The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  As the priest’s humanity had helped to save our lives in Poland, my parents hoped that his talisman would continue to bring us luck in Australia.

  21

  Beneath its picture postcard sky, Australia in 1948 sprawled in sluggish innocence, content to paddle in the sunlit shallows of life. Still appended to the British Empire, it awaited its own destiny while feeding on myths and deceptions. The land where the world’s oldest living culture had existed for over 40,000 years was presented in history books as an empty space waiting to be filled by British colonists. Although Australians believed in giving everyone a fair go, beneath the veneer of egalitarianism lurked a deep-seated but unacknowledged racism. Aborigines on reserves had no vote and their children were being plucked from their mothers’ arms to induce them to abandon their own heritage and embrace European culture. Asian migrants were excluded, Jewish immigrants were restricted, and foreigners were referred to as reffos, wogs and dagoes. Homogeneous, conservative and almost entirely Anglo-Saxon in origin, Australians were about to awake from their illusion of perfection.

  But to us, the passengers of the Derna, whose countries and communities had for centuries been trampled, suppressed and enslaved, Australia offered a blessed haven. This seemed to be a land that had never experienced war or revolution, where the sun shone warmly and the plants grew tall and straight.

  Rita was so excited when the Derna docked in Melbourne on 5 November 1948 that she hardly noticed the grey skies and drizzly rain. In the chaos of departure, she hadn’t been able to find Philippe, her stowaway sweetheart, to wish him luck. She had given him her aunt’s address and wondered if she’d ever hear from him again. Although she cried when she and Helle clung to each other as they said goodbye, she was certain it wouldn’t be long before they saw each other again. After all, her aunt’s farm in Kapaldo couldn’t be very far from Sydney where Helle’s family were going to settle. They would visit each other and exchange confidences just as they’d done every single day on the ship.

  From the glowing letters Rita had received from her aunt, she could picture herself on the farm plucking sun-warmed fruit in the orchard, sun-baking on the beach, and saving lives in her nurse’s cap and uniform. Nothing could dampen her high sprits: not the fact that it took most of the day to disembark and find their luggage, nor that they were tired and hungry and had no money. Once they reached Queensland all their troubles would be over. Even her mother had brightened up now that they had arrived. ‘We’re really lucky,’ she said to her sister Lilija as they boarded the train. ‘So many of the people on the ship have no one in Australia, but we have our family waiting for us.’

  The locomotive chugged out of the city, grinding to a halt at desolate stations where few people alighted or boarded. The vastness of this empty land amazed them. Mile after mile of nothing, connected by occasional clusters of low houses with small windows and overhanging roofs shading small dark verandahs. Didn’t people here like sunshine and light?

  And the trees, so sparse and pale, with droopy leaves in that apologetic shade of grey-green, so different from the dense, dark woods of Latvia. Thinking about Latvia evoked memories of oak trees whose shadows made lacy patterns on the soft loam, and cool rivers flowing past fields of wheat. With an effort, Rita pulled herself out of her reverie in an attempt to find something pleasing in the spindly trees and dust-coated towns of her new country. Facing her, Aunt Lilija cradled her little son Arne and tried to hide her dismay at this inhospitable, arid landscape.

  Announcements were made from time to time, but they could only look at each other, shake their heads and look hopefully at Jack, the older of the two boys, who had learned English in Munich. Pushing his fair hair out of his eyes, he sat forward and strained to make out what these flat, nasal voices were saying, but could only shake his head and shrug. These words didn’t sound like the ones he’d heard in class.

  Each time the train pulled up, they scanned the name on the platform and checked it with the one they had written down: Monto. Occasionally when the train made a longer stop, passengers would leave and return a few minutes later with a sandwich, some milk or a soft drink. They shook the bottles to mix the thick creamy collar under the silver foil top more evenly through the milk. Their white bread was so spongy that their fingers left dents in it, and the scent of yeast, corned beef and pickles filled the compartment. Rita tried not to look at the food which made her mouth water. It was horrible not to have enough money to buy even one sandwich for her little sister Sigride, who couldn’t understand why there was nothing to eat.

  An Australian couple in their compartment glanced their way occasionally, and from their expressions and lowered voices it was obvious that they were talking about them. At one point, they sat forward and asked something but no one understood what they said. At the next station, the couple left the train, but soon returned with a bag of rolls which they handed to Rita’s mother. Tears welled in Rita’s eyes. What a wonderful country this must be, to have such good people in it.

  As they chugged northwards, the landscape changed. Washed out, dried out and burned out, she thought. Chasms gaped in the eroded earth as though split by a giant’s axe. On their shadowy verandahs, lanky men in big floppy hats and women in faded dresses looked as dried out as the land. How could such a country sustain life?

  Exhausted and hungry after their long journey, they could hardly wait to meet the family and see the farmhouse they had heard so much about. ‘Your room is waiting for you,’ her aunt had written in a letter they now knew off by heart. But when they got off the train at the tiny station, instead of their relatives, a stranger in a battered sweat-stained hat was standing there. After driving them to the farm in Kapaldo, he disappeared in a cloud of throat-biting dust and left them to survey their new home.

  It was a tin shed, about as welcoming as a bus shelter. Lilija drew in her breath to stop herself from crying. She had visualised an inviting farmhouse like the ones in Latvia, with wooden beams, thick eiderdowns and lace curtains. There was no electricity, only a kerosene lamp, and no ceiling, just the corrugated iron roof over narrow camp beds. Exhausted by the journey and the heat, her grandmother slumped down and turned towards the wall. Rita couldn’t bear to meet her mother’s eyes. In the corner of the shack stood a piano, coated in dust. ‘Look! A piano!’ She tried to sound enthusiastic. ‘I’ll be able to play!’

  Their aunt and uncle had not come to welcome them.

  Later, Rita woke with a start, looked up and froze. Slithering on a beam just above her bed was a long snake with patterned skin. Her heart thudded and she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Too terrified to close her eyes and even more terrified of keeping them open, she lay awake for the rest of the night, imagining the grip of the slimy body as it fastened around her neck. Carpet snakes were to become frequent nocturnal visitors, but learning that they were harmless did nothing to dispel her terror.

  Rita is reminiscing about her arrival in Queensland as we talk on the sunny patio of her home in Brisbane. She heard about my search for passengers while listening to the Latvian program on SBS radio several months ago and responded at once. ‘There were eight of us travelling together on the Derna,’ she told me over the phone and added with a laugh, ‘I was a romantic twenty-one year old at the time and fell in love with a handsome French stowaway!’ I found her open, friendly manner engaging, and several months later, travelled to Brisbane to meet her.

  On the rare occasions when her aunt and uncle arrived at the farm to issue instructions about the chores Rita and her family were expected to carry out, there was no trace of the warmth they’d expressed in their letters. Only two other people ever set foot on the farm: the man who came three times a week to collect the cream and bring their bread and meat, and a Latvian neighbour who dropped in occasionally for a chat.

  Rita’s aunt had migrated from Latvia in 1927 because she had contracted tuberculosis and had been advised to move to a warm climate. Not long after arriving in Queensl
and she married, and by 1948 she and her husband had a tropical fruit orchard at Yeppoon and the dairy farm in Monto, which is in a pastoral area. Although they had a milking machine on the farm, they instructed their relatives to milk the 150 cows by hand. ‘Perhaps they didn’t want to wear their machine out,’ Rita says sarcastically. Because of the drought, the ground was parched and all the water holes had dried up, so Rita and her family had to chop down bottle trees so that the cows could suck moisture from the trunks.

  ‘I hated living on the farm and loathed the work,’ she shudders. ‘I couldn’t wait to start training as a nurse.’

  But it soon became apparent that, despite their promises, her aunt and uncle had no intention of putting her through nursing school. ‘We can’t afford it,’ her aunt said. ‘Besides, we need you to help us on the farm. After all, we had to pay all that money to bring the eight of you out here.’

  Her uncle never tired of reminding them that he had paid 600 pounds to the Red Cross for their passage. ‘Do you know how hard we have to work to earn so much money, especially with the drought?’ he would point out.

  Rita is a motherly grey-haired woman with a gentle manner. As she talks, she takes my hand and looks into my face. ‘I was so angry and disappointed,’ she recalls. To think that she could have been in Germany, training to be a nurse, instead of living in a hovel at the end of the world, callusing her hands by milking those damned cows every day. If only she had taken up that offer to become a nurse in Munich! But when she had written that she wanted to stay in Germany and become a nurse, her aunt had replied that Monto had a hospital equal to any in the world and that she could train right here. What a joke, Rita thought bitterly, staring at her sore, roughened hands. While she pulled the cow’s long teats, the milk spurted into the bucket in time to ‘Buttons and Bows’, the latest hit tune that kept blaring from the radio. Most of the words of this American song about buckskin and toting a gun were incomprehensible to her, but one line was painfully apt: ‘Don’t bury me in this prairie…’ She was buried there all right.

  ‘We were lured to Monto to be slave labourers on the farm, to milk cows, feed pigs and take care of calves,’ she tells me in her lilting accent. Their only payment was food, and from the miserly portions it was obvious that their relatives begrudged even that. Furious at their deception, she tried to stir her mother up to confront them, but the argument always ended the same way.

  ‘If they get angry and throw us out, where can we go? We don’t have any money and we can’t speak the language. They’ve sponsored us. Maybe we’ll be in trouble with the government if we leave,’ her mother would reply.

  It was the most miserable Christmas they had ever spent. In the searing heat, surrounded by flies, they longed for a white Christmas just like the one they recognised in Bing Crosby’s hit song. They yearned for snow-covered fields, frost-etched windows, a log fire, the resinous scent of fir trees hung with shining baubles, and the traditional casseroles and spiced cakes. Their hearts ached for the world they had left behind. Their aunt and uncle stopped by to wish them a joyous Christmas, and in a rare gesture of conviviality, Aunt sat down at the piano and sang a rousing song they had never heard before. ‘It’s an Australian folk song,’ she told them as she proceeded to sing ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

  Being exploited by strangers is distressing, but being exploited by relatives is unbearable. After two months, Rita could no longer stand living at the farm. Embittered by forlorn hopes and false promises, she was angry enough to explode. She hadn’t escaped the Communists, survived the bombing in Germany and the voyage on the Derna to live like a feudal bond-servant, tied to her relatives without any hope for the future. ‘Even if I have to walk all the way back to Europe I’m not staying here,’ she told her mother one night, flopping onto her camp bed, exhausted and covered in filth from another day of endless chores.

  She found an unexpected ally in their Latvian neighbour. ‘I know the matron of a small hospital in Brisbane,’ the woman suggested one day. ‘Maybe she’ll give you a job.’

  So Rita fulfilled her dream of working in a hospital, but instead of looking after sick people in a starched cap and snowy white apron, she spent her days scrubbing the tiled walls and waxing the floors of the Beerwah Private Hospital in a faded dress that was falling apart. But even scrubbing floors was better than milking cows on the farm.

  As there were no vacant beds in the nurses’ dormitory, the matron set up a folding bed for Rita in a chilly room that contained a marble slab. Not many people could sleep soundly in a mortuary and Rita was no exception. It was sterile and cold with a penetrating chemical smell that sickened her. The thought of the blue corpses that had lain on that slab kept her awake as disturbing thoughts swirled in her head. Much as she needed the job, she couldn’t stay in this gruesome room. Somehow she managed to communicate her distress to the matron who found her a more suitable room.

  Rita had only been at the hospital for a few weeks when Matron called her in. ‘You have to go to Kapaldo right away,’ she said. Rita’s throat tightened. Grandmother must have died. She knew how much her poor grandmother suffered in the Queensland heat. You can’t replant an old tree, she thought sadly. But it wasn’t her grandmother. When she arrived at the farm, a terrible silence greeted her.

  Then her mother tottered towards her, ashen, tears streaming down her face as she fell into Rita’s trembling arms. ‘It’s Jack,’ she whispered. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Not Jack!’ Rita screamed. ‘Not Jack!’

  She repeats the words now, in a disbelieving whisper. Even now, after all these years, she still can’t believe it. Jack was such a healthy chap and he was only twenty years old. Her beautiful, adored brother couldn’t be dead. Couldn’t be. In between her mother’s sobs, Rita pieced together what had happened. While working at the butter factory in Monto, Jack fell in love with an Australian girl who broke off her engagement to an Australian who worked at the local pharmacy. Jack was friendly and outgoing, a strikingly good-looking six-footer, but despite all the admiring glances that girls cast his way, he wasn’t conceited or spoilt. On that tragic day, he had been on his way home when he collapsed in the street. Mrs Lindemanis answered the knock on the farm door a little later to see a policeman standing there. By the time she reached the hospital, Jack was already cold.

  Rita’s voice trembles and her eyes glisten with tears. Fifty-one years later, she still can’t come to terms with this loss. For a few minutes we sit in a silence that is broken by the crystal call of butcher birds roosting in the trees around us, the cruel hooks of their beaks ready to tear into their prey.

  Rita pulls herself to her feet, hobbles inside and returns a few moments later with a pile of old photographs, their edges curled with frequent handling. Looking through them, she picks out one of a gorgeous young man modestly holding a sheaf of flowers. ‘This was taken in Germany on Jack’s confirmation day,’ she says in a low, hoarse voice that softens whenever she utters his name. ‘Everybody loved him. It was so wrong. He shouldn’t have died. I was the sickly one, not him. He’d never been sick a day in his life.’

  Despite the strange circumstances of Jack’s death, the doctor’s certificate stated that he’d died of a twisted intestine, and the family was too stunned to question his diagnosis. It’s still painful for Rita to talk about his funeral, even after fifty years. ‘My mother was a broken woman, a total mess. We didn’t have the money to pay for his funeral so some of the people from the local Lutheran church took up a collection for us.’ She hangs her head and strokes the photograph. ‘We had to depend on charity to bury him. Our aunt and uncle didn’t contribute a single cent. They didn’t even come to his funeral.’

  Among the small group of mourners were some Latvian medical students who had been cutting sugar cane up north during the long summer holiday. When they saw the body, they commented on Jack’s unusual colour and sudden death, and wondered whether he could have been poisoned. Suspicions and rumours circulated around the little town,
but no investigation was ever held. Rita’s family was too poor to engage a solicitor, and the police weren’t interested in pursuing the matter on behalf of ‘Nuts and Balts’ who couldn’t even speak English.

  Within three months of arriving in Australia, their dreams of a happy future had been buried along with Jack. The land that had promised so much had brought only disappointment and death. It seemed to Rita that her life had been a succession of losses, each one more terrible than the last. She’d lost her beloved father, the ability to have children, the hope of becoming a nurse, and now the brother she adored. She was convinced she had even lost her chance of marrying her sweetheart. Eric had fled from Latvia to England and was waiting to follow her to Australia, but since she couldn’t have children, she decided with a heavy heart that she should release him from the engagement so that he could marry someone else and have a family. Watching the vigour with which Rita scrubbed the floors, the matron admired the young woman’s energy. She didn’t know that pent-up anger and resentment were fuelling every stroke.

  Sometimes while she spread the soap suds on the floor, Rita thought about Philippe. She knew that he had managed to stay in Melbourne because she had received one letter from him, but the voyage now seemed so far away. Too depressed to reply, she had never heard from him again. Often she daydreamed about the farmhouse in Latvia, and the smooth, sun-warmed rock in the river where she and Eric had sat with their arms around each other, making plans that could never come true. ‘I hated Australia, despised Brisbane and wished I’d never come,’ she says. In Monto they would talk about Brisbane as though it was some dazzling capital, but to her it was a backward, boring place. The town hall with its three pitiful storeys was the tallest building in town. With its funny houses on stilts, Brisbane was uglier and more provincial that any country town she’d ever seen in Europe. And more lifeless.