Sailing on a Cusp and a Prayer

By Margaret Zeegers

This is a book where Jennifer Worth’s Call the Midwife meets Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes in Australia, with a nod to AB Facey’s A Fortunate Life, as it presents the early years of one migrant family’s experience after arriving by ship in Australia in the 1950s. Babies, marriages, childhoods, and relationships in general figure prominently not only for those arriving with their large families but also for the Australians who had a similar fertility. All of these have provided material for rollicking good yarns about the real people of the fictional parish, St Kitts, in a fictional country town in Victoria, Australia, going about their daily lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369495360

Margaret Zeegers

Dr Margaret Zeegers is President of the Australian National Section of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia where she is the Coordinator of the English programs delivered in that School.

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Copyright © 2024 by Margaret Zeegers.

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Rev. date: 02/26/2024

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Contents

Author’s Note

Acknowledgement

Dedication

1     Leaving and Arriving

2     Setting Up House

3     Reality Bites

4     The New Neighbourhood

5     Sinkids

6     The Neighbours

7     New Catholics in the Country

8     A Better Life

9     The First Holy Communion Dress, and Beyond

10   Getting the Language

11   What’s in a name?

12   Getting to Know All About You

13   On a Cusp of History

14   Old Catholics in the Country

15   At Leisure

16   The Dressing Gown

17   The Weekends

18   Regular Relief

19   Sad Things Happen to Good People

20   Play, Child. Play

21   In the Playground

22   Close Encounters

23   Finally

About the Author

Author’s Note

Mine is the only real name have used in this book. None of my siblings’ names is used, and neither are those of any other parishioners or townspeople that I ever knew. Some characters are composites of two or more of them. That being said, none of what I have described is fiction. What is written here is about real people who really did or said the things I have recorded.

Acknowledgement

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the members of the family, especially the ones that I have called Ray and Drina, who prompted my recall of stories and events. They also told me things that I never knew.

Dedication

For my mother, Agnes Timmers, who had the courage and strength to take us all through it, and the intelligence to take it for what it was. Without her, none of us would have made it.

And for Duncan and Elizabeth, as always.

One

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LEAVING AND ARRIVING

It’s a Thursday afternoon at the beginning of August in the fifties. Our family is on a ship, leaving an unreconstructed postwar Europe of high inflation and high unemployment with the perception that there were few prospects of escaping poverty and achieving a better standard of living if we were to stay. We are on the cusp of great change. We are sailing to Australia, which is experiencing a postwar boom with full employment, a relatively high standard of living, high levels of home ownership, a free universal education system within a classless society and a better future for the many children: a paradise indeed. What we are leaving is, given the depressed economic conditions of a country recently wracked by World War II, an overpopulated country with high unemployment and an official government policy of encouraging emigration. With the hope of that better life and future, like so many other Northern Europeans on this ship, we are setting out to begin a new life in this new country. We are leaving behind extended families and social networks that sustained communities like ours for centuries, perhaps never to be seen again.

Thousands have left on ships in the weeks and months before today, and thousands more will go in the weeks and months that follow. We are to be deposited at Bonegilla migrant camp, which in itself would normally have been enough to scar anybody for life. We would eventually leave the camp to take up our residence in the small town and parish that would become our permanent home. This much is true.

The rest of what is written here is also true but fictionalised—while it actually happened in that parish in that small town, the names have been changed, as they are irrelevant to the story. The characters are real, and they did what I have described here. The town was, and still is, one of a number of small towns and parishes dotting the landscape around Ballarat. I have given the parish the fictional name of Saint Kitts, mindful of the fact that there is no Saint Kitts in the canon of Catholic saints. If there had been, we would have pronounced it as Sinkids. We would have reproduced the name as we received it. This is how our Australian parishioners would have pronounced it, so we would have as well. The Sinkids of this story is fictional; it is a composite representation of a number of parishes we knew and experienced.

The use of pseudonyms for the characters described will serve just as well as their actual names, for it is the events and the people responsible for them that are important. Those of us who went through it all have much for which we may be grateful and much that we might regret. Perhaps we would have liked it to have been different, but it was not, and we dealt with it, and I reckon we did well. We got the chance to grow up in what really is the greatest country in the world because our parents made the momentous decision to migrate to Australia. I have attempted to unpack the truths underlying our migration as it turned out for us. On closer examination, they are more like half-truths. Once this became apparent, we did what working-class families all over the world did: we just got on with things and played out the hands we had been dealt to the best of our abilities.

I have also explored the cusp on which all of us, migrant and Australian alike, were positioned. The Australia I have described in this book was on its way into history. Some small traces of it still exist, but the Australia of that time did place before us a wonderful potential for a good life. This is an unassailable truth. If we did not manage to make the most of it, the fault lies with us and not with Australia or Australians. We just carried too much psychological and cultural baggage to be able to see the possibilities that were on offer.

Given the criteria that the immigration people had to work with, all of our families were strikingly similar. We were the personification of those pictures of newly arrived large families, of children ranged with their parents on Melbourne’s Station Pier in a line from oldest to youngest, that regularly appeared in The Sun News Pictorial. We all called it The Sun. The pictorial bit meant that its use of photos to illustrate a story meant that you really did not have to read any of it, a boon to non-English speakers or poor readers. Perhaps new arrivals pictures appeared in other dailies as well, but we did not know of their existence, so never saw them. Only small, neat and tidy, middle-class Protestant families and the unmarried would be amazed by our family numbers. The newspaper seemed quite unaware that a significant number of lower-order Australian families, Catholic or Protestant, were of similar size. They kept printing only photos of us and our large families, and people kept being amazed by them. We rather enjoyed them ourselves, seeing ourselves in those photos in the press. Each family also had its own photos, taken as keepsakes by someone with the Brownie camera, a not inconsiderable family investment, to record the many milestones in their lives in the new country.

The men operated the Brownies. In a darkened space, the Kodak film on its little spool would be removed from its yellow box with red lettering, the end threaded onto another little spool already in the camera, and subjects would strike poses. The picture-taking man would hold the camera at waist level, looking through the view finder from above, tell everybody to watch the birdie, and click the shot. You really could see what might pass for a birdie as a little filament of metal clicked behind the lens. Then they’d wind it on to prevent a double exposure until the film was full. They’d remove the newly filled spool of film, put it back into its yellow Kodak box with the red lettering, and take it to the chemist for sending away for developing. It might take a week or so, then they’d send one of the children to pick up the photographs, which came in a yellow Kodak envelope with red lettering, and pay what was really a pricey amount. The whole process seemed to be of some importance to all the families we knew, but we didn’t understand why until we became older ourselves and recognised the importance of marking and recording particular experiences, especially of migrant families.

Within each family group like ours, there would be various categories. There would be the Father, the head of the family, of course; the Mother, the real powerhouse of the family (again, of course); the Boys, the ones just out of childhood about to enter adulthood who served as the labourers to the father’s working skills; the Girls, also leaving childhood on their way to adulthood and skivvies to the mother’s domestic skills (the teenager had not been invented yet); the Children, too young to be one of the Boys or the Girls yet; and the rest of us at the tail end of the family. That was me and the other youngest ones. We were the amorphous and largely undifferentiated but absolutely lovable and beloved group: the babies, toddlers, and early primary schoolers. The word for our category translates roughly in English as the littlies. Apart from the two-children Guilders family, who were Protestant, which probably explained why they had only two children (think Monty Python), all our families, even the other Protestants, had this configuration. It was as if the immigration people had a template that specified the required family number and characteristics, and applications were accepted only from families that had the requisite boxes ticked.

In our family there was our father, whom we called Pap (pronounced Pup), our mother, called Mam (pronounced Mum), and the rest of us in the brood. Let’s name one of them Andrijs, and as is the custom, let’s give him the diminutive of Rijje (pronounced ‘Raya). We were all given names, baptised with them, then called another that may or may not have some connection with the original. When Andrijs was called Rijje, Australians received our pronouncing of it as Ray. Our Yannike became Nick, and on. We all, except for our mother, ended up calling them by those new names too. We all had such variations on our names, and these were the ones that Australians often used as they anglicised them to try to get their own tongues around this particular aspect of our foreignness.

The Monty Python shoebox in middle o’ road is as close to an accurate description as one is ever likely to get of the lives we lived, especially the part about the younger generation never believing it if you told them. And we never really have told them. We were drawn from urban-working or rural-labourer classes in our own homelands. Fathers may have been tradesman in some cases but were more likely to have tradesman-like skills developed on their labouring jobs. They could build, make, and repair things with some skill. Our mothers could sew, knit, crochet, and make do with almost nothing. Their biggest quality was that they could endure hardship, and they had plenty of practice at this.

As all our families were so similar, we all grew up with fathers who worked hard, and had always done so. The thing was, back home all their hard work had never really paid off, had never really let them get ahead. They were acknowledged Good Workers and even Good Husbands, but their schemes for enhancing the family fortunes had never come off. Married young and with immediate arrivals of children that they had to support, they found that other men got better jobs, or were promoted ahead of them, generally had better luck, or whatever. They might never have actually been called stupid, but they had a sort of unimaginative stolidity that prevented them from ever making any real upward social movement. That made them ideal candidates for the sort of work and workers that Australia needed at the time: physically strong and intellectually just that little bit lacking. Nobody was looking for professionals. It all came together so nicely that the Immigration People rubber-stamped their applications with enthusiastic repetition.

Our mothers, also having worked hard all their lives, had married our fathers when they too had been young, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, when they had been too young. They produced a number of babies in quick succession, at the same time taking up their socially assigned roles as the personal servants of the men they had married. They had been identified by the same immigration officers as clever and emotionally and psychologically strong, which they had to be if they were to get through it all. They would be the ones to hold the families together and make homes from which the new workers would venture with a will to undertake what the country required of them. They would be doing it for their families and not for the country, of course, but the country would benefit.

We all knew our fathers for what they were. They had the usual tendency of weak-minded men to bluster and browbeat their families, but the wonderful women that were our mothers were the backbone of each family. We knew that we had to speak to our parents, indeed everybody’s parents, with respect, and we maintained this position in the face of the most ridiculous pronouncements and actions of our own and our friends’ fathers, for that was the way we did things. Even our mothers tended to be complicit in this, constantly denying their own native intelligence as they capitulated to their husbands’ authority. Every now and then they would revolt, and huge quarrels erupted. Our mothers would win them, for their husbands were nowhere near their intellectual equals. They would eventually retreat, quite beaten, bemoaning the shortcomings of their women in the obedience stakes, castigating them for not doing the right thing by them. One of the best victories our mother had over our father was the day that he was berating one of the Children for some sort of real or imagined moral or ethical lapse. She leapt to her usual tigress defence. She actually chased him out the back door, having just hit on the peroration, delivered at the top of her voice, and in English: Advisor to the Pope! Advisor to the Pope! Even a more quick-witted man than our father would have had trouble with an appropriate riposte to that one. She had deflected attention from the perceived errant child for a while, at least until the next time. Our fathers would sulk for some time, our mothers would be indignant for some time, and then it would all be business as usual.

Our fathers went to work and our mothers stayed at home. To our fathers’ way of thinking, this meant that they had provided a life of luxury for their wives and children, and so had done all that could possibly be required of them. They held that their wives did not work, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary before them. What they meant was that their wives did not go out of the house for paid employment. To have a wife that did that showed that the husbands did not earn enough. This could not be tolerated. A salient exception to this principle was Mrs de Lecht. She took a job as a cleaner in the local Council Office, used the extra income to buy a car and taught herself how to drive it. She was the one who drove the family to church and various family outings, until her particularly dense husband reluctantly allowed her to teach him to drive so that he could keep some sort of face before the other men. She also smoked, which horrified everyone, and poured herself a large McWilliam’s port before bed on a Friday night, which also horrified everyone. Mr de Lecht was the object of some scorn from his peers for being unable to control his strong headed wife, but we littlies loved her for her excellent humour and generosity when we went to play with her littlies. She always included us in her family’s activities, made sammidges (we were quite surprised to find out that they were actually sandwiches) of bread and fresh strawberries which she grew herself and sprinkled with sugar, and was generally good fun. She worked in the garden, which nobody else’s mother did, and milked the goat which she had bought herself. Everybody else had a cow. She always did things her own way, refusing to accept any deprivations for her children that a deference to her husband would have meant.

None of the other mothers, even if they had had the time, would ever work in the garden or tend to cows. That was strictly their husbands’ and sons’ work. They had left home where their own mothers had done hard agricultural labour, and they were not about to take it up here, given that they had been told that their lives were to be so much better than before. They went out to the clothesline and back, and that was it. They wore their patched and darned dresses and aprons that nobody else would ever see as they went about their domestic labours, only pulling on stockings and proper shoes for Mass on Sundays. Their habitually bare legs, even in winter time, were as white as those of any corpse, making their thick blue varicose veins particularly evil-looking. They were never warmly dressed, focussed on housework and cooking, but they never resorted to warming themselves in the way we saw our Australian mothers do. These women would stand with their backs to the stove and lift the backs of their skirts to the back of their waists, then lean their virtually bare backsides in to absorb some of the warmth more effectively. It shocked us, but we seemed to be the only ones to react in this way. They themselves saw it as quite an acceptable thing for a woman to do.

Our fathers brought home the money, handed over The Housekeeping, castigated their children, took their meals, had their washing done, and were regularly surprised by another baby. That was it as far as their role in the family was concerned. They never washed a dish, cooked a meal, bathed a child, changed a nappy, or took any of their children on their laps. They had very strict notions of what was women’s and what was men’s work, as did Australian fathers. No man was ever seen pushing a pram or a pusher. They felt that if they physically disciplined their children they had done the right thing by all concerned. They took to this role with a will. They would box ears and put a boot up what they considered to be recalcitrant sons’ backsides without second thought. They ruled their families with an iron fist, or at least they were allowed by their wives to think that they did. Mr Verhoeven, for example, would on a whim when the whole family was gathered in the kitchen in the evening, rouse himself to give the order: Pissing, praying, and to bed. All would jump up to comply with the alacrity he always demanded. Our fathers admired his firm hand on his family.

There was also the firm hand of the Religious of the parish who were to help us to live our lives All for the Greater Glory of God. For all her genuine religious devotion, our mother had another term for them, the gently sardonic ‘ghostlings’. She applied the name to priests, nuns, seminarians and missionaries. It was only a little disrespectful from our side, to be sure. The real lack of respect came from them in their dealings with us. They could never see the people of courage, initiative and spirit that stood before them. They saw only the different, the strange, the alien. In our turn we saw small minds and mediaeval limitations to thought and intelligence. We never quite managed to live up to their impossible standards. Perhaps we might be grateful for that.

Two

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SETTING UP HOUSE

The house was a hovel, albeit a relatively big hovel. It had been built some time in the 1870s and had been quietly falling into disrepair ever since. It had been a private maternity hospital at some point so that its three bedrooms were big enough to accommodate the number of double beds required in the one bedroom for boys, the one bedroom for girls, and the third bedroom for our parents and the cots and cradles to enable our mother to tend to littlies in the night. Only the baby and the toddler got to have their own beds; everybody else had to share. It had a large kitchen with a ceiling that sloped so low towards the back wall that housed the wood stove that our mother could not stand upright over her cooking, and she was only a little over five foot tall. It had a smaller sitting room that could accommodate the Good Furniture, the oak table and fabric upholstered dining chairs that had been shipped over, and some tatty second-hand stuff bought or cadged here. That room was never really used as it was the Australian equivalent of the parlour. Family life took place in the kitchen. It was there that we hung our crucifix, essential in any good Catholic home, and a Holy Water font by the door so you could dip your finger into it and bless yourself with it as you entered, and where we gathered in the evening.

Our first purchase was of a large wooden table, the focus of all of our activities. It sat against the wall until it was needed for meals and moved further into the middle of the room. Meals, washing up, ironing, baby bathing, nappy changing, littlie dressing, birdcage cleaning, sewing, large item mending, dress pattern cutting, homework, newspaper reading, card and board games … the kitchen table was the centre of all of it. Our father’s chair sat at the head of the table, a long wooden bench for littlies and Children ranged along the length of the wall on one side, individual wooden chairs sat at the other end and around the sides for the Boys and the Girls, and our mother’s chair where she sat with the toddler on her lap to feed before she would eat her own (by then cold) meal completed the arrangement.

The smoke stains from the wood stove still clung tenaciously to the kitchen walls and ceiling. The wooden draining boards beside the deeply rust-stained and generally discoloured sink had at some stage in their recent pasts started to grow little wooden beards from constant water splashed over them. They might have had nice smooth surfaces when they were new, but you’d have to shave them now, and then sand and oil them to get that effect back. And that’s what our father did, before he replaced the enamel sink with a stainless steel one. There were two mismatched cold water taps into the sink, one from the outside rainwater tank and one from the town water supply. Any hot water required for the kitchen came from the large black kettle that had been scrounged from somewhere or other and constantly kept on the boil, or from the woodchip water heater at the end of the bath, or from the copper sitting above its own fire in the wash house that passed for a laundry.

We did have electricity, which many people did not have in their houses yet, so that was a bit of a luxury. There was one power point in the kitchen into which the radio was immediately plugged, and a single electric light in each room. Electric cabling ran in conduits from the light switch up the wall and across the ceiling to the light itself. Ironing of the enormous loads of laundry that such a family as ours generated was done with a pair of irons heated up on the stove. An old ice chest that had been left in the house by the previous owners served to keep perishables for a short time. It sat on the bare wooden floorboards next to the stone hearth in front of the stove. Each week the ice man delivered a huge block of ice that he carried with a pair of big callipers. The ice sat in the bottom in a separate compartment and worked surprisingly well in keeping food stored in it from going off too quickly. We fairly soon got a Kelvinator refrigerator that stood in that spot, and the teasing question of whether the little light stayed on when the door was closed occupied not a little of our thinking. The rest of the floor was covered with unsecured worn and faded pieces of tar-backed lino that constantly shifted underfoot.

Outside the back door was the copper set into a brick surround with a fireplace underneath, the smoke from which fed into the kitchen chimney. There was a double set of two stone wash troughs with taps. The deeply cracked concrete floor sloped to a gutter that would take water away to the open drain at the side of the house. Some semblance of protection from the weather was provided by the rusty tin roof that sloped towards a back wall and extended further along to provide a back porch, but the area was open at the end, barely providing any protection from the weather. It had been thoroughly colonised by spiders, whose webs loomed thickly and darkly in its many corners.

The bathroom was a squalid little affair that had been at some stage made over from the original hospital kitchen pantry. There was no hot running water, but there was an old chip heater that would provide just enough water for the communal Saturday night bath in the old tap-drip stained enamel bath that stood on clawed feet. Our toilet was an outside dunny, or thunderbox, situated as far as possible from the house because of the stench from the human waste matter daily deposited in the can, which sat under a smooth wooden bench with a hole in the middle. The contents of the can was a heaving mass of maggots. The walls were festooned with spider webs, with probably the relatives of the scary laundry spiders in their depths.

The house roof leaked, and we put buckets, saucepans and whatever else we had to catch the unwelcome flow when it rained. All the cords of the sash windows were broken, so we propped them open with sticks. The weatherboards were weathered, dry rot infested, their ancient paint peeling to reveal the original timber greying underneath. Rats and mice entered at will, cockroaches bred undisturbed, and there were no insect screens to check the influx of flies during the day and the mosquitos at night. We tended not to have problems with bees, for it was the garden that was important to them, but when there was a swarm as they moved to find new hives, it was as scary as it was fascinating. The fences that still remained were gap-toothed or at a low tilt, the gates rusted almost to disintegration, and the garden overgrown to jungle proportions. At least we didn’t have poor Mrs Verhoeven’s problems of the grass actually coming up through her kitchen floorboards when the family moved in her house only a few doors down from ours.

This was patently not part of the dream of a better life. There was a lot of hard work ahead to make it all fit for what we might consider human habitation, even if the people who had sold the house to us saw nothing wrong with the lives they had lived there. There was nothing else for it. We just had to make the best of it and accept that this was to be the way of things. To give him his due, our father set to work at once, putting his considerable skills and scant money into a house that really was never going to be worth it all. That is, except for digging the septic tank and replacing the thunderbox with a flushing lavatory … that really was worth every penny. When he had finished, we had an iron cistern that automatically filled itself with the aid of a float and was emptied by pulling a chain, flushing away the deposits in the new enamel toilet pan below. He had provided a major advance in the quality of our life.

Our mother’s expectations of this Brave New World had been significantly lowered when she found not one, but two, maggots in her bowl of soup in Bonegilla, and her experience so far of life in migrant hostels in general. She had been the one who had bought the house with a deposit of £100 she had received just before our ship docked. That was an awful lot of money back then, when a good wage was £5 per week, handed to the worker in a small tan paper packet containing the requisite notes and coins, and most men earned less than that. You could buy a new car outright for £80 and still have a tidy sum of £20 left over, as our father well knew. So did she. As our father desperately tried to wrest that £100 from her, she staunchly held onto it. Unlike the rest of us, she was never frightened of him, which made her our own heroine. She had been able to invest that money in one of the better houses available, unlike other wives like Mrs Verhoeven down the street. That poor woman and others like her had in a misguided sense of duty handed over their £100s for their husbands to squander. Now they had had to settle for whatever they could get. Our mother knew our father too well and had resisted.

We could not know it then, but we were already better off than many of the Australians who lived in even worse conditions in even more cramped and confined miners’ cottages and other tumbledowns. Not all of them had electricity, and their furniture was even more dilapidated than ours. One family that arrived soon after us had taken a good look around, then abruptly decided to go back. They were the only ones we knew who did this. Our mothers looked upon their departure with a certain wistfulness, never joining in the general castigation by all and sundry of the decision. Australians could not for the life of them understand why you would want to leave. They obviously were not made of the Right Stuff, they decided. Our fathers saw it as a bit of a betrayal, a regrettable display of weakness that reflected badly on the rest of us. We never heard from that family again. They had not stayed long enough to make anything of an impression on us, and we soon forgot all about them. We had our own fish to fry and toilets to instal.

When we got our flushing toilet, it was one of only three in the whole street. Everybody had the thunderbox and nobody seemed to mind in the least. The mothers would keep a bottle of Phenol to be sprinkled around and over it in a quite ineffectual attempt to mask the stench as maggots continued to heave and swell. Every dunny door had a hole in the shape of a crescent moon, again an ineffectual attempt to disperse the concentration of the stench, and to enable an arm to go through to unlatch the door if someone got stuck inside. Of course our neighbours knew about flushing toilets for they used them at public conveniences, at the pool, at the footy, at the cinema, and so on. They had never conceived of having their own for personal use, as we did.

They held it as a truism that mice and rats would always find their way into a weatherboard house, casually swept away their droppings and lived with the smell of their urine in cupboards and drawers. They would set mouse traps, catch the vermin with great regularity, empty them, and re-set them to catch more, but they never seemed to think of preventing their occupation of the cupboards in the first place. One of our friends’ fathers still carried the scar on his face from a rat attack on him when he was a baby. When a rat’s nest between the walls would sometimes erupt into some sort of rat nest activity, they would bang on the wall with a stick kept there for the purpose. If they surprised a sea of cockroaches blackening the floor when they turned on a light at night, they would gleefully stomp on as many of the hundreds of them as they could before the horrible things that had survived scuttled back into their hiding places in the walls, ceilings and under floorboards. Admittedly, I only ever saw this once, but the family reacted with a practised alacrity that showed that they had done this before and probably would again. The survivors would come back to devour the bodies of their dead friends when the light was turned off again, gorging themselves on a ready food supply with which to keep the infestation buoyant. Apart from an odd antenna or two, the floor would be quite clean in the morning. So much for the truth of better housing; it went flying out the cordless sash window.

We saw all of this in our Australian friends’ houses as we became more involved with them. They themselves had no idea that the way that they lived might be, or even should be, any better than it was. Nevertheless, the townsfolk felt that we ought to be grateful for what was on offer to us, having no inkling of how any of us might have lived back in our home countries. We tended to indulge them in this. Later arrivals would be less judicious, giving rise to the Whingeing Pom character. We tended to have some sympathy for that Pom. Australians could not know then that they were on a cusp of change too, and that we would be the agents to tip them off it. It was only when families like ours, and there were quite a few of them, tackled the possibilities of improved housing conditions that they were introduced, initially via the possibility of a proper toilet, to the notion that they did not have to content themselves with what they had. Apart from the pensioners in the street for whom the cost was prohibitive, each house eventually installed their own. In this way, another truth was challenged. We were the agents, not just subjects, of change in Australia. It had all started with that septic tank.

Three

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REALITY BITES

When she saw what were to live in, one of the Girls, Holma (from Bertholomena) immediately challenged one of those truths which had underpinned our migration. Initially using the cool tones that she normally used on our father, she asked, Did we really leave our nice house to come to this?. Her tone was not quite disrespectful but not quite respectful either. We had had a nice house back home: brick, two storeys, pleasantly appointed, a bathroom with a shower, an indoor toilet, hot and cold running water, electricity, and comfortable heating provided by pot-bellied stoves in the depths of a European winter, with cheap coal regularly delivered straight into our coal cellar. As she made her list, her tone became increasingly heated as she raised her voice to him. It was very brave of her, we thought. She reminded him that we had had a large and supportive extended family and family friends. He, skilled craftsman that he was, had never been out of work, she continued. The Girls and the Boys had had to leave their own circles of intimates, and it was hotter here than we had ever experienced back home. By the time she came to the end of her list all coolness was gone.

At this point Holma had no idea of what worse was yet to come. Even as she spoke, arrangements were being made for her to take up a live-in domestic situation at a religious institution in Ballarat, taking up the meaner tasks that the ghostlings did not engage. She had embarked as a schoolgirl and disembarked as a worker, regardless of legal school leaving age in Australia being 14. In just a few days she was to leave her family, go to a place that she had never been, to live with people she had never met. She went with no English, no friends, and nothing but her own young girl strength and resources to sustain her. She would never have a single day of formal schooling again. It rather put paid to the idea of a better future for the children. We would only see her once a fortnight when she came home to submit her unopened pay packet, receive a few shillings for her allowance, then return, making sure that she kept enough to pay for the bus fare at the end of the next fortnight. One can only imagine the isolation she felt with no means of communication, or the loneliness of that isolation, as she could only do her work without any real socialisation with other girls her age. She was resourceful, though, and as intelligent as the rest of us. Determined to master the new language, she constructed her own dictionary for her learning of new words. Every day she would write a list of a few of them to memorise for their meaning, spelling and pronunciation. It became a lifelong habit. She constantly honed her English language skills.

While Holma was remonstrating with our father, our mother may have despaired at the obvious domestic drudgery before her. She and the Girls would have to cook, clean, launder, iron, and see to the general domestic demands of the family with only primitive things with which to do it all. Our next eldest sister, Drina (from Alexandrina) still had a month or two to go Sinkids school before the end of the year. Our parents considered her enrolment as a mere formality, keeping her at home most days to work with our mother in taking on the enormous task of cleaning and polishing things that stubbornly refused to be cleaned or polished in spite of all their efforts. With the oldest Girl packed off to work away from home and the others too young for this sort of thing, there were only the two of them to do what was required, even though there would be a pile of it waiting for Holma to do on her days off. This was Women’s Work that no self-respecting male would ever do. Drina quickly mastered the skill of ironing with two flat irons heated on the stove top. She learned to judge the force of their heat as appropriate for the various fabrics as one cooled, then swap it for the other as it was set on the stove hotplate to heat up again, deftly using pot holders on the handles to prevent burning her hand.

The trial and error involved in learning this new skill once showed itself in an iron-shaped scorch on our father’s Sunday shirt, which infuriated him. Drina received no praise for what she got right, only receiving scolding for what she got wrong. The daily pile of ironing was huge for a family our size, and she did it all every day, day in and day out, except for Sundays, of course. Then our father got Drina a job working in a commercial kitchen. She was twelve years old, and her formal schooling too was put to an end. It did not auger well for a better future for her either. The Girls’ experiences threw up another challenge to the accepted truth of our move. The better standard of living and free universal education was not going to be available to everyone. This sort of thing would not have happened back home, as child labour laws would not have allowed it. For some reason, legal school leaving age did not seem to apply to our families. Later, Holma got a job in the town as well, so we had her at home with us once more. They both stayed at these jobs for the too few years that remained before they got married. For them, migration had not been an escape from their difficult lives; it was quite the opposite. They hoped that their youthful marriages would serve them better.

The Girls would go to work and take up their allocated household duties when they came home. Our father would be at work all day and never turn a hand to any household tasks; the Boys and Children would be at school and in any case, their chores would be of the out-of-doors variety. For us littlies, all such considerations would be immaterial for the womenfolk of the family would see to our comfort and wellbeing, such as it was. We still had fresh in our minds the wonderful adventure of the weeks-long sea voyage, the storms at sea, the passage of the great ship through the locks of the Panama Canal, and the stops at exotic ports. The tempers that flared and the fights that erupted hardly affected us at all, beyond there being an extremely unpleasant atmosphere in the house.

As Holma passionately enumerated all the good things she felt we had so recklessly abandoned, our father reacted with reciprocal vehemence. He saw her outburst as casting aspersions on his sagacity, as indeed it was, and the ensuing row was rather