The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  Almost three years after the baby died, when the war was over, after they’d been deported from Hungary and were living in Germany, Luisa was born. She had immediately made everyone so happy. Elizabeta had loved her from the moment she’d first held her. Her arrival had created a fresh start for the family. Jozef had work, and so did Berta, and there was food on the table and enough money left for little things. A string of pearls for Berta for her birthday. A new pipe for Jozef and a leather pouch for his tobacco. New shoes for Elizabeta and a new blanket for Luisa. A brand-new set of aluminium pots and pans for Berta’s kitchen.

  They had lived a simple and quiet life until the day, a year ago, when Jozef had arrived home brandishing a pamphlet, Gluck in der neuen Heimat. Happiness in your new homeland. They had been looking for happiness in a new homeland and hadn’t found it yet. Germany had never felt like home to them. That night, her parents had had serious discussions around the kitchen table. Elizabeta found the pamphlet on the kitchen table the next morning and had pored over it, reading all about the Australian way of life. Her parents had continued talking into the night on many nights that next week. Finally they decided to apply to migrate to Australia. Elizabeta hadn’t wanted to go. She liked going to school and she liked her friends. There was even a boy in her class, Aleksander, who smiled at her and walked her home two times a week. Her life was just beginning and her parents had decided to wrench her from it, and she had cried when they’d left their village and got on the train and cried when they’d walked onto the Fairsea at Bremerhaven, all their worldly belongings in four suitcases and a trunk. They’d left behind most everything—but the brand-new pots and pans came with them across the other side of the world.

  Once they were on the boat, Elizabeta made the decision to stop crying about having to leave. It had only made her parents upset, particularly her mother. Elizabeta was old enough by then to understand and remember what they had been through already. Her father said they were going to Australia for a better life, and she had decided to believe him. After all that had happened, perhaps it would be best to leave everything behind and not look back. It would be nice to finally belong somewhere, to know there was somewhere in the world that wanted her family.

  Elizabeta had never felt the tug of loyalty to any country. She’d never truly imagined she belonged anywhere. In Hungary, where she and her parents had been born, they were treated like Germans, with suspicion. When her family had been deported to Germany, real Germans looked down on them as refugees. But they had German names and spoke German, didn’t they? She was still as confused as ever by it. When she’d asked her father about it once, he’d told her that when the war was over, important politicians carved up countries and decided what to do with German-speaking people like them from countries that didn’t want them any more.

  ‘They think we are Nazis because we speak German,’ he’d said. ‘That’s why we were put on those cattle trains in Budapest by the soldiers. That’s why we are in Germany.’

  But all that was past now. Today was to be her first Australian morning.

  She wondered, as she curled up on a thin mattress on a camp bed in a small room in an ex-army hut, swathed in blankets and warmed by her sister’s breath, what Australia would feel like when she opened the door and saw the big blue sky full of sunshine for the first time.

  By the time the Schmidts left their hut for the walk to the mess hall, Elizabeta felt as if she hadn’t eaten in a week. There had been sandwiches on the train the day before, on the journey from Port Melbourne, but she’d shivered them away all night in the cold hut. She was impatient for her family to gather up their trays and plates and bowls and spoons and cups and walk across Bonegilla for breakfast.

  Their shoes crunched on the frosty grass as they walked. The sky was a pale blue and as she followed her parents and kept an eye on Luisa, it struck Elizabeta that for the first time in six weeks the air wasn’t filled with the smell of salt and the sound of waves. She took in a deep breath. Bonegilla smelled like something new, like fresh air and open fields, and the spindly trees dotted here and there, with almost-white trunks and leaves long and thin and grey-green, had a scent like peppermint. And there were birds, black-and-white birds, in the branches of the tree, singing, as if they were calling out hello to everyone below.

  There was a low hum from the conversations happening all around them as people walked to breakfast. They had to stop and wait as a truck rumbled past on the road, black smoke spewing from its exhaust. There was a picture of a ram with curling horns sticking out of its woolly coat and letters and words painted on the side in English. Elizabeta tried to spell them out, but her reading was still too slow and it went by too fast.

  The camp was big. In the dark of the night before, there had been dim street lights and a chill wind blowing in from somewhere cold. This morning, she couldn’t seem to see the end of it, no matter where she looked. The camp was filled with accommodation huts like theirs, neat row after row of pale green corrugated iron buildings with the same red doors. In the distance, there was a collection of bigger buildings and one in particular seemed to be the centre of people’s comings and goings. The mess.

  And there weren’t only buildings but people, coming out of every building and walking along every road and in every direction. The camp had come to life while she was waking up. Two women walked by, laughing, their hair wrapped in coloured scarves knotted at the back of their necks, with fabric bags over their shoulders, stuffed to the brim with clothes, the sleeves spilling out as if there were arms inside trying to crawl out. A group of young men jogged past, dark-haired and wiry, wearing T-shirts and canvas shoes, bouncing a ball, speaking Greek. Three young women walked by arm in arm, smiling.

  Elizabeta took it all in, dawdling behind her parents. When they called out her name, she scurried after them and when they reached the front door of the mess hall, they waited politely at the end of the queue.

  Chapter Three

  ‘More of them arrived last night. Another trainload of dagoes.’

  Sixteen-year-old Frances Burley looked up from her boiled egg and the toast soldiers her mother still insisted on giving her. Her brother, Tom, took advantage of the distraction his purposely provocative statement had created in his sister, and leaned over his bowl of porridge to steal one of her rectangles of toast.

  ‘Tom!’ she exclaimed with a huff of indignation. She reached across the table to slap the back of his hand. He pulled it out of harm’s way and grinned.

  ‘Thomas Walter Burley.’ Mavis Burley sighed and shook her head. She was at the kitchen sink. She opened a cupboard door below, reached for the Rinso and lightly sprinkled flakes from the box into the running water. ‘Leave your sister alone. And don’t use that word.’

  ‘What word?’

  ‘You know perfectly well what I mean,’ Mavis said.

  ‘You mean dagoes?’

  ‘You’re awful,’ Frances said through gritted teeth as she shook an avalanche of salt onto her boiled egg.

  Tom grinned at his sister and chewed teasingly before washing the toast down with a mouthful of milky tea. ‘I didn’t make it up. That’s what people call them. Dagoes. Reffos. DPs. Wogs. Balts.’

  Mavis turned from the sink, her lips pinched together. ‘I’m so delighted your father and I are spending all that money boarding you in Melbourne while you’re studying at university. It seems to have broadened your outlook in a way we could never have imagined. I would appreciate if you left that talk behind when you are up here at Bonegilla.’

  ‘They’re just words, Mum. I don’t mean anything by them, honestly. Lots of chaps are saying it. I’m just having a bit of fun.’

  ‘May I remind you that your father is in charge of this place? He would be horrified to hear you talk about people that way. Have a think on that, young man.’

  Tom kept his smirk firmly in place but lowered his eyes to his porridge. Frances could see he was chastened, although he wouldn’t admit it in a million years.


  She turned to her mother, taking the opportunity to show her mother how well read and worldly she really was. ‘I wonder which countries today’s new Australians are from, Mum?’

  Mavis turned off the tap over the sink, wiped her wet hands on the floral full-length apron she was wearing and came to the table. ‘They disembarked the Fairsea down in Melbourne yesterday so I expect they’re from all the usual places in Europe.’ Her mother smiled at her. ‘You’re going to name them all again, aren’t you, Frances?’

  The family’s atlas was permanently open on the small wooden desk next to the bed in Frances’s room, and she loved to study the yellow, green and ivory countries marked out on the map of Europe. Since her father had become director of Bonegilla five years before, Frances’s world had opened and bloomed. Living at Bonegilla was like being dropped right in the middle of a history and geography lesson and Frances had soaked up everything. She’d even learned to say some words in the languages spoken at the vast camp.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact, I am.’

  ‘Here we go,’ Tom sighed and rolled his eyes. It was a game they’d played ever since they’d come to Bonegilla and Frances loved the well-worn routine between the two of them. She and Tom both loved making their mother laugh.

  She ignored her brother and counted off the countries on her hand, the index finger of her left hand pressing down on the fingers of her right, pinky to thumb and then beginning again. ‘We’ve had Italians. Greeks. Poles. Hungarians. Germans. White Russians. Lithuanians.’

  ‘There’s no such place as Lithuania,’ Tom teased.

  ‘Of course there is.’ Frances continued. ‘Yugoslavians. Bulgarians. Romanians. And …’ she said with mock seriousness, ‘… Czechoslovakians!’

  ‘Don’t forget the Transylvanians.’ With his index fingers he tugged at the corner of his mouth to expose his teeth and he rolled his eyes back up into his head. ‘I vant to suck your blood.’

  Frances let herself enjoy the joke once more. With three years between them, they were unlikely ever to be real friends, but Tom always liked to make her laugh and she liked that he still tried.

  ‘Tom.’ Mavis smiled and shook her head at her children. Frances was aware that it wouldn’t be long before she too would finish high school and leave Bonegilla, as her brothers Tom and Donald had done before her. This might be one of the last chances the three of them would have to sit together and make each other laugh. She was growing up too, no matter how hard her mother found that idea, and life would soon take her away from her parents and her brothers and this place she’d called home for the past five years.

  She slapped her forehead. She’d forgotten the last line of the performance. ‘Oh, no. I forgot the Latvians.’

  Mavis tugged at one of Frances’s long, brown plaits. ‘God forbid we forget the Latvians.’

  ‘What must it be like to travel all the way across the world and end up in Australia?’ Frances had begun to think about the world differently in the past little while. The countries she had just reeled off were more than places on the map to her now. They were possibilities. Exotic destinations filled with languages and culture and people so different to her.

  ‘I’m sure they are all very happy to be away from Europe,’ Mavis said. ‘The war made things dreadfully hard for so many people and some places still aren’t the same as they were before. Many of the people who come here have never been able to go back to the homes they once had.’ She stood, picked up her children’s breakfast plates and placed them on the long metal sink under the window. It was open this morning, despite the chill autumn breeze, and the cafe curtains fluttered. Winter was well on its way in this part of the world, eight miles from Albury, on the southern banks of the Murray River. ‘I’m sure people are very happy to be in Australia, to make a new home for themselves, to put all the sadness behind them and start afresh.’

  ‘They’d better not be commies,’ Tom said. ‘Look at this. “Australian Reds to be accused of aiding spies”. It’s all about the royal commission on Russian spying. That Petrov chap, he’s Russian. There’d better not be any of his fellow travellers on that train today.’

  Frances and Mavis looked at the newspaper article from the front page of The Age newspaper that Tom was poking with a stiffened index finger. A photo of a crowd outside the High Court building in Sydney was prominent, showing a high iron gate with spikes atop it, and a group of police officers standing around, one with his hands clasped authoritatively behind his back.

  ‘Tom, dear, I think you’ll find that all those being investigated are Australians.’

  ‘Really? We’ve got our own commies?’

  Mavis tweaked her son’s ear. ‘Apparently we do. I’m sure your father can tell you all about it if you ask him.’

  ‘Where is Dad, anyway?’ Frances asked. He usually ate breakfast with the family, and had made a point of it when one or both of the boys were up to stay.

  ‘He’s in his office preparing things for our latest arrivals.’ Mavis turned to glare at her son. ‘And I can guarantee that your father has never used any of the words you did earlier, Thomas Burley.’

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Tom sighed and folded the newspaper. He rested his chin in his palm and looked sulky.

  ‘Do you think they’re all happy to be coming to Australia?’ Frances asked. ‘Do you think they’re sad to leave behind their families and friends?’

  ‘It must be a terribly hard thing to pack up all your children and take a boat to the other side of the world, to leave the rest of your family.’

  ‘I left my friends when we moved here from Canberra. That was hard.’

  Mavis smoothed her daughter’s hair. ‘Yes. It was. But you’re only a train journey away. Do you think you would last six weeks on a boat? Tom felt queasy fishing on the river.’

  Mavis winked at Frances and they laughed at Tom’s expense.

  ‘Oh, very funny,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure everyone who comes here is exceedingly happy with what they find. It may be a bit of a shock arriving in an old army camp in this little town, but it’s not a prison, remember? People are free to come and go. They’re only with us until they find work, perhaps on the Snowy Mountains Scheme, or in New South Wales, or Perth or South Australia. They’re not afraid of hard work, your father always says.’

  Frances was a witness to the fact that there were always people arriving and departing. Sometimes Bonegilla felt like an enormous transit point, like limbo, a place to shuffle and organise people between their old lives and their new.

  Tom folded the newspaper and leapt up from his seat. ‘Thanks for breakfast, Mum.’ He pushed his chair in slowly, having previously been warned about scratching the newly laid geometric-patterned linoleum, and then walked through to the living room, whistling. Soon, the low tones of an ABC announcer mumbled through to the kitchen.

  Frances helped her mother by clearing the table. Mavis washed the dishes, dipping her hands and the plates and cups in and out of the sudsy water, in a rhythm Frances found comforting. She liked this small house at the camp. When soldiers were trained and stationed there during the war, one of the important army people had lived there, but Bonegilla hadn’t been home to troops since 1947. Australia hadn’t needed so many soldiers since then; soldiers like her Uncle Bert, her mother’s brother, who’d been killed in Darwin in 1943. He’d been in the navy, serving on a ship anchored in Darwin Harbour. Her mother had never said it out loud, but Frances knew her mother was glad there were no Japanese coming into Bonegilla. Many Australians still couldn’t forget the war and Mavis couldn’t forget what had happened to her own brother. She’d heard her mother say it once to her father, late one night when she’d slipped out of bed to go to the toilet and she’d overheard her parents talking in the kitchen. She’d stopped and listened to their conversation even when she knew she shouldn’t have. It had been the anniversary of Uncle Bert’s death, that day, and she remembered because her mother had called her own parents in Melbourne and she
’d cried on the phone and then gone to lie down on her bed, the door firmly closed, the blinds drawn all day.

  Frances didn’t remember Uncle Bert. She’d been five years old when he’d been killed, but she felt like she knew him. He was a ghost in her mother’s family, a reminder to them that the war had been so close.

  Frances enjoyed the companionable silence as they washed and wiped the dishes. As she stacked the clean china plates in the dresser, her mother made herself a cup of tea, and sat at the table, reading the newspaper. Frances excused herself and went to her room to study her atlas.

  To Frances, her home felt as if it was the centre of the world. When the trains arrived during the day, Frances loved watching the new Australians step off the bus and land in a whirl of activity, clutching their suitcases, wearing their winter coats even on the warmest of days. Trucks came and went, delivering food to the mess huts so the staff could feed the thousands of people living there. Her father once told her that Flemington Reynolds, the local abattoir, delivered two hundred sheep a day.

  ‘Imagine that, Frances,’ he’d said. ‘An entire flock of sheep!’ And there was bread and milk and vegetables and fruit delivered every day, too, and firewood and sometimes ice cream and pineapples. Frances loved the freedom of wandering the vast grounds of Bonegilla, all three hundred and twenty acres of it, so her father liked to tell her, past the Greek church and the Roman Catholic one; the cinema; the halls where people met for social functions; the police station and the hospital. She would make her way through the rows of timber-framed corrugated-iron army huts, listening, watching and hearing things unlike anything she’d heard in her own family. Around every corner there was a drama unfolding, or so it seemed to her. Loud and impassioned arguments in foreign languages. Whispered conversations between men and women. Disputes over space on the washing line and the toilet queue. Laughter and tears, in both adults and children. Frances had spent the past five years at Bonegilla listening and had learned to say some phrases in all these exotic languages: