The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  About the Author

  VICTORIA PURMAN is a multi-published, award-nominated, Amazon Kindle–bestselling author. She has worked in and around the Adelaide media for nearly thirty years as an ABC television and radio journalist, a speechwriter to a premier, political adviser, editor, media adviser and private sector communications consultant. She is a vice president of Romance Writers of Australia and a long-standing member of the Writers SA Board. She is a regular guest at writers’ festivals, has been nominated for a number of readers’ choice awards and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Three Miss Allens, was published in 2016.

  Also by Victoria Purman

  The Boys of Summer series:

  Nobody But Him

  Someone Like You

  Our Kind of Love

  Only We Know

  Hold Onto Me

  The Three Miss Allens

  The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls

  Victoria Purman

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  In memory of my grandparents

  Stefan Scheirich (1913-1990) and

  Maria Scheirich (nee Szimon; 1912-1990)

  and for their children, grandchildren and

  great-grandchildren.

  Pictured at Bonegilla, 1954.

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Victoria Purman

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Chapter Forty-eight

  About Bonegilla

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  9 April, 1954

  Sixteen-year-old Elizabeta Schmidt blinked open her sleepy eyes. The camp. The words were being murmured from one family to another on the rust-red train. Like a Chinese whisper, they had spread from carriage to carriage, seat after seat, over hats and scarved heads and little children’s curls, in hushed and tired voices, like a wave. Their journey was almost over.

  Six weeks earlier the Schmidt family had left their home in Hessental to take the train to Bremerhaven on Germany’s North Sea coast, and begun their journey on the Fairsea around Europe to Malta, then Port Said in Egypt, and to Melbourne via Perth. After a rough voyage over the Great Australian Bight, during which Elizabeta’s mother had been sick every day, they’d berthed at Port Melbourne and then crossed a wharf and climbed aboard the train with many carriages. It was almost midnight now, and Elizabeta was tired and anxious, having had only snatches of sleep on the journey. What would they find when the train finally stopped? The leather seats were a small comfort. She and her family had been forced onto all kinds of trains before with nothing so luxurious; they had had no windows and only wooden planks to sit on. Elizabeta didn’t mind this Australian train at all.

  She pulled her brand-new winter coat tighter around her and lifted the collar to cover her ears. The sobbing from behind her had begun an hour before and the woman hadn’t stopped. Elizabeta didn’t recognise the words, but thought it might be Russian perhaps, or Ukrainian. Elizabeta had been surrounded by languages her whole life. She still remembered a few words in Hungarian, was fluent in German, and had picked up some English in the classes provided on the Fairsea on the voyage over and from lessons from her father. She recognised the harshness of Polish with all its zeds and jheds; the passionate roar of Italian and the musicality of Greek, in which everything seemed to end in ki. People had picked up languages like scraps of food, anything to help survive the war.

  The train slowed and lurched and then pulled up with a brake squeal like fingernails on a blackboard, and the woman behind Elizabeta began howling in earnest now.

  Someone whispered in German. No matter where they came from, everyone understood some German. ‘Sie war in den Lagern. Sie mag es nicht, Züge. Sie verstehen.’

  She was in the camps. She doesn’t like trains. You understand.

  There were murmurs and nods of agreement all around.

  The rattle of the train stilled and Elizabeta stared out the window into the black nothingness. There wasn’t a star in the sky. Dim lights brightened an uncovered platform on its own in the empty dark, but there were no buildings to be seen. There was a strange whistling in the dark, a rustle of leaves, perhaps, in the distance. The sobbing woman howled again, which set off a couple of tired children who began to squawk. Slowly, everyone around her stood, collected their belongings and bags, reached for the hands of children, and moved down the carriage towards the open doors. Elizabeta stayed close to her parents, Jozef and Berta, and when her mother asked her to make sure she held her little sister’s hand, Elizabeta clasped Luisa’s fingers in hers. Her nine-year-old sister looked up at her, her hair coming loose from her thin plaits.

  ‘Wir sind hier, Luisa,’ Elizabeta said.

  Luisa nodded, her eyes wide and frightened. They shuffled to the end of the carriage and stepped off the train onto the platform. Dirt crunched underfoot. Moths danced and crashed into the lights hanging overhead. This wasn’t even a station, Elizabeta realised. It was more like a siding in the middle of a field.

  The unexpected chill hit Elizabeta and iced her throat. Her father had told her, promised her, that Australia would be sunny and warm all the time. ‘It’s always summer somewhere in Australia,’ he’d said. This was not what she’d been promised. Luisa gripped her hand tighter and snuggled in close, her little body pressed up against Elizabeta’s. Ahead of them, their parents were waiting. Their father, wiry and tense, his short hair covered by a peaked cap, was stern and watchful. Their mother, a bag of bones under her thick coat, was sad-eyed and alert. They looked back to their daughters and beckoned them with an urgent wave. Elizabeta quickened her step and tugged Luisa with her, past a man in a uniform handing out something official to each person.

  ‘Elizabeta, Luisa. Komm.’ Her mother slipped a cord with a name tag attached around Elizabeta’s neck, over her layers of clothes and winter coat. Elizabeta felt the string, rough under her fingertips. She wished it were pearls instead. She’d coveted her mother’s pearls, the tiny pale orbs on a delicate strand that sat right on her collarbone, so special they had only come out for church on Sundays. But they were back in Germany with a wom
an from the village, sold off with the new bedroom furniture and the dinner set and the few books and trinkets they’d had. They needed money for their new life in Australia, not pearls, Elizabeta’s father had said when he’d sold them.

  Berta slipped a name tag around Luisa’s head. She looked down at her daughter. Luisa’s bottom lip wobbled and her lips were pulled together to cover her chattering teeth.

  ‘Ihr zeit bald ins bett,’ Berta said, pinching her cheek as if to warm her. ‘Schön warm.’ You’ll be in bed soon. Nice and warm.

  Elizabeta was too old for that loving touch from her mother. She looked up to the black sky. There wasn’t even a moon. All she could see was a bench and the word Bonegilla, white letters on a black sign that seemed to float in midair. She desperately wanted to be in bed too, nice and warm. She gripped Luisa’s hand, and together her family followed the crowd as people shuffled along in their winter coats, their hats, their new suits, their European shoes, along the siding and down a ramp to a dirt road, where a row of chugging pale blue buses stood in formation to take them all to their temporary home in Australia.

  Had she slept on the bus? She wasn’t sure when the bus pulled up at the camp a few minutes later. The passengers were guided off the buses and shepherded in the dark towards a large and squat reception hall. Inside Elizabeta squinted. The lights were bright after the pitch darkness of the night. Shoes clicked on the wooden floorboards and people found seats in the rows of camp chairs facing the front of the hall. Luisa climbed into her father’s lap and laid her head on his shoulder. Next to him, Elizabeta shivered. Her breath was making clouds even though they were inside. She looked around at the sea of faces. She recognised people from the Fairsea. There were mothers and fathers who had befriended her parents. Young children she’d last seen playing table tennis on the boat, happily chasing after the flying white ball. Young women her own age who she’d exchanged shy smiles with in one of the boat’s dining rooms. She remembered laughing with them as their wayward plates and cups seemed to have become possessed, sliding from side to side across the dining table when the ship listed in rough weather across the Great Australian Bight. She recognised in their expressions what was in her heart: hope, but fear too. Like her, they’d left everything and everyone they’d known and taken a leap of faith, a journey into the unknown. She wondered if this new place felt like limbo to the other girls too.

  Suddenly the crowd hushed. People craned their necks and looked forwards. Elizabeta lifted herself out of the canvas chair to see above the heads in front. A man in a grey suit and a dark blue tie stood at the front of the hall on a stage with a microphone on a stand. In his hand he held some sheets of paper and he was saying something in English. Elizabeta tried very hard to concentrate on his words, but she was tired and disoriented and everything echoed in the cold hall. She tugged on her father’s coat. He knew some English, absorbed while working at an American army base in Germany in the years after the war. He’d been teaching Elizabeta ever since they’d got their papers to come to Australia

  ‘Was sagt er, Vati?’ What’s he saying, Dad?

  Her father listened and then whispered to Elizabeta in German, ‘He says welcome. He’s talking about what we’re allowed to do and not do. Where the showers and toilets are. There is hot water. There is food in the mess if we are hungry.’

  Elizabeta felt too tired to eat. Luisa was asleep in her father’s arms and Elizabeta listened as he continued to translate. ‘And now he’s saying that we are all new Australians now and that we must learn English as soon as we can. Bonegilla is about the future, not the past.’

  ‘New Australians,’ Elizabeta whispered slowly. Bonegilla. Bon – a – gilla. Elizabeta said the name over and over in her head. It sounded Italian but they were somewhere in the middle of Australia. How could that be?

  There was applause and everyone stood. Jozef held onto Luisa, and Berta moved closer to stroke her youngest daughter’s hair.

  ‘Ve is new Australians,’ Jozef announced in English, and Berta shooshed her husband with an exhausted smile. She had been seasick almost the entire voyage from Bremerhaven. It had been Elizabeta’s job to mind Luisa while their mother stayed in her cabin, her stomach roiling, unable to keep any food down. She was bone thin and her skin was grey. Maybe now they were here in Australia her mother’s spirits would lift. She might find solid ground on which to plant her feet, on which to feel safe and to be well enough to love her children again. It was the pearls, Elizabeta knew. If only her mother had been able to keep her pearls, she wouldn’t be so sad.

  There was more shuffling, but now it was across the camp into the cold and mysterious night, as they followed directions to the accommodation block to which they’d been assigned, ticked off on a list on a clipboard. Elizabeta saw a red door. Her father stepped up the small stairs and pushed it open. He smoothed his calloused hand down the wall inside and flicked on the overhead light. Berta gasped and for a moment stood staring. From behind, Elizabeta looked past her. It was small.

  ‘Komm herein,’ Jozef urged and Berta took the three steps and was inside, Elizabeta and Luisa close behind her, clutching a fold in her coat.

  It was called a hut but it wasn’t separate. It was one of a number of compartments in a long dormitory. Elizabeta counted three doors and three windows in this building alone.

  ‘Mein Gott,’ Berta murmured.

  There wasn’t much inside the tiny space. Four narrow beds with metal legs on a linoleum floor. Each had a grey-and-white striped mattress on it, barely thicker than a folded blanket. On each bed were five blankets, neatly folded white sheets, a pillow and towels. Next to the towels were four silver trays with melamine dinnerware stacked in a pile. There was two of everything on each tray: cups and saucers, plates, soup bowls, knives, forks and spoons. There was a small wooden table in the room, upon which was a pale yellow packet of something that looked like medicine, two canvas folding chairs, a jug, a basin, a brush, a broom, a bucket, a shovel and a rake. Elizabeta looked up to the bright bulb hanging in the centre of the ceiling and blinked. There were two huge moths dancing in the light. They were so big she thought they were birds come to sleep in their room.

  It was no warmer inside the hut than out. Elizabeta’s breath clouded. Jozef examined the tools while Berta quickly made up the beds and the girls slipped between the sheets, still wearing all their clothes. She covered them with all five of their thin grey blankets.

  ‘Gute Nacht, Elizabeta,’ Jozef whispered as he leaned down and kissed his daughter’s cheek.

  ‘Du auch, Vati.’ She watched the moths flit as her parents made up their beds before finally turning out the lights.

  Elizabeta lay in the dark and the cold, too nervous to sleep. As her father gently snored, her mother breathed quietly and Luisa kicked her legs about in her sleep, her mind raced. It was cold, the sheets and blankets scratched against her legs and she fought against the tangle of her coat and her clothes underneath. What would she find tomorrow? What would this Bonegilla be like in the light of day?

  Back in Germany, when her parents had been approved for migration and received their immigration papers from the Australian government, Elizabeta had told her teacher that her family was leaving for Australia. He’d walked to the bookcase and pulled down an atlas, flipping pages under his chalky fingers.

  ‘It’s the other side of the world,’ he’d told the class.

  She would miss her friends, she knew, but for a long time, Elizabeta had wanted to be far, far away from Germany, and the other side of the world seemed like just the right place to be, far away from everything.

  Most of all, she wanted a safe place and a fresh start, far from their memories and their history, a place where they might one day, finally, belong. It didn’t seem like much to ask. As she grew warmer under the blankets, the soft breathing of her family was a lullaby as she fell into her first sleep on Australian soil.

  Chapter Two

  A thump, thump, thump on the roof woke Luisa fi
rst.

  ‘Mutti. Vati,’ she cried out, half asleep. ‘Was ist das?’

  Elizabeta had heard those noises too. She lifted her head from the hard pillow and looked around the bare hut. It was still cold and her breath made smoke in the air above her face. A pale light leached in through the mist their condensed breath had made on the hut’s single window. She was still wearing all her clothes from the day before but one sock was missing. Her toes rubbed against the scratchy sheets.

  ‘Shoosh, Luisa,’ she whispered. A few steps away, their parents were two unmoving shapes under their blankets.

  ‘I’m scared,’ Luisa sniffled.

  ‘It’s only a bird,’ Elizabeta whispered sleepily. She yawned and pulled the blankets up to her chin. ‘It’s a mother bird looking for food for her babies.’ She was still so tired. She didn’t want to move from the warm cocoon her body had made, despite the cold in the room. Her eyes drifted closed.

  There were two light footsteps on the wooden floor. Elizabeta pulled back her blankets and Luisa slipped in next to her big sister.

  ‘There are birds here in Australia?’ she whispered.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Elizabeta said quietly. ‘And kangaroos. They bounce down the streets here, yes? They hop on their two big feet and they have a very strong tail. You can climb on their back for a ride, like you can on a camel or an elephant.’

  ‘Kangaroo,’ Luisa said out loud and began to giggle.

  ‘And my teacher told me we will see natives wearing grass skirts, too. And that there will be beaches and swimming and big, blue skies full of sunshine.’

  Elizabeta slipped an arm around her sister and they lay quietly, listening for more of the mysterious sounds, waiting for their parents to wake up. Luisa’s breath was hot on her neck and Elizabeta pulled her close.

  There should have been another sister in between them, bridging the seven-year gap in their ages, but Angela hadn’t survived two months. Elizabeta didn’t know how she’d died. One day she was there and the next day she was gone, and then they were in church and she was buried in the cemetery alongside it. She still didn’t know how to ask to her mother what had happened. There had been so much suffering in those years that she wondered whether they had simply run out of ways to talk about loss, about war and displacement and a dead baby. There had been a decade of grief circling around their lives like a crow.