, Melbourne, an Aboriginal woman with tribal markings across her chest, and a rural scene of sheep. I also learnt about kangaroos, and knew that in this country, people spoke English.
So, in my personal luggage, I had some expectations, but certainly no particular concerns about my future. Besides that, I had with me the clothes on my back and some more in a suitcase, Mecki, a cheeky little hedgehog, my favourite books, including the folktales of the Brothers Grimm, and in my head and heart, I carried nine years’ worth of life experience, in Germany, about 3 years’ worth of schooling, family stories and a language.
If I’d known then that there was snow in Australia, perhaps I would have pleaded to bring along my sled too!
My father had instigated our move to Australia in the hope of improving the family’s material prospects, whereas my mother mainly wanted a place ‘where nobody can push you out’. My parents also didn’t know what lay ahead of them here, of course, but they had experience of turmoil and an expectation of hard work, only this time, envisaging a more stable and peaceful life in the process.
We arrived at Princes Pier in Melbourne on 5th May 1959, and a red rattler brought us to the Bonegilla camp the next day. We stayed there only three weeks because my father was quite disappointed that there were no jobs lined up, as had been promised by various authorities, and he had only £100 in his pocket. So he travelled to Melbourne on his own initiative, and with the aid of an acquaintance from Germany there, he was hired at International Harvester, and found some rooms in Richmond. Six months later, my parents put down a deposit on a house-and-land package in Box Hill North, costing £6,500. The land had to be paid off first – £3,000 – before the Bank would grant a mortgage for the rest. My parents managed to repay that first debt within three years, and in January 1963, we moved into a house in Sussex Street, where my mother still resides today.
In four years we had lived in four different places, not counting Bonegilla – two in Richmond, then in Balaclava and Prahran. I attended first Yarra Park State School and then St. Colman’s Catholic School, where one nun taught three grade levels in one classroom. I also looked after my little sister in between my parents’ working shifts, and the type of childhood I had known in Germany was no more. You can appreciate that this was a very disruptive time - which I describe as a ‘grey’ period in my life - anomie.
When we moved to Box Hill North, I was 13 years old and entered Blackburn North High School in 2nd Form, where I stayed until Matriculation in 6th Form. As an incentive to complete this level of education, I was awarded a Commonwealth Govt scholarship – but my parents used the money from this to pay for the bit of road in front of our house – so I’ve always felt that I own it!
However, this more settled phase gradually brought colour back to my life, with school becoming more fun and enjoyable, and me finding acceptance in a circle of peers, whom I still see today.
In 1967, my family trotted off to Box Hill Town Hall to be sworn in as Australian citizens. My parents had decided that our future lay in Australia, but there were also practical reasons for taking this step. I had no issue with making a commitment to Australia – except for the bit about swearing allegiance to the Queen, when I kept my fingers crossed behind my back. I really didn’t mean it.
I next chose work, marriage and raising three children – having my own family network was very important to me. I also became active in writers’ support groups, where I met many migrant women – and guess what was a common theme - yes, Heimat, the migration experience, memories, and so on. I have to confess that although I could still speak and read German quite well, and wrote letters to my grandmother, I did not write stories in German – my expressive ability had in the course of the years shifted to writing in English. And I had also lost confidence in my German vocabulary so that I did not feel able to raise my own children bilingually – but – very consciously I facilitated their connection to the language through my parents, Saturday school, and using German whenever possible, in my own way, and through contact with German relatives through mutual visits. Today I very consciously maintain an interest in German for my grandsons, and work at promoting the learning of German for children at school.
Against this background, I’ll now read you some snippets for a piece I produced for a writers’ workshop.
A Migrant Once…
I was writing to a friend: ‘I understand exactly how you feel, for I was a migrant once…’ when I re-read the sentence I leant back in my chair in a state of wonder.
A migrant once? Suddenly I felt extremely happy and I ran into my garden with spread arms, smiling widely at the bright flowers around me. At some stage, somehow, I had shaken off the migrant label and arrived – home. Clearly something had happened in my subconscious to prompt the words: I was a migrant once? But when? I couldn’t say, and so I became rather lost in thought.
I recalled that one of my classmates in Germany had written into my autograph book: Vergesse nie die Heimat
Wo deine Wiege stand.
Du findest in der Fremde
Kein zweites Heimatland.
An assumption in this innocent verse is that a person’s birthplace is also their homeland – perhaps the only one – but is this necessarily so?
My first home was a wooden barracks in a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Nürnberg. My father hailed from a small village in Oberschlesien, my mother from an even smaller one in East Prussia. They met at the Schafhoflager, my mother having survived the flight from the Russians and my father finding his family again through the Red Cross after being released as a French POW. I had two sets of grandparents at the camp, and I often heard their tales about the homelands they had to leave and to which they could not return, and the Flucht. I noticed they often became sad when talking about Heimat, and I concluded that to lose it must be a very traumatic experience indeed. About this time I formed the notion that everybody’s life began in some kind of camp, a lager, and eventually people moved out to find work and then a home of their own.
I also entertained the idea that perhaps I had no homeland of my own. My grandparents, my parents and the other adults I knew in Germany all had a Heimat, a place where their cradles once stood, where everything was familiar, but invariably it was somewhere else, far away, not where they actually were. At age 9, my identity, my security and sense of belonging were not yet tied to a location like Nürnberg or Bavaria, but were instead embedded in family members, particularly Oma, my maternal grandmother.
On my first return visit to Nürnberg in 1972, there was no tugging at the heart about the city or the region, a feeling of ;Heimat’ - although there were familiar spots, like the path to my grandfather’s grave, which I followed without thinking. I had spent many Sunday mornings there with my father, digging out weeds and planting begonias. For me the echoes of home resounded most strongly in the apartments of family – grandparents, uncles, aunties – and their memories of my childhood.
When my beloved Oma died, some 20 years after we had come to Australia, my grief was relatively brief as leaving her behind when we migrated had been my first real heartbreak, and I had already missed and cried for her then. She had regularly written letters to us, but with her death, it was now my father who kept me connected me to our roots; and it was he, who continued to speak German to me, even as my mother saw me as an opportunity to learn English. Indeed, maintaining German was a way of staying grounded, of having an anchor, when the world around me was not so comfortable and school could often be a battleground.
My first friends in Australia were Italian, Greek and Maltese. We bonded because we had all arrived by ship and were strangers – no, aliens – to this country. An Alien Certificate confirmed our status. I had a name change – Brigitte to ‘Bridget’ – and didn’t mind this as a way of fitting in, but being one of the gang proved to be quite a challenge once my classmates and neighbours included Australian children with all the claims and confidence of a British heritage.
Red-haired Norma gave me an elementary lesson in recent world events – ‘we were the goodies, you the baddies’, so I dug up Australia’s convict past, made it sound as negative as possible, and reinforced the impact of this information with a slap that bounced her head off a brick wall. I learnt not to volunteer that I came from Germany, but I refused to ‘serve the Queen’ at Monday morning school assembly, as I never understand why I should. What made much more sense to me was to ‘cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.’
It took more than developing a taste for vegemite to be accepted, of course, and in order to avoid conflicts in the school yard, I lost myself in books, which greatly aided the learning of English. I read Mary Grant Bruce, Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert, and many other authors, searching for ways of connecting with Australia, particularly its history and the Aboriginal people.
Eventually I married an Australian – albeit someone with Swedish, German, Irish and English twigs in the family tree – whose grandfather had served in WWI, as had mine. ‘They was ordinary blokes, just like us’, Pop said to me once, and I liked him very much for those words, given that Australian commemorations of war – like Anzac and Remembrance Day –invariably positioned me as an outsider right from the start. When the pupils of Yarra Park State School had to assemble at the Shrine to watch Princess Alexandra drive by, I asked what the inscription ‘lest we forget’ meant. My English was still greatly lacking after only a few months here, but I got the message: you’re from Germany, so this is not for you. It’s only for OUR soldiers.
There were of course many cheerful and interesting moments too, but I’d be lying if I said they are the first to spring to my mind when asked what coming to Australia was like. A particular strategy which helped me in the early years here came from the film Pollyanna – the Glad Game. Does anyone know of this film? To play the game, all you had to do was find something every day to make you glad, something to look forward to. I remember very well when all I could think of was the yellow vanilla pudding my mother would cook for desert. There were many other things which gave me much food for thought then and still do – but I won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of them here. Suffice to say, my writing hobby provided some ‘creative therapy’, as I once described it, in a 50-word bio of myself.
I strengthened my emotional commitment to Australia following the sudden and much too early death of my father, in a poem, which I composed in 1986:
Australia Day at Maldon Cemetery
Headstones: weathered, overgrown,
mute witnesses to sorrows past
speak grimly of the quest for gold,
the tragedy of bearing children.
On stony ground, sunbaked and cracked,
across my shoes, red bull ants
trace their ancient tracks,
indifferent to the history of men.
Relentless burning sun incites
cicadas’ shrill hypnotic fugue
and stirs within a melody, unchanged
since others stood here long ago.
I see blue mountains stretching far
on shimmering horizons –
my spirit sings, in harmony
the timeless chorus of the land.
I don’t know how these words stand up to literary criticism; important is only that on one bright hot summer’s day I lifted my gaze to the countryside beyond a cemetery fence and made a spiritual connection with the landscape, the land which has remained constant for millennia and accepted all who walk on it, regardless where they are from.
At that point, almost 30 years after disembarking from the ship, I was almost home – I just had to realise it, and that enlightenment came to me not long after, when I was writing to my friend.
And there is just one more thing. In 2007 I participated in what was to become an artistic installation entitled ‘More on Heimat’, which focussed on people whose parents were once Flüchtlinge, displaced persons – so I fitted right in. This exhibition mapped onto the commemoration of a local Heimatdichter, Josef Mühlberger, for which I wrote a story in German, inspired by the Brothers Grimm and Aboriginal mythology. My artistic friend transformed this into a wooden book, which is called very simply ‘Ein Märchen’, a fairytale. When my cousin’s 10-year old daughter read it, she understood immediately that it was a metaphor for my home-coming in Australia.
