from the Dutch Courier:
Book Review - by Jeltje Fanoy
Bonegilla: where waters meet
The Dutch Migrant Experience in Australia
Compiled and edited by Dirk and Marijke Eysbertse
Published by the Erasmus Foundation, 2006 (3rd Edition)
GPO
ISNN 0 646310054
Early this year my
Greek-Australian friend sent me a newspaper article about Gerard Willems, who
is an acclaimed Australian pianist. Gerard came to
Dirk and Marijke Eysbertse, after
enormous amounts of research in both Australia and The Netherlands, lovingly
put together this account of the Dutch migrant experience in the 1950’s and 1960’s
at the migrant camp Bonegilla. The camp was
Bonegilla has now become the
Bonegilla Heritage Park, a peaceful open-air museum celebrating migrant history
in Australia: “Across the road are the Latchford army barracks (named after
Lieutenant Colonel Latchford)”, writes Marijke Eysbertse, “where my husband
Dirk and I stumble upon another few rows of tin sheds, remains of the former
Bonegilla Reception Centre, which started life as an army camp, became a
migrant camp in 1947 and went back to the army in 1971. Nineteen kilometres
away to the North, across the
No, a concentration camp or Detention Centre (in the modern sense) Bonegilla was not, although there was an armed guard on the gate, presumably to keep out undesirables. Migrants could leave the camp, except it seems from the accounts that there was only one very infrequent bus service. People had to walk everywhere or catch a ride with local farmers. Many young, unattached migrants did. But leave the camp altogether you could not. Assisted passage migrants were told they had to prove to the Australian authorities, before leaving the camps, that they had substantial employment and accommodation. The only problem was, there wasn’t much employment around.
The Netherlands poet Koos Schuur, who migrated with his wife and two young boys to Australia in 1951 (and returned twelve years later), extensively documented, in letters to his friends back in Amsterdam, the deteriorating economic situation in Australia, and the resulting increasing hostility against migrants. In De kookaburra lacht: Brieven van een emigrant Koos describes how he had made some literary contacts in Sydney before leaving. He and his wife were the only migrants on their flight who refused to take themselves and their children to a migrant camp. They hailed a taxi at Sydney airport and drove straight to some odd-sounding address: “Hierdoor ontliep ik bepaalde moeilijkheden en nam er andere voor in de plaats”. Koos Schuur wrote some very poignant poems about the stark economic realities the family encountered thereafter:
Na het dertienmaandse wee
Een wereld ondersteboven
Leven op een haarlijn
Bouw ik uit een paar beschadigde handen
Een weg
Een verte
Een borduurpatroon voor liefde…
After thirteen months of woe
A topsy-turvy world
Life at the hairline
With two damaged hands I build
A way
Distance
An embroidery pattern for
love…
The migrants were warned before they left home and, again on the ships and planes, not to venture out on their own, but travel on to the safety of the migrant camps: “Our friends from Gaanderen left that night in the car of someone who had offered them a job and housing. He was terribly nervous and he asked for our advice. I said, ’First you ought to go to the camp and then get a job.’ The Immigration Service advised him against it as well…” (Klaas Hoogland, arr. 1959)
But the ten-hour train and bus journeys were a nightmare for many: “They put us on a train which was very old-fashioned. They had placed some benches in the carriages. When we looked out of the window, the landscape seemed dry with dead sheep, dead cows and dead trees everywhere. We thought what on earth made us do this because in Holland, in those films they showed on information nights, we saw green fields and beautiful houses. Everything we saw on those films looked like a beautiful dream…” (Herman and Geesje Blom, arr 1958). And Kees Groenewegen, two years later: “After a while they (his wife and daughters) can’t control their nerves any longer and they are all crying. It looks as if we are going to a concentration camp. It is getting dark, pitch dark. The beautiful landscape has been forgotten. Instead, the situation is miserable...”
When the families arrived at the camp, things weren’t much better: “The huts were very dirty when we arrived, with holes in the walls. They looked like chicken sheds. The food was horrible…” (Mieke Esman, arr. 1955). And eight years later, still the same kind of story: “My wife Elizabeth wanted to take the first available train to Sydney to catch the Willem Ruys back to Rotterdam. I found our arrival in the middle of the night at Bonegilla far worse than my forced arrival in Germany in 1943. Bonegilla looked like a concentration camp. This impression was strengthened by the fact that we were greeted in German…”(Jules Visser, arr. 1963)
In the early eighties, when I was the editor of the poetry magazine “Migrant 7”, I received in the mail a small chapbook with three short stories by the Polish-Australian writer Tad Sobolewski. I was shocked by “Free as a bird” which was a story about Bonegilla. The protagonist (perhaps Tad himself) refuses to accept a fruit-picking job from the camp’s employment office that would take him away from his wife and children: “To leave my family at the mercy of rapists who have to be caught by the victim and delivered to the police station? Sorry! I flatly refused to go, was called to the office, solidly grilled for about one hour by an officer, told that I would be deprived of social welfare payments, ten shillings weekly, not to be sniffed at, and would have great difficulties in finding any job long afterwards. I insisted that I would go anywhere – but with my family…”
There were serious unemployment riots at Bonegilla in 1952 and, again in 1962, when there was a credit squeeze in Australia with about 110.000 people looking for work. I was astounded to read that in 1959 the Dutch Immigration Officer at Bonegilla (Herman Kortenhorst, arr. 1956) was actually the only one of his kind: “I was there to help the Dutch. No other nation provided that service. I made sure they would get work, some already in the first week…” Herman Kortenhorst often felt like a priest giving confession: “If there was a complaint, they came to me. I was just about everything: social worker, priest, doctor. It boiled down to the fact that they had someone to talk to. With so many people together in a relatively small area, arguments erupted, such as: “He’s looking at my wife.” I had to talk to people and had to mediate.”
What was the idea behind keeping so many migrant families so far away from the cities, in sub-standard, crowded conditions? These people were so keen to get back to work, so eager to please….why not give them a chance to make a go of it, make lasting links to their new homeland, straight away?
From their research, Dirk and Marijke Eysbertse have documented how many of the migrant women started to become quite institutionalised inside the camp: “We spent the best part of the day chatting to each other and drinking coffee. Together we were washing or ironing clothes. We heard that many people who left the camp, and were all alone in Australia, often thought of the camp fondly…” (Hennie Bos, arr. 1952). And quite a few Dutch families actually learned to like the rural aspect of the Albury/Wodonga region near Bonegilla. They remained in the camp to save on living expenses, bought some land and built their houses with their own bare hands, even making their own bricks: “To be able to swim in sweet water and ride a bike were two things we wanted when we were choosing where to live. In Albury we could do both and decided to settle there. Our first house had no sewerage but my grandmother in Alkmaar, in 1920, didn’t have sewerage either. After a few years we had a septic tank put in. Now we have a beautiful house…” (Miep and Bert van der Sleesen, arr. 1951).
It was a shock, especially for the women, to leave the camp and then start anew, all over again, somewhere else, often in even more difficult living conditions and with less than adequate income. Journalists came out from Holland to see for themselves what was happening to the migrant families once they got here. Apparently no initial research had ever been done by the Dutch Government before the assisted passage migration scheme started, and no ongoing research was planned for in the ensuing years. However, even the Queen herself made a public statement in the early fifties in support of emigration: “I remember the Queen made a speech. She said that Holland was too crowded. It would be necessary for some Dutch people to leave the country. We thought, if the Queen says so, there must be something in it…(Bert and Miep van der Sleesen, arr. 1951). It’s within this context that Dirk and Marijke Eysbertse quote George Barrington (1755-1804) from “A voyage to Botany Bay”, drawing a witty parallel to Australia’s early history of convict settlement: “True patriots are we: for be it understood we left our country for our country’s good”.
Dirk and Marijke Eysberste have traced some of the debates about migration in the Dutch Parliament, once the reports in the papers started coming out about the real situation in Australia. The only reason for the continuation of the scheme in Holland seems to have been that it was too hard to turn migration on and off…better just to keep it going. As researchers, Dirk and Marijke believe they have gained a much clearer picture in the Netherlands of how migrants actually felt during this period. Many ex-migrants thought that they had been misled by lack of information about the real socio-economic situation in Australia. In fact, now living back in Holland and secure within the safety net of their families, they have no qualms of calling it lies and broken promises by both the Dutch and the Australian authorities. The official stories about Australia were “tall tales”, or just “recruitment” propaganda. Which makes one wonder: what exactly were migrants “recruited” for, for some sort of military purpose?
Which leads me back to my Greek-Australian poet friend, po, who sent me the cutting about the Dutch-Australian pianist Gerard Willems. One of my favourite po stories (and he has many!) is how his father became frustrated with the obvious lack of suitable employment offered at Bonegilla. He just packed up and left the camp, his five months pregnant wife and two toddlers in tow. They walked straight past the armed guard (“Don’t you dare stop me!”) and travelled the 19 kilometres to Albury Railway Station on foot. They were on their way to Melbourne, because it had been rumoured in the camp that there was a friendly, semi-established Greek community there. In the early eighties po wrote a long series of poems, simply called “Bonegilla”, which haven’t been published in their entirety yet. In his working class inner-city migrant vernacular, po endeavours to pull together all the rumours of the time, the lively migrant stories and his own tireless research in libraries and from newspaper reports. Here’s a small excerpt from the poem “1945-1950”:
there’s
737 people to the sq. mile
in Java alone
670 in Korea, &
390 (to the mile) in Japan
compared to
just under 3, in Australia
& if
the war in the Pacific
taught Australia (& Australians)
anything:
it was populate or perish
in which case cob.,
…you’d better get used to eating
chop-suey
A similar conclusion is drawn from the research done for Bonegilla: where waters meet, though the foreword by the Dutch-Australian poet Cornelis Vleeskens is a dreamy piece of writing, placing the European migrant experience within the timeless context of land and Aboriginal knowledge systems. It is truly fascinating reading, more like a film than a book, the moving historical photographs and the copious use of quotations from field interviews, media and public records providing a way in for others to look at their own migration experience with greater insight and clarity. I was particularly moved by the way Dirk Eysbertse ends the book with a comment about himself as a Dutch-Australian migrant: “I recently played an audio tape from 1958 that I had sent to my parents. I could not believe that I told that fantastic story of success when in fact I was living in a self-built garage while constructing a timber home with very little money…”.
I can also remember those kinds of fantastic tales, told and retold by my own migrant parents, to the relatives they’d left behind and whom they were missing so terribly. Was it that they were just too proud to go back home, as my mother would put it, “with limp paws” (met hangende pootjes)? Or were they just tired or, simply, too sad to start all over again? Dirk Eysbertse explains his own confused Dutch migrant experience this way: “I was a citizen of the world until I realized, there is no place like home.” I think he might be right about that: for many years I was struggling myself with my lack of “international” Dutch migrant status. As a Dutch migrant child from the early sixties, I find a great deal of comfort in Dirk and Marijke Eysbertse’s insightful book. But of course, just like Gerard Willems, I’ve come to appreciate my fellow-Australians: they’re such an optimistic, resilient and resourceful lot! I suppose, just like us Dutch migrants, they just had to be.
As a migrant writer Jeltje Fanoy writes in both Dutch and English and, since the mid seventies, has been working on themes of work, alienation and displacement. jeltje performs her work solo and in collaboration with other artists, especially musical improvisation. She currently convenes poetry performances at La Mama Poetica.
