The Immigrant’s Story

The number of immigrants arriving in Australia from Europe increased rapidly just before and after the Second World War. As a postwar immigrant myself I would like to comment on how my experiences differ from the main characters in three Australian books.

Moniek Prochownik, the unfulfilled artist in Alex Miller’s novel Prochownik’s Dream (2005), migrated to Australia looking for dignity and freedom. Perhaps it was due to his bad war memories, his first work experiences, or his over-protective family, that he failed to take the opportunities that Australia offered.

Feliks and Kornelia Skrzynecki, remembered by their son Peter in his memoir The Sparrow Garden (2004), arrived with pre-existing prejudices, homesick even before they reached Australia, and spent their whole life amongst fellow Polish immigrants.

Raimond Gaita’s portrayal of his father in Romulus, My Father (1998) shows that he was an honest person, good family man, friend and tradesman, but he was unable to be a successful immigrant because of personal misfortunes.

The first time I heard the term emigrant or immigrant was in 1939 when, aged twelve, I attended a farewell dinner in Prague in honour of my cousin Rita and her husband John. They were leaving for Australia because of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. I could understand that, for “political reasons”, they were leaving behind their families and native country with little hope of ever returning.

I watched the tearful faces of my relatives and listened to their different comments, some about recklessness and others about courage for undertaking such a long voyage. I had no idea that seven years later, as the only family survivor of the war, I would embark on an identical journey.

In 1945 Rita and John succeeded in tracing me through the Red Cross. Letters were exchanged between Prague and Sydney about travel arrangements. For the sum of one pound, John and Rita obtained my landing permit, number 39837, which permitted them to guarantee my maintenance in Australia. The authorities had to be convinced that I was of sound health and good moral character. This presented no difficulties, as I was only nineteen.

According to the passenger list of the converted freighter Ville d’Amiens, I arrived at the Port of Sydney from Marseilles, via New Caledonia, on November 25, 1946. Although I had a valid passport with an Australian visa, an Aliens Registration Officer filled out an “Application for Registration” form with my personal details. He requested an additional photograph and took my fingerprints. The document was ready for my signature and I hoped I would now be allowed to enter Australia. But my disembarkation was further delayed as, after a three-month voyage, our luxurious but battered ship was so dirty that the local wharfies refused to board and unload our luggage.

Before our departure from Prague I had received two puzzling photos from my cousins. One was of Rita wearing a white uniform, standing in front of a shop window displaying the sign “Delicatessen”. Her plain apparel was a far cry from that of the socialite I remembered, who always dressed immaculately in outfits from her parents’ fashion boutique. The other photo showed John, formerly a lawyer, wearing baggy shorts, knee-high socks and something vaguely resembling a soldier’s headgear.

The mystery was solved upon my arrival and gave me an insight into Australia. John’s shorts and digger’s hat were the “livery” worn by friendly aliens who volunteered for quasi-military duties. Rita’s photo had been taken in front of the Continental Delicatessen in Macleay Street, Potts Point, where my cousins served cold meats and salads prepared in a tiny kitchen. They worked from morning until midnight, using a cookbook written by Marie Janku-Sandtnerova (a sort of Czech Margaret Fulton). The shop assistant, Vera, born and bred in Sydney, became Rita’s lifelong friend and business partner.

After the lease on the shop expired, many customers kept in touch with my cousins, which allowed me to meet many of their friends. These included well-known locals such as the journalist Rupert Lockwood, the Canberra lobbyist Jack Smith, and the brother of the popular singer Gladys Moncrieff, all of whom accepted us immigrants into their midst.

Opportunities for immigrants in the postwar period were endless. John and Rita’s first venture, the delicatessen, was followed by a goulash bar at Kings Cross; a dry-cleaning agency in Redfern; a shoe shop in Ashfield; an import-and-export firm; and a company producing ethical drugs.

Through hard work Rita and John managed to redeem some of the upper-middle-class lifestyle they left behind in pre-war Europe, and took time off for short holidays, Rita enjoying her hobby of horse riding and John taking up golf. They also succeeded in fitting into the mainstream by accepting the Australian way of life. They became my role models and mentors, and made it easier for me to link with Australian customs and standards.

Surviving “the final solution” had convinced me that whatever the future brought must be an improvement on the war years. And destiny was kind to me. I did find in Australia the regular, free and simple life I was seeking.

Some unusual events introduced me to my new homeland. A friendly customs officer showed compassion when inspecting my only piece of luggage, a half-empty old suitcase, but confiscated a paper bag of poppy seeds, which I had brought as a present for Rita to enable her to make her favourite poppy-seed cake; a retired high school teacher held free English lessons in which he gave me my first taste of Shakespeare; somebody asked me to translate from Chinese, not realising that an immigrant coming from Europe was unlikely to know Chinese.

The outré events did not end there. Years later at a government seminar for Nesbians (Al Grassby’s word for immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds) a delegate representing Turkish women demanded compensation from the government for being tricked into coming to faraway Australia instead of Austria as promised.

The late 1970s were still days when my husband could lecture at a university having only a masters degree (without a PhD) and I became a company secretary with only a bookkeeping diploma. Of course, not all postwar immigrants would agree with my enthusiastic assessment of a friendly country full of opportunities.

Alex Miller’s novel Prochownik’s Dream portrays Moniek Prochownik as having the chance to become a successful immigrant because of his thorough knowledge of English, acquired while working for ten years in Britain before his arrival in Australia.

Moniek, a fourteen-year-old boy with an ambition to become an artist, was separated from his parents during the war and sent to a labour camp in Poland. He arrived in Australia with his wife Lola, not as a stateless refugee, but as an immigrant looking forward to enjoying here the dignity of personal freedom.

Such hope was dashed on the first day he spent on the moulding line of the Melbourne Dunlop plant, when he felt obliged to change his name from Prochownik to Powlet. Moniek considered the factory his second prison—after the Polish labour camp—but he never left. Despite a talent for painting and knowledge of English, he failed to take advantage of the opportunities Australia offered. Evidently he had no will to succeed, perhaps feeling constrained by the experiences of his youth.

Was Moniek’s lack of effort also partly due to the (perhaps unintentional) absence of support from his loving wife and his two sons, Roy and Tony, both born in Australia? The over-protective Lola was proud to watch her husband spend evenings drawing and guiding Tony to become a painter. However, Lola put away Moniek’s paintings in an old suitcase, and they were never exhibited. Did the family realise that Moniek’s last chance of being recognised as an artist in Australia thus disappeared? At the end of the book, Prochownik’s dream had not been realised, as Tony had not yet painted his father’s portrait.

Roy, Tony’s older brother, understood that his father, by putting on a brave front, was trying to hide his frustration with his family. Roy came to the rational conclusion that “perhaps one lifetime was not long enough to become an Australian”.

Peter Skrzynecki’s memoir The Sparrow Garden was published fifty-five years after his family’s arrival in Australia. His mother Kornelia grew up in a Ukrainian village and described her family (I am not sure if her father, a Hungarian Jew, was included) as often hungry but happy “surviving all that and the war”. Kornelia separated from Peter’s father before their son was born. She met and married Feliks during the postwar European upheavals.

Feliks Skrzynecki was born in Poland in the village of Raciborow. He was a working-class man, used only to labour on the land. The memory of the idyllic life on the farm “amongst fields of rye” sustained Feliks through his whole life.

Peter was born in 1945, in a German household where his mother worked during the war years as a servant. He says he clearly remembers being in his mother’s womb and being born. “Her crying was for a loneliness and pain, being far away from her home in the Ukraine.” Perhaps the author’s poetic imagination is playing a part here.

Early postwar immigrants came to Australia from various walks of life, for political, economic, family or other reasons. Some had landing permits from guarantors who vouched to provide accommodation, maintenance and jobs. The Skrzynecki family was granted a government-assisted passage (with a two-year contract to undertake any work assigned to them). As displaced persons, Feliks, Kornelia and four-year-old Peter left the German camp Lebenstadt in October 1949, on the General R.M. Blatchford, sailing from Naples.

In contrast to Moniek Prochownik, who was happy to leave his refugee status behind and hoped for a good life in Australia, the Skrzynecki family seemed depressed and homesick even before they reached Sydney Cove. Peter described the crossing of the Red Sea as the “severance of the umbilical cord that bound his parents to Europe and in particular, Poland and the Ukraine”, and encapsulates their grief and sorrow in an untranslatable Polish word, zal.

I found some common ground with Peter. We both contacted the Australian Archives for passenger lists of the ships that brought us to Australia. The General R.M. Blatchford included the Skrzynecki family under numbers 529, 530 and 531. The Ville d’Amiens showed my name under number 194. Peter shed tears because of the indignity suffered by his parents when listed as numbers. But it was a mystery to me why he was offended when the newcomers were considered as labourers and “not as convicts, squatters, or landed gentry”. I remember my travel number, L983, on a list of “passengers” taken to a concentration camp. Out of a thousand only 113 survived, my family not being amongst them.

As Peter observes: “Adolf Hitler was dead. The Holocaust was over. The Allies had saved the people of Europe … This was a new beginning. Decisions had been made.” I made my decision to leave the old country and was happily settled in Australia three years before the Skrzynecki family was being processed at number 13 wharf at Pyrmont by officers of the Department of Immigration. From there the newcomers travelled to the reception centre in Bathurst, “roughing it” for two weeks in corrugated-iron Nissen huts before moving further west. (I hardly dare to mention that I spent many happy years on a ridge near Bathurst living in a dwelling of corrugated iron.)

The Skrzyneckis’ destination was the Parkes migrant camp. Peter remembers his stay there as a happy time, but his mother, who worked in Parkes as a domestic, vowed never to revisit the town or the camp again. Feliks was employed as a pipe layer by the Sydney Water Board and visited his family for a few days each month.

After Feliks’ two-year contract was completed, the Skrzynecki family was free to go where they pleased. They went only as far as western Sydney. With a deposit of £270 and a loan of £1600, they became, within four years, owners of a cottage at 9 Mary Street, Regents Park, with a creek, garden and fruit trees. Feliks stayed in his first job with the Water Board until his retirement.

The house in Mary Street became Peter’s parents’ refuge, from which they never moved, and the “sparrow garden” came to be their paradise. And yet, why this ferocity, when Feliks “violently clubbed to death small bodies of sparrows, trapped under wire netting which should have protected his lettuces”? Peter suggests that this was the only way his father could assert authority.

Feliks and Kornelia were law-abiding citizens and loving parents. They made sure their son received a Catholic education, but they attended mass only when it was celebrated by a Polish priest, and arranged to be buried in a family plot in the Polish section of Rookwood Cemetery.

For their friends they chose only Polish and a few other immigrants from displaced persons’ camps. In this context two of Peter’s statements come to mind: that life in Australia will be for all of them “a far cry from the lives they left behind as consequences of displacement and dispossession”; on the other hand that “children grow up in Australia to a far better life than their parents had left behind in Europe”.

The immigration angle provides the major theme in The Sparrow Garden. I found it difficult to understand why Peter exaggerated the intolerance of the Australian immigration officials, politicians and some inhabitants, who were not used to the postwar influx of refugees. After all, that is what we were, “not convicts, squatters, or landed gentry”. I think Associate Professor Peter Skrzynecki OAM would concede that the second generation of immigrants can choose their trade or profession without being discriminated against. Shouldn’t he also admit that his parents, only four years after arriving in Australia, already owned their home and could select their own way of life? It unfortunately did not include adjusting fully to Australia.

Raimond Gaita’s biography, Romulus, My Father, is more than just a description of how a family of refugees deals with life in a new country. It is an attempt to understand a man from whom Raimond learned three fundamental things: “what a good workman is; what an honest man is; what friendship is”.

Such a man is called, in Yiddish, a Mensch: an upright, honourable and decent man. With such virtues Romulus should have become a successful settler and fit easily into the local community. Instead, he and his family became “victims of misfortune, in their different ways, broken by it, but never thereby diminished”.

Romulus was born in the Banat, then a Romanian part of Yugoslavia. By the time he was seventeen, he had completed his apprenticeship as a blacksmith and was recognised by his master for his workmanship. Looking for better prospects, he left for Germany, but his plans were cut short by the beginning of the war. Romulus was conscripted to work in a munitions factory in Dortmund in the Ruhr Valley. There he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old chemistry student, Christine Anna Doerr. Romulus, despite his dark complexion, was accepted into her middle-class German family due to exceptional times: he supplied them with otherwise unobtainable goods through the black market. He luckily avoided being caught and imprisoned as a black marketeer. He could also have been executed for his association with a pure Aryan maiden.

After the war, Romulus realised that Christine, due to her mental and physical condition, was unable to look after their baby son. Although her parents were happy to care for their grandchild and although Romulus, with his trade and skills, looked forward to a prosperous future in postwar Germany, he gave in to the whim of his sickly wife, who believed that life in a warmer climate would cure her ills. Did some of the experiences of the war years spent in Germany influence Romulus’ decision to leave Europe?

Thus, in 1950, Romulus and Christine, with four-year-old Raimond, sailed to Australia on the Hersey under an assisted passage scheme and docked at Port Melbourne. From there, the family transferred to Bonegilla, a reception camp for immigrants. Romulus was sent to work on the construction of Cairn Curran Reservoir on the Loddon River in central Victoria, where accommodation was provided for men only. A skilled tradesman, Romulus was put to work with a pick and shovel, which he accepted as repayment for the free passage he could not have otherwise afforded. He looked forward to a new life for himself and his family after fulfilling his two-year bond.

When Romulus received news from Bonegilla that Christine was neglecting Raimond, he felt he had no option but to obtain permission to keep his son, for at least a month, at the workers’ camp at Cairn Curran. His two new friends, Romanian brothers Pantelimon and Mitru Hora, helped to look after Raimond. When the authorities revoked the privilege, father and son moved into a nearby farmhouse, “Frogmore”, near Baringhup. Christine joined them and Romulus hoped that, although the accommodation was primitive, without electricity or running water, it offered some hope of keeping the family together.

It was to no avail: “A troubled city girl from Europe could not settle in a dilapidated farmhouse in a landscape that highlighted her isolation.” Longing for company, Christine began a relationship with Mitru, and eventually followed him to Melbourne.

By then Romulus, released from his contract, had to take up a job in a tool-making factory and at the same time look after six-year-old Raimond. He did not complain about his predicament, or become bitter or blame the government for taking advantage of him. There was no woman in Romulus’ home to bring up a child. Christine, depressed and suicidal, only occasionally visited the farm. The only help came from his friend Pantelimon (known as Hora). When staying with Romulus and Raimond at Frogmore, Hora had to intervene between father and son, because of Romulus’ strict behaviour towards Raimond. Only Romulus’ animals, Rusha the cow, Marta the cat, Orloff the dog and especially Jack the cockatoo, seemed to have a calming influence over Romulus. Nevertheless the two friends formed a close relationship, and openly discussed their different experiences—Romulus under the German occupation and Hora under the communists.

Romulus accepted a neighbour’s offer to use his workshop. This enabled him to return to his trade and begin manufacturing wrought-iron furniture. His reputation as a skilled artisan soon spread among farmers of the region to neighbouring towns and even as far as Melbourne. According to Raimond, his father’s work “both expressed and formed much of his character. His sense of the importance of work and of its moral and spiritual requirements was simple and noble.”

Most postwar immigrants, not long after their arrival in Australia, had steady jobs, their own homes, a car, and could afford to look after their children’s education. Romulus, in contrast, had to cope with the suicide of Mitru and Christine and the feelings of guilt that neither he nor his friends had realised how far his wife’s life was affected by her psychological illness. It seemed that not even Christine’s frequent hospitalisations and her stormy relationship with Mitru fully explained her incapacity to care properly for her children. Their two little girls became wards of the state, as the authorities denied Romulus permission to adopt them.

The painful times were, to some degree, alleviated by Romulus’ prospering business. He was known as an honest man who would not do careless or shoddy work.

And yet, the thirty-seven-year-old Romulus felt isolated among his neighbours and longed for sociable European society. Perhaps he was trying to bring a little bit of Yugoslavia to this country through corresponding with a young woman named Lydia whom he intended to marry. After two years she arrived in Australia—but with a husband, brother and mother.

After this betrayal on top of his other misfortunes, Romulus admitted himself to the Ballarat psychiatric hospital, where Raimond—a boarder at St Patrick’s College in Ballarat—visited him. Romulus’ mental breakdown reduced his confidence and spirit, which was a shock to Raimond, who realised that he would never again be able to accept his father’s authority.

Romulus released himself and returned to Frogmore. Sometimes he was able to hide the signs of his sickness, at other times his condition was so bad he had to be re-hospitalised. Nevertheless he later married a young Yugoslav divorcee from Melbourne, Milka, who was not only able to deal with Romulus’ illness, but she also shared his love for animals and was a supportive and willing worker.

Still feeling depressed and imprisoned in Australia, Romulus finally revisited Yugoslavia, not realising that the pre- and postwar jovial atmosphere of Europe, as romanticised in his memories, was no more. Disappointed, he returned to Australia.

Luckily I had no romantic dreams about my former homeland, so it was no big surprise that on my first visit to the Czech Republic after the collapse of the communist system I found that my grandfather’s house in Prague had been given by the state to total strangers. They claimed that no heirs had survived the war, although they were well aware of my existence. I appeared in 1991 at the Appeals Court. It would have been difficult for the judge to deny my ownership, and after all legal documents were re-examined, part of the house was eventually returned to me.

I thought I would have some free time in the beautiful city of my birth, but it was not to be. One of the tenants, an international bank, disputed the court’s decision and brought over an English QC to test my identity. Although I had strict instructions not to interrupt the proceedings, I could not help but call out to the arrogant QC: “Don’t treat me as an intruder, you are the one sitting in my parents’ dining room!” Eventually I won, and was happy to fly back home to Australia.

The visit to Europe failed to satisfy Romulus’ hopes and it did not make his adjustment to the Australian way of life any easier. He and Milka recognised the generosity and decency of their neighbours and friends, but both felt that the recently emerged “multiculturalism”, which should have brought a changed attitude towards New Australians, was “not free from condescension by the very people who sang its praises”.

Romulus finally conceded that Christine did not deserve to lie in an unmarked grave. About twenty years after her death, Raimond returned from London, where he was working, to help his father build a monument in Christine’s memory. When Barbara and Susan, Raimond’s half-sisters, then visited their mother’s and father’s grave, Romulus felt that whatever might happen in the future, nothing could undo the good of the family members finding each other.

The more things change the more they stay the same. Take for instance the humble Bathurst telephone directory. In 2003, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs had three simple entries:

• General Enquiries
• Australian Citizenship
• Complaints

By 2007 the number of entries had nearly tripled and included the following:

• Immigration dob-in line
• Employees Work Rights checking line
• Employees Work Rights feed-back line
• Client services fax-back line
• General skilled migrant information

In 2005 a culturally diverse working group arranged a multicultural gathering in Bathurst to highlight the bright future for immigrants and their children and acknowledge their ethnic, cultural, social and religious diversity. I sat next to a lonely-looking couple with two little girls. They were refugees from Iran. The husband, in his late thirties, told me in broken English that while working as a labourer in a factory he had no opportunity to better his position and still had problems communicating with his co-workers. They were superficially polite and friendly, but had no desire to mix with his family and compatriots. His wife felt lonely and unhappy because they missed their relatives and friends. They decided to stay in Australia, for the sake of their children’s future.

My Iranian acquaintance would have agreed with the statement that “perhaps one lifetime was not long enough to become an Australian”. And yet, all the families in my story decided to stay in Australia.

According to anthropological studies and archaeological excavations, large movements of populations date back as far as the Stone Age period. One of the earliest written stories of migration is Yahweh’s call to Abram, in Genesis 12: “Leave your country for the land I will show you … So Abram went.” Given the continuing upheavals around the world, large-scale migration looks likely to be with us for some time to come. We can only accept that some of us will succeed and be happy, and others will not. To solve all the problems of immigration would require the wisdom of Solomon.