The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

by Victoria Purman

  At the mess hall, a stream of people was going in the front door and a line of people walked past them from the back of the mess; they had washed their dishes in the long trough at the rear of the building and were making their way to take their dishes back to their huts. People were calling out in different languages, looking for laughing, escaping children. There were so many sounds for so early in the morning.

  Her little brothers looked up at Iliana and called out in singsong voices, ‘Breakfast.’

  ‘Yes. Breakfast,’ she replied. Months of English lessons at the Bonegilla school had given the boys a distinct advantage over the rest of the family. She often heard them chatting away to children in their class, every one from a different country, already so fluent in English. Prenotazione. Breakfast. Iliana was getting better at making that leap in her head, to think in Italian and then in English.

  As she followed her parents and brothers inside, they spooned up food onto their dishes at the bain-marie, and then found seats at a Formica-topped table.

  When they left Bonegilla, when they had a house of their own, she wanted to cook with her mother again, the traditional foods of Puglia: orecchiette pasta and taralli biscuits and zeppoli pastries. That’s what Italian girls did. That’s what she wanted to do in this new country. Be a good Italian girl.

  Her nonna. Would she ever taste her nonna’s cooking again? Her eyes were wet now and she wiped them hurriedly, not wanting anyone to see that she was upset. Would she ever see her nonna again? Nonna, who’d lived through so much herself, who’d lost so much, had now lost her daughter and her grandchildren to a strange new country so far away she couldn’t even take in the distance.

  Iliana’s good mood had disappeared as quickly as the steam from her bowl. A wave of homesickness swept over her. She pushed her bowl into the middle of the table.

  She wasn’t hungry anymore.

  After breakfast, it was Iliana’s duty to walk Stefano and Giovani to the classroom at the camp. Her big brother, Massimo, had waved at his family before heading off with his friends to play soccer, as the Australians called it. Il calcio. He’d joined the Bonegilla United soccer team and spent most of this time with his teammates, practising, or taking long walks around the local hills and to Lake Hume. He had a freedom that Iliana didn’t. She was expected to be with her mother and help look after her two younger brothers. At sixteen she was already too old for school and anyway, they probably wouldn’t be in the camp very much longer. She knew that her father would find a job soon.

  There must be lots of jobs for hardworking men like her father.

  Australia was a big place. Iliana wondered how many Italys would fit into Australia if you cut them out on paper and put them together like a jigsaw puzzle.

  Chapter Six

  Frances Burley rose early the next Sunday. The day held the promise of warming sun, with clearing cloud and a forecast that predicted no rain at all. She slipped on her woollen skirt and a pale yellow cardigan her mother had knitted for her, which was her favourite, buckled her shoes and tried to tamp down her excitement at having the day to herself. After breakfast she dutifully helped her mother prepare their Sunday roast by peeling the potatoes which would soften and golden in the fat of the lamb; she peeled carrots and prepared Brussels sprouts, which she hated but ate anyway, and set the table ready for lunch at one o’clock. She never complained about helping her mother. If she didn’t do it, no one else would. Even when Tom was up from Melbourne, it was never deemed a boy’s duty to help in the kitchen.

  ‘Nicely done, Frances,’ her mother told her as she looked over the table setting. ‘You’ll make someone a fine wife one day.’ Frances wasn’t sure she really ever wanted to be anyone’s wife but she liked seeing her mother so pleased. The Royal Doulton china sparkled. Frances had made sure to polish the silverware as well, and it caught the light and gleamed. She had placed a crystal glass at her mother’s setting, ready for a sherry after their meal. ‘I wish your father were here. He loves roast lamb.’

  ‘How long will he be gone this time?’

  ‘A few days. But we’ll be fine without him. We always are.’

  Frances hoped to be like her mother when she grew up. Mavis Burley was always immaculately dressed, especially for Sunday dinner. Her slim-fitting tweed skirt was topped off with a pale green knitted twin-set that pulled in at her waist, and her everyday pearls sat neatly on her collarbone. She never left the house without a slash of Coty’s lipstick and a powdered face, and her hair was always set and hairsprayed into place. Frances assumed her mother was trying to set an example for all the new Australians, to represent how an Australian woman should dress and comport herself. They needed someone to look up to. Most of them looked quite raggedy, but Frances supposed they didn’t have much choice, having had to pack up their lives into trunks and battered suitcases. Even if they’d had fancy clothes and shoes before, they’d probably had to leave them all behind. She thought it highly unlikely that they’d even had fancy clothes and shoes at all. If they did, why would they come to Australia for a better life when life seemed to be rather good already?

  ‘Thank you, Mum. Can I go now?’

  Her mother laughed as she walked from the dining room back to the kitchen. ‘You know the rules. Don’t get dirty and don’t get lost. And be back in time for lunch.’

  ‘How can I get lost? I know every tree. Every hut. The post office, the cinema, the mess halls in every accommodation block, the stores and even the hospital.’

  Her mother stopped and looked back at her daughter. Frances could see her smile falter. ‘You’re quite the adventurer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Just like Amelia Earhart,’ Frances declared.

  ‘Exactly not like her, if you please. Be careful.’

  ‘Of course I will.’ She went to her mother and gave her a quick hug.

  ‘Be back by half past twelve, please. You’ll need to freshen up before we eat.’

  Frances shivered with excitement as she walked out the front door and into the world of Bonegilla. She turned her face to the weak warmth of the sun and strode. The weekends were her chance to explore the camp and she relished this time to roam. During the week, she was on the bus to school in Albury with the other children of staff who worked and lived at the camp, and felt she missed out on so many of the comings and goings. On Saturdays and Sundays, she would walk as much of the three hundred and twenty acres of the camp as she could, soaking up everything she saw. There were always new people unsure of where they were, and camp residents who were saying their final goodbyes to the place before they boarded the bus to the Bonegilla rail siding to begin their new lives in Australia.

  The staff knew Frances, and would call out hello to her if they saw her. She never felt scared among thousands of strangers. When it was bustling with people, sometimes eight thousand of them at once, it felt to Frances like a huge holiday camp or a seaside town in summer without the sea but with Lake Hume instead. Staff and residents even grew to know each other, especially those migrants who found work at the camp and stayed. The previous summer, there had been a wedding reception at the Hume Club at the camp. One of the teachers married a Yugoslavian man who was working as a translator in the Employment Office. Frances had been allowed to go to the wedding in the Catholic chapel at the camp. The teacher’s dress was so beautiful and the Yugoslavian man was so proud of his brand-new Australian suit.

  People didn’t spend much time in their huts but wandered, played, lived in the open spaces between the huts and around the buildings. They were so exotic looking: the dark complexions and black hair of the Greeks and Italians, the Slavs with their blond hair and the Dutch girls whose hair was like daffodils. But making friends hadn’t been as easy as Frances had anticipated. She would have dearly loved to have made friends with some of the girls but hadn’t seemed to find the right way to do that. Firstly, language was a problem. Not many people spoke more than a few words of English, and there were so many other languages in the camp that Fra
nces didn’t know where to start. Although they seemed friendly enough, she found that people tended to stick together. The Italians with the Italians. The Germans with the Germans. The Dutch with the Dutch, and the Latvians with the Latvians. Bonegilla was so temporary that perhaps it was easier that way. Frances had tried to appear friendly, but perhaps she’d inadvertently given off airs and graces, some idea that she was better than them. Perhaps that’s what stuck to you when you were the daughter of the camp’s director.

  The new Australians never knew exactly how long they were going to be at Bonegilla. As soon as the men were assigned work, they would be off, leaving Bonegilla for good. To South Australia, to Quorn and Peterborough to work on the railways; to the Riverland to pick fruit. To Melbourne to work in factories and in government utilities; and to Cooma to work on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Some were destined for Queensland and the cane fields. Australia seemed to be teeming with jobs begging for people to fill them. When her father left his copy of the newspaper at home, Frances would flick right past the women’s pages until she found the classifieds. There was work everywhere, column after column of positions detailed in tiny type. Labourers. Farm workers. Factory workers.

  Bonegilla was temporary for everyone but her.

  Just as her mother did, Frances felt obliged to play her part in welcoming all of these people to Australia but she wasn’t quite sure how to do it. They had been through so much, had so many experiences. She and her family had lived in Canberra before moving to Bonegilla. That was the whole of her life experience. In her wildest imaginings, she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to leave everything behind and take a ship across the world to a strange place. So many Australians had done it in the reverse direction during the war, but she’d been too young to understand what that meant, really. Their neighbours in Canberra, the Millers, had lost a son in New Guinea and her parents had gone to the funeral; and her cousin Marjorie was a nurse who’d sailed off to Malaya. She’d married a soldier and came home and was now the mother of two little girls. Frances thought all those who’d gone to war, and consequently all those who were still leaving Europe because of it, were so brave and adventurous. She longed to be brave and adventurous herself.

  The radio brought that world into her house. Not just news, but Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra and Doris Day and Rosemary Clooney. There seemed to be, to Frances at least, a whole world out there that was so much more exciting than Australia, than Albury, than Bonegilla.

  Inside the camp, there was life every day. There were people, families, loud and happy voices, cooking smells, card playing, the sounds of a violin or a piano accordion in the air. When the sun was out, families poured out of their huts and set up in the lanes between the rows of buildings. Camp chairs around a table created a perfect spot for cards or the bowling game the Italian men liked to play with great whoops of excitement or groans of dismay.

  Frances made her usual start to her walk around the camp, past the hospital, in and out of the rows of huts, soaking in the voices and the laughter and the happy sounds of families. Sometimes she veered off course, if there were things to see, and other times she walked away from the sadness she saw and heard. More than once she’d heard sobbing as she’d walked by the accommodation huts—adults sobbing, not the plaintive cry of young children—and when Frances had told her mother about it, Mavis had patted her daughter’s hand and sighed, ‘They miss home, I expect.’

  Frances was on her usual route north to the oval. It was the weekend, so she knew there would most likely be a fiercely competitive soccer game underway. When she reached the clearing, she wasn’t disappointed. A cheering crowd had gathered on the sidelines and the sun shone down on the olive-skinned players. Half were wearing guernseys and the other half were stripped topless, and they took it in turns to enthusiastically chase the ball through the long grass, passing it with their feet, snaking in between the other players.

  It was fast; the players were quick on their feet, moving so rapidly she had trouble seeing the ball at times as it shot out from someone’s foot, bounced off another player’s head and, much to everyone’s amusement, got lost in the long grass on the sidelines. Frances moved forward into the crowd of people, following the ball as one of the players kicked it so hard it flew through the air and landed way past the temporary goal posts. A roar went up from one section of the crowd, Italians by the look of them. The ball bounced off into a copse of gum trees and one of the players bolted after it.

  Someone moved next to Frances and she stepped sideways to make room. It was a girl, about her age, the same height, with black hair cut short. Gold earrings glistened in her ears, the European kind Frances coveted. No one in Australia had pierced ears, her mother had told her, except for certain kinds of women. Sometimes she snuck into her parents’ room to quietly open her mother’s jewellery box on the dresser, to touch her diamante necklaces and drape them around her neck. Once she clasped a sparkling pair of earrings to her earlobes, dazzled by how long they were, but her play-acting had only lasted a minute. They pinched something dreadful.

  The girl smiled back at Frances. ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ Frances replied. ‘They are good players.’ Then she felt slightly ridiculous. She wished there was a way to tell just by looking at someone if they spoke or understood English.

  To Frances’s relief, the girl smiled back. ‘Good. Yes.’ Then she pointed to one of the young men running towards goal, dribbling the ball flamboyantly with his fast-moving feet. ‘My brother.’ She splayed a hand to her chest. ‘Massimo.’

  ‘Oh, he’s your brother,’ Frances repeated slowly.

  There was a shout from the players and they quickly turned their attention to the young man out on the pitch. Massimo. He was lithe and tanned, wearing shorts, kneehigh socks with stripes and a long-sleeved guernsey with thick black and white vertical stripes. He had control of the ball, and was sprinting fast, urging it down one end of the playing field, no one fast enough to catch up with him, and then he smoothly kicked the life out of the ball and it soared between the upright posts for another goal.

  The girl raised her arms up in the air and whooped, ‘Tre, Massimo!’ She turned to Frances, holding up three fingers. ‘Three goals.’

  ‘Three goals. Goodness, he is a very good player.’ Frances was barely able to keep her eyes from him, as he ran back to his team members, his arms in the air, laughing with delight, his white teeth gleaming against his skin.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Frances asked.

  ‘Me?’ The girl pointed to herself. ‘Iliana.’

  ‘I’m Frances.’

  Iliana laughed. ‘Italian? Francesca.’

  ‘I like that so much better than Frances,’ she muttered to herself.

  Iliana looked confused. ‘I not understand.’

  Frances waved her words away with a smile.

  ‘This my friend, Vasiliki.’

  A girl, about the same age, wearing a floral dress and a green cardigan, emerged from next to Iliana. Her hair was thick and almost black and hung in two thick plaits. She was little, a good head shorter than Frances.

  ‘Hello.’ Frances was too scared to say the girl’s name. It seemed very complicated.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said and slipped an arm through Iliana’s, leaning close and bumping her friend’s arm.

  Frances pointed at the players. ‘Soccer.’

  ‘Il calcio.’ Iliana kicked her foot forwards then repeated. ‘Soccer.’

  ‘Il calcio,’ Frances repeated, thinking hard to lock it away in her head. She might need this phrase when she travelled to Italy, one day.

  The three girls shyly smiled at each other and Frances turned back to watch the game. One player in particular. Massimo had called out to another player who kicked the ball to him, and then he grinned, as if he loved being in command of the ball and having all eyes on him. He tapped the ball forwards with his right foot, then flicked it to the side, teasing the opposition player who was a
pproaching him, and then he pulled his leg back and swung. The ball soared into the air and Frances turned excitedly to Iliana.

  She heard screams and shouts and then someone clutched at her arm and the next thing she knew she was flat on her back on the long grass and her head was pounding, and a crowd of people were gazing down at her with shocked expressions and mouths agape.

  There was a loud, fast garble of words she didn’t understand.

  ‘Lei sta bene?’

  ‘Der Ball schlug sie auf den Kopf!’

  ‘Snel een dokter.’

  ‘E morta. E morta!’

  ‘She is not dead.’ Someone was pressing a palm to her forehead. Frances shivered but the hand was warm and strong against her skin. She blinked her eyes open and the light stung. The crowd of strange faces all around her, looking down on her in horror, sucked all the air out of her lungs and all the light from the sky. She felt sick. When she moved to get up, a firm pair of hands on her shoulders pressed her back down to the damp grass

  ‘The ball. It hit her.’

  She tried to focus. It was Iliana’s brother. The fast runner. The goal kicker. He was leaning over her, saying something fast and direct to one of his teammates and the young man turned his back to them, shoved his way through the crowd and took off.