Margitta Acker has written two books - “From Baltic Shores to a Distant Land” (published 2009) and “Meat Pies and Mumbling Blokes” (published 2013) - describing her personal migration experience. They can be purchased for $20 each (plus postage) and a discount applies if you buy both. Please contact: ackers@netspeed.com.au.
"I arrived in Australia in June 1962. In my luggage I not only carried memories, but expectations, too, imaginings of what Australia and my life in this new and oh, so strange land, might be like. In the beginning I looked for the familiar – in nature, in culture and in everyday life. The familiar was going to help me find my place in these new and somewhat intimidating surroundings, and the memories – they were going to keep me strong and help me cope.
"I arrived in Australia in June 1962. In my luggage I not only carried memories, but expectations, too, imaginings of what Australia and my life in this new and oh, so strange land, might be like. In the beginning I looked for the familiar – in nature, in culture and in everyday life. The familiar was going to help me find my place in these new and somewhat intimidating surroundings, and the memories – they were going to keep me strong and help me cope.
My memories go all the way back to my childhood in a small coastal village in eastern Pomerania. I remember summers at the beach, my grandmother’s flower garden, and winters of snow and ice. I remember when the Soviet Army arrived in our village on a freezing cold day in March 1945, and I remember some of the horrors that occurred at the time. A year later we left our home for good. An overcrowded transit camp, days spent crammed into a cattle train, another camp, being sent across the Baltic Sea in an evacuation ship followed by another, safer camp were all part of our family’s six-week journey westwards. And here we were not welcome either: accommodation was scarce, there was not enough food to go around, jobs were hard to get, the black market thrived.
But slowly, slowly things improved. My father had survived the war. The family was together again. We settled in a village in Lower Saxony. My siblings were born. I completed my education. Then, at the age of 21, I met a man, a German man who had migrated to Australia in 1955 and returned five years later to visit his ageing parents. We became engaged shortly before he returned to Australia, and I followed fourteen months later.
What did I expect to find in Australia? What did I imagine? I am ashamed to say that I knew very little about Australia and that, in the early stages, I not only looked for the familiar, I also compared. I looked at the countryside, the towns, the shops, the houses, the people with German eyes. In a country of tea drinkers there was no decent coffee, the bread was awful, good wurst was hard to find, the only wine available seemed to be some sweet, bubbly stuff. And so it went.
But as before, things gradually improved. I put my German eyes aside and tried to really look, without preconceived ideas and without prejudice. And I actually liked what I saw. I liked it very much.
Below are a few excerpts from my two books “From Baltic Shores to a Distant Land” (published 2009) and “Meat Pies and Mumbling Blokes” (published 2013):
Soon the big vessel was gliding down the … River towards the open sea, the North Sea. Farewell songs boomed across the water from the pilot station: Muss i’ denn, muss i’ denn, zum Städele hinaus (a German farewell folksong) and another, catchy, but as yet unknown tune which would be played again once we arrived at the other end as well as at every port of call along the way: Waltzing Matilda.
Did I cry? I don’t think so, even if my heart was heavy which surely it must have been. I wanted to be brave and not get carried away by my emotions. Rosemarie [she was in my cabin] and her boyfriend were standing next to me at the railing as we listened to the music and hummed along, our eyes firmly fixed on the horizon ahead of us.
………………….
Here we were on a sparkling white ship on sparkling blue seas. Wonderful! … six young women to a cabin, we all felt as if we were on an ocean cruise and not on a migrant ship. Somehow the word migrant ship seemed to carry the connotation of something basic, crowded and somehow ugly. But this was bliss: beautiful meals, certainly meals more glamorous than I’d ever had in my life; swimming pools, deck chairs for sunbaking, entertainment every evening, from movies and games to dances, an equatorial baptism, a fancy dress ball at which – so my diary tells me – the captain asked me for a dance, not once, but twice. And yet, I have no recollection of that. All of this – apart from a small administrative fee – came with the compliments of the Australian government. Because of my status as an assisted nominated dependent, who had been sponsored by her future husband, I was welcome in Australia.
…………………
How empty was the country we had travelled through! Fifty, eighty, a hundred miles (no kilometres then) between settlements seemed to be nothing unusual. …. somewhere off the highway we occasionally spotted a farm, its buildings looking rather unimpressive. While the farmhouse itself was often hidden behind a hedge or under some tall trees, the rest of the farm buildings were nothing more than an assembly of tentative structures of mostly corrugated iron with a sprinkling of machinery, new or rusted, in between. Were these farmers here poor? Could they not afford to build a decent barn? A decent brick shed for their tractor? It certainly looked like that.
…………………
I had always dreamt of a white wedding and being married in a church, preferably in spring. The 28 July [five weeks after my arrival] was a clear, cold and windy winter’s day. We were married at St Peter’s Lutheran Church in Braddon [in Canberra]. … I wore a short white dress and a veil. Max and Gerda[our hosts] were the only Germans among the 16 guests; all the others were virtual strangers to me. No family members, no girlfriends, no relatives. Not even a telephone call to or from Germany. A telephone call at that time was prohibitively expensive, and we didn’t have a telephone anyway. ….. That was when I realised for the first time how enormous the distance was that separated me from home, from the people and things that were dear to me. Would I ever see them again? Would I? I doubted it.
…………………
Suddenly Christmas was upon us. It was strange – the heat of summer and Christmas; for me that didn’t to go together. Even though I baked Christmas cookies, bought presents and decorated a tree, it just didn’t feel like Christmas. …
On Christmas Day we drove to the coast where Australians love to celebrate Christmas. In the camping ground not far from us was a family group – three generations. The children were playing with the presents they had opened in the morning, the men were drinking beer, the women were busy preparing a meal in the shade of some gum trees. There was a plastic Christmas tree in front of their tent, colourfully decorated. The radio blared Christmas carols. When they played ‘Silent Night’ and Bing Crosby sang ‘I am dreaming of a white Christmas’, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry. – I fled to the beach and had a good cry.
……………
And this is as far as my cultural expectations were met in Canberra in the early 1960s:
The Sydney Opera Company … were to present La Traviata. The venue was the Albert Hall. … we expected something akin to a small opera house with tiered seating, a small raised stage, a smaller-than-usual orchestra, but an orchestra nonetheless. … Of course, there was no proper stage, no tiered seating, no small orchestra. There were just rows and rows of hard chairs in front of which stood a grand piano, and behind the piano there was in fact something that vaguely resembled a stage: a sort of raised platform. Our hearts sank. … we were in pioneer country … as far as the arts were concerned. This truly was another world. As the piano hammered away to Verdi’s tunes and the singers … sang the familiar tunes, I was reminded of the words an Englishwoman had said to me in London in 1961 when I had told her I would be going to Australia the following year. “Australia”, she had said, “why Australia? They have no culture down there, you know.” But I wasn’t going to Australia for the culture, I was going there for the adventure.
And it certainly has been an adventure. My early frustrations have long been forgotten; I have adapted well and even enjoy Christmas in summer. We are still here after more than fifty years, still married after all that time. Children and grandchildren – life has been good. Australia has been good to me, to us.
But slowly, slowly things improved. My father had survived the war. The family was together again. We settled in a village in Lower Saxony. My siblings were born. I completed my education. Then, at the age of 21, I met a man, a German man who had migrated to Australia in 1955 and returned five years later to visit his ageing parents. We became engaged shortly before he returned to Australia, and I followed fourteen months later.
What did I expect to find in Australia? What did I imagine? I am ashamed to say that I knew very little about Australia and that, in the early stages, I not only looked for the familiar, I also compared. I looked at the countryside, the towns, the shops, the houses, the people with German eyes. In a country of tea drinkers there was no decent coffee, the bread was awful, good wurst was hard to find, the only wine available seemed to be some sweet, bubbly stuff. And so it went.
But as before, things gradually improved. I put my German eyes aside and tried to really look, without preconceived ideas and without prejudice. And I actually liked what I saw. I liked it very much.
Below are a few excerpts from my two books “From Baltic Shores to a Distant Land” (published 2009) and “Meat Pies and Mumbling Blokes” (published 2013):
Soon the big vessel was gliding down the … River towards the open sea, the North Sea. Farewell songs boomed across the water from the pilot station: Muss i’ denn, muss i’ denn, zum Städele hinaus (a German farewell folksong) and another, catchy, but as yet unknown tune which would be played again once we arrived at the other end as well as at every port of call along the way: Waltzing Matilda.
Did I cry? I don’t think so, even if my heart was heavy which surely it must have been. I wanted to be brave and not get carried away by my emotions. Rosemarie [she was in my cabin] and her boyfriend were standing next to me at the railing as we listened to the music and hummed along, our eyes firmly fixed on the horizon ahead of us.
………………….
Here we were on a sparkling white ship on sparkling blue seas. Wonderful! … six young women to a cabin, we all felt as if we were on an ocean cruise and not on a migrant ship. Somehow the word migrant ship seemed to carry the connotation of something basic, crowded and somehow ugly. But this was bliss: beautiful meals, certainly meals more glamorous than I’d ever had in my life; swimming pools, deck chairs for sunbaking, entertainment every evening, from movies and games to dances, an equatorial baptism, a fancy dress ball at which – so my diary tells me – the captain asked me for a dance, not once, but twice. And yet, I have no recollection of that. All of this – apart from a small administrative fee – came with the compliments of the Australian government. Because of my status as an assisted nominated dependent, who had been sponsored by her future husband, I was welcome in Australia.
…………………
How empty was the country we had travelled through! Fifty, eighty, a hundred miles (no kilometres then) between settlements seemed to be nothing unusual. …. somewhere off the highway we occasionally spotted a farm, its buildings looking rather unimpressive. While the farmhouse itself was often hidden behind a hedge or under some tall trees, the rest of the farm buildings were nothing more than an assembly of tentative structures of mostly corrugated iron with a sprinkling of machinery, new or rusted, in between. Were these farmers here poor? Could they not afford to build a decent barn? A decent brick shed for their tractor? It certainly looked like that.
…………………
I had always dreamt of a white wedding and being married in a church, preferably in spring. The 28 July [five weeks after my arrival] was a clear, cold and windy winter’s day. We were married at St Peter’s Lutheran Church in Braddon [in Canberra]. … I wore a short white dress and a veil. Max and Gerda[our hosts] were the only Germans among the 16 guests; all the others were virtual strangers to me. No family members, no girlfriends, no relatives. Not even a telephone call to or from Germany. A telephone call at that time was prohibitively expensive, and we didn’t have a telephone anyway. ….. That was when I realised for the first time how enormous the distance was that separated me from home, from the people and things that were dear to me. Would I ever see them again? Would I? I doubted it.
…………………
Suddenly Christmas was upon us. It was strange – the heat of summer and Christmas; for me that didn’t to go together. Even though I baked Christmas cookies, bought presents and decorated a tree, it just didn’t feel like Christmas. …
On Christmas Day we drove to the coast where Australians love to celebrate Christmas. In the camping ground not far from us was a family group – three generations. The children were playing with the presents they had opened in the morning, the men were drinking beer, the women were busy preparing a meal in the shade of some gum trees. There was a plastic Christmas tree in front of their tent, colourfully decorated. The radio blared Christmas carols. When they played ‘Silent Night’ and Bing Crosby sang ‘I am dreaming of a white Christmas’, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to cry. – I fled to the beach and had a good cry.
……………
And this is as far as my cultural expectations were met in Canberra in the early 1960s:
The Sydney Opera Company … were to present La Traviata. The venue was the Albert Hall. … we expected something akin to a small opera house with tiered seating, a small raised stage, a smaller-than-usual orchestra, but an orchestra nonetheless. … Of course, there was no proper stage, no tiered seating, no small orchestra. There were just rows and rows of hard chairs in front of which stood a grand piano, and behind the piano there was in fact something that vaguely resembled a stage: a sort of raised platform. Our hearts sank. … we were in pioneer country … as far as the arts were concerned. This truly was another world. As the piano hammered away to Verdi’s tunes and the singers … sang the familiar tunes, I was reminded of the words an Englishwoman had said to me in London in 1961 when I had told her I would be going to Australia the following year. “Australia”, she had said, “why Australia? They have no culture down there, you know.” But I wasn’t going to Australia for the culture, I was going there for the adventure.
And it certainly has been an adventure. My early frustrations have long been forgotten; I have adapted well and even enjoy Christmas in summer. We are still here after more than fifty years, still married after all that time. Children and grandchildren – life has been good. Australia has been good to me, to us.
