With Tosia to organise and motivate them, they didn’t go through the mental paralysis that afflicted many migrants who had no friends or family to guide them. She anticipated their difficulties and, with her boundless energy, smoothed the path for them. ‘Guta, there’s a science course at the university that would suit you, but you’ll need a part-time job to keep you going,’ she would say. A moment later she was making inquiries and phone calls and passing on names and addresses. ‘Dick, you’ll have to do electrical engineering again. They won’t recognise your Polish diploma so you’ll probably have to go to RMIT…’ The two orphans had found a surrogate mother.
They had been staying with her in her small St Kilda flat for several weeks, wondering whether they would ever find a place of their own, when she rushed in bursting with news one afternoon. ‘I’ve found you a house! But don’t expect luxury,’ she warned. Accommodation was scarce in Melbourne after the war, and even flats were hard to find. The house in Wordsworth Street, St Kilda was a tumbledown weatherboard cottage with dry rot, an outdoor toilet, leaning fences with broken palings and grass that straggled waist-high in the neglected yard. But they had a house and, what was even more astonishing, the rent was affordable. As Dick was an electrical engineer, the resourceful Tosia arranged that he would do the landlord’s electrical repairs in return for a low rental.
It seemed miraculous to live so close to St Kilda Beach with its promenade and inviting curve of yellow sand. St Kilda was a dynamic enclave of European immigrants, especially Jews. On weekends they strolled along the windy beachfront, the men in jackets draped across their shoulders, the women in ankle-strap shoes and upswept hair. They congregated in cafés like the Scheherazade where Polish, Russian and Hungarian émigrés cooked dishes like their mothers used to make, and the smell of poppyseed cakes, cheese blintzes and walnut tortes was impossible to resist. The men banged their fists on the small tables as they argued about the political situation in Europe, their cigarette smoke swirling around them. More concerned about everyday problems, their wives discussed the clothing factories where most of them spent the weekdays bent over sewing machines, and exchanged information about children’s schools and butcher shops that sold good veal. In Acland Street, refugees always found familiar faces to ask about mutual friends, a room going cheap or a factory looking for workers.
To the lively Europeans, Melbourne was a prim English city and Australians were disconcertingly Anglo-Saxon and inscrutable. They uttered stock phrases with a cheerful but flat monotone that seemed to use a grudging fraction of their vocal range, and one never knew what they were thinking. To the women, Australian men seemed stiff, sexless and lacking in gallantry. Instead of shaking hands, Australians said, ‘How are you?’ but never expected an answer.
That’s the phrase Guta expected to hear from her new workmates when she entered Henty House. Inside the building, the five charwomen who confronted her gave her the once-over. Their narrowed eyes swept up and down her cotton print dress and came to an insolent stop on her nose with its flattened bridge. Guta didn’t need to speak much English to understand the body language of arms folded across pinafores and eyes cold with disapproval.
Guta felt her throat drying up beneath their gaze. In fractured English she tried to explain that she was working so that she could study, when one of them muttered, ‘Who sent her? We don’t need no bloody students!’ Guta tried again. Perhaps the woman hadn’t understood. Surely being a student couldn’t pose a problem. But she had no doubt about the sentiment behind the next comment. ‘We don’t want no bloody reffos here!’
Ever since Arthur Calwell, the minister for immigration, had introduced a policy to increase Australia’s population through immigration as a bulwark against possible invasion, the scaremongers had whipped up fears that Australians’ jobs, houses and their whole way of life were under threat. Even though the unemployment rate was less than two percent, articles and cartoons in newspapers depicted cunning foreigners taking jobs away from fair dinkum Aussies, undercutting their wages and grabbing homes that should have gone to diggers. With the right-wing press thundering about potential racial and religious disharmony, and the unions howling about unfair competition and the erosion of hard-won conditions, many workers resented the newcomers, hated to hear them speaking their foreign lingo and wished they’d go back to where they’d bloody well come from.
Guta was dismayed by the antagonism of her workmates. It wasn’t as though she was taking their jobs or asking for special privileges, yet they seemed to regard her as an enemy. But she couldn’t articulate any of that and suspected that they wouldn’t listen even if she could. At nineteen, she was no match for these hard-faced harridans with their dried-out hearts and wrinkled faces. Guta gritted her teeth. She had survived the Nazis and she’d cope with these narrow-minded witches. There was no choice—she needed the work. If she had to spend each morning working in hostile silence, that’s what she would do.
The Civil Aviation Department occupied six floors. On the first five floors, all the women had to do was empty ashtrays, whisk a feather duster around the tables and filing cabinets and mop the wooden floors. The most time-consuming was the sixth floor where the draughtsmen’s rooms were located. Under large windows, tilted drawing boards were covered with blueprints of aeroplanes, all of which had to be carefully moved so that the surfaces could be dusted, and then replaced in exactly the same order. The grimy lino floor had to be scrubbed and polished every day until it sparkled. This was a thankless task because during the war, along with colourful Yankee navy jargon, the draughtsmen had also picked up the American habit of spitting pipe tobacco and grinding it into the floor.
It was the sixth floor that the charwomen unanimously allocated to Guta.
They had to be out of the building by the time the civil servants started work at 8.15. Guta couldn’t help smiling when she saw them arrive. With their crew cuts, pipes stuck in their mouths and epaulettes on their jackets, they looked like extras for a musical about Yankee sailors. If they’d suddenly broken into a Fred Astaire tap-dancing routine, she wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
But she didn’t have time to loiter. As soon as she replaced the broom, duster and polisher, she patted down her springy ash blonde hair, ran through the double doors of the building and sprinted to the University of Melbourne to save the threepenny tram fare. If she made good time and reached the campus in twenty-five minutes, she had time for a quick shower at Union House before her lectures on anatomy, physiology and organic chemistry. Although Guta had dreamed of studying medicine, she couldn’t afford to study for five years full-time, so she had enrolled in science instead. As she sat forward to catch what the lecturer was saying, she wondered whether she would ever learn the intricacies of this impossible language. Charlie’s lessons on the Derna had not equipped her for the terminology the science course required. Apart from language problems, she had no grounding in science subjects and had little time to study. After lectures, she hurried back to Collins Street where she worked in the evenings as a receptionist for a doctor whose predominantly Polish patients needed someone who could speak their language.
At weekends, Guta washed cars. She charged ten shillings and sixpence for a wash and polish, which paid their rent. The cars belonged to the pre-war migrants whom the new arrivals called ‘the allrightniks’. To those who had nothing, the people who had climbed one rung higher on the immigrant ladder seemed like millionaires.
Among Tosia’s vast network of friends and acquaintances was Ray Campbell, a big-hearted elderly Australian woman who gave Guta lessons in spoken English. It was through Ray that she received an invitation to visit the Reads in the Riverina. From the moment they met, Guta was enchanted by this family and their property. Located in a lush pastoral area surrounded by magnificent countryside of limitless horizons and huge skies, it became a spiritual and emotional haven where she breathed freely for the first time in many years.
She felt as though she had known the Read
s all her life and staying with them during the Christmas holidays became the highlight of her year. ‘They were the first family I ever met who had no war scars,’ she tells me. ‘It amazed me that people could plan ten years ahead, and decide which schools their children would go to. And here was I, still not able to plan a day ahead.’
Guta today is a handsome woman with a dignified presence. She is tall and slim, with crinkly grey hair pulled back from a strong face and an even gaze. The bewildered young girl who lacked the confidence to talk to the other passengers on the Derna has become a quietly assertive woman, but an air of vulnerability still lingers in her expression. Articulate and analytical, she speaks excellent English with a trace of a Polish accent. As we talk in the kitchen of her homely cottage in an old Melbourne suburb, her cat Pushkin paces up and down along the window seat and rubs against the glass until she opens the back door to let him out.
Guta’s emotional recovery began with the Reads. Don had a wonderfully dry sense of humour, and kept a straight face while making comments that made her double up with laughter. ‘When a newborn lamb kept us awake all night with its bleating, I asked Don why the mother wouldn’t suckle it,’ Guta recalls. ‘He pointed at the massive ewe which resembled a shapeless bale of matted wool and said in a deadpan voice, “She doesn’t want to ruin her figure!” ’
Shocked to see that they threw out the curds from the milk, Guta suggested making cottage cheese, an idea that the Reads greeted with wrinkled noses and sounds of disgust. Undaunted, she asked for a bucket of curds and several days later presented them with natural yoghurt. Their stomachs turned. Refusing to give up, she let the curdled milk drip through a muslin bag to make cottage cheese, but that revolted them as well. ‘Do you wait till your eggs go bad, and your tomatoes rot, before you eat them?’ Don would joke, while the children shuddered and held their noses.
Although Guta and Don were on the same wavelength where humour was concerned, it was his wife Marjorie who became her confidante. Strolling beside the dark green creek that flowed through the property, sometimes they sat in the shade of the tall paperbarks whose skin flaked off like tissue paper. But no matter how much peeled away, there were always more layers underneath. Guta found it surprisingly easy to talk to Marjorie about everything, even about the traumatic experiences she had never been able to discuss with anyone else. Marjorie phrased her questions so sensitively and listened with such empathy that she evoked complete trust. And when words were inadequate, she would simply put her arm around Guta’s shoulders and hug her. Dick, who was studying electrical engineering at RMIT at the time, was less sociable and never accompanied her on these holidays at the Reads’.
In between working and studying, Guta and Dick fixed up their house, mended the fence and planted a garden in what had been a wilderness, although they continued to sit on wooden crates because they couldn’t afford any furniture. When one of their neighbours came over unexpectedly with a table and three chairs, Guta was speechless. ‘How can we ever repay you?’ she asked.
‘There’s no need,’ the woman replied. ‘Someone helped us when we arrived. When you’re on your feet, help someone else and I’ll be repaid.’ Guta never forgot her words.
The neighbour on the other side was an old French woman who would stand on her verandah every day, watching out for the postman. ‘Do you have any French letters for me?’ she asked him every morning in her high-pitched voice. Reddening with embarrassment, he would mutter to Guta, ‘Someone should tell that woman to stop saying that!’
But at the Civil Aviation office her workmates remained truculent. She thought them rude, crude and unattractive and did her best to ignore their taunts, although sometimes she was amused to hear them swearing non-stop for five minutes at a time without once repeating themselves—something not even Charlie the seaman with his scatological vocabulary was able to do. But despite her resentment, she gradually developed a grudging admiration for the solidarity that existed among these women. If one of them happened to be ill, the others would finish their own work and then converge on their workmate’s floor to do hers as well. ‘That’s how we work here, so you’d better get used to it,’ one of them told her in her brusque way. ‘Anyone’s sick or away, the rest of us pitch in so no one misses out on their dough.’
When Guta’s English improved, she was able to follow their conversations. Occasionally they talked about the Depression, a time of soup kitchens, desperate mothers whose children fought over biscuit crumbs, and demoralised men who wandered around the countryside with swags on their backs in search of work and a crust of bread. Hunger and humiliation Guta understood only too well, but she never spoke about her own experiences.
In time, she came to appreciate their grasp of political issues. Although they were uneducated, they were shrewd enough to see through the pronouncements of politicians who tried to hoodwink the public. The only one they admired was the pipe-smoking prime minister, Ben Chifley. A country boy with little schooling who had started off cleaning railway offices before becoming an engine driver, he had entered politics and risen to the top. He was one of them. But when the Labor Party was defeated and the Liberals under Robert Menzies came to power in December 1949, they were livid. ‘Bloody Menzies,’ they would say. ‘You can’t trust him further than you can throw him. He’s a real snake in the grass. Chifley was for the workers, not like these bloody mongrels,’ they muttered.
During the coal strikes which caused chaos on the wharves, disrupted transport and resulted in power rationing and mass unemployment, the women were solidly behind the strikers, barracking for them to keep up the fight. When the government clamped down on the strikers, they reached new heights of vituperation about the rotten scabs and the stinkers in parliament who didn’t care if decent workers starved. Most of their husbands were unionists who worked on the factory floor, and in their juicy language Guta heard a deep commitment to their cause.
The spokeswoman was Doris, whom Guta described to her friends as ‘a cubical box of aggression with arms akimbo’. What Doris said went. One day when Guta stayed upstairs to scrub the floor during their tea and cigarette break, Doris marched up and rasped in her gravelly voice, ‘You bloody well come down with the rest of us! No one works through the break!’ Too intimidated to resist, Guta followed her and pretended to sip the nauseating milky fluid. In Poland only invalids and nursing mothers drank tea with milk.
Doris’s mate Ruby usually arrived at work with shaking hands, a trembling voice and a small unlabelled bottle in the deep pocket of her coat. Periodically she would take it out, put it to her lips, close her eyes and swiftly glug down its contents. As if by magic, her hands soon steadied and her voice became firmer.
One day she came in with a black eye and a bruised cheek. As the women collected their keys that hung from hooks inside the lockers and pulled the polishers, wax and brooms out of the downstairs cupboard, Doris gave a long low whistle through her teeth. ‘Strewth, Rube, did you get run over by a truck, love?’
‘That stinker of a husband of mine threw a spud at me,’ Ruby mumbled.
‘Well I bloody well hope you threw it back at him!’ Doris cackled.
Ruby drew herself up to her full height of about five feet and tilted her bruised chin. ‘I wouldn’t stoop that low because I’m a loidy!’ she retorted. The others laughed and for once Guta joined in.
Suddenly Ruby swung around to face her. Her eyes narrowed and a look of sheer malice crossed her swollen face. ‘What are you staring at? You bloody migrants come into this country and think you own the place, taking our jobs, grabbing the houses that our diggers should be getting. Why don’t youse all go back where you bloody well came from?’ While she continued her harangue, Guta stood there, not knowing what to do.
On and on Ruby went, her voice growing more strident all the time, while the others stood by in silence, their faces registering no emotion, until Doris suddenly yelled, ‘E-nough! Everybody out!’
An hour later, Guta found Ruby slumped o
n the bench, head on her hands, not moving. Now we’ll have to do her work as well, she thought. After finishing her own floor, she came downstairs, picked up the broom and started sweeping, churning with resentment.
Next morning, Ruby was at work as though nothing had happened and no one referred to the fracas of the previous day. After the other women had got out on their own floors, Ruby stayed in the lift with Guta as it creaked towards the sixth floor. Uneasy about the close proximity, Guta braced herself to rush out of the lift the moment the door opened. There was no knowing what this erratic woman might do. But before she could get away, Ruby grabbed her arm. ‘Now listen here, love,’ she wheezed, and Guta noticed that her bloodshot eyes were moist with emotion. ‘I get carried away at times, see. I don’t mean nothing by it. You don’t want to take no notice of an old bugger like me, okay?’ Guta nodded. This was obviously Ruby’s way of saying sorry.
It didn’t take long for the others to come round as well. Mollified by the way she had kept to their agreement to pitch in and help even after Ruby’s onslaught, the cleaners began treating her like one of them. Instead of having five foes, Guta ended up with five mothers. ‘Now look, love, don’t go wasting your money in them shops. Just tell us what you need. My hubby works in the factory so I can get it much cheaper,’ they’d tell her whenever she mentioned something she wanted to buy.
She knew she had been accepted the day a union official paid them an unexpected visit. ‘You’re not in the union, so you can’t work here,’ he announced. Guta explained that she’d tried to join but had been rejected because she was a member of the students’ union.
The Voyage of Their Life Page 32