The Sparrow Garden

by Peter Skrzynecki

  Żal is more than a description of a physical feeling; it is a heartfelt reaction, carrying the notion of profound loss and yearning at the same time; it belongs to the language of the spirit or soul, to an Absolute that is intangible.

  The sea voyage was an experience my parents obviously preferred to forget. Crossing the Red Sea between walls of parted water may have meant salvation for the biblical Israelites, but crossing it for my parents was the severance of an umbilical cord that bound them to Europe, and in particular to Poland and the Ukraine.

  It is twilight in Naples, the sky purple and growing darker; it is the evening of 16 October 1949 and we are boarding the General R. M. Blatchford. Ahead lies the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean and finally the Pacific Ocean. We are about to step off European soil. I will return to Naples in fifty years. My parents will never return.

  The gangplank is enormous and must be very strong to take the weight of all those emigrants, many of whom are dressed in suits and coats, wearing ties, scarves and hats, correct attire, as if they were attending an evening function; their worldly possessions have been packed into wooden trunks and suitcases, tied with belts and lashed with ropes, labelled and locked. They file on board and there is much commotion on the dock. Officials, bureaucrats from the Department of Immigration in Australia, are doing final checks, herding them towards the “chariot” that will carry them to the Promised Land, giving no indication of the stifling and cramped conditions that exist ahead. Why should they? These Displaced Persons are used to “roughing it”. If anything, Australia has already done them a favour by offering food and shelter, and work for the men while the women stay at home and bring up the children. Everyone’s efforts help to make Australia great. Arthur Calwell, Minister for Immigration under the Chifley Labor Government, has practically guaranteed it.

  So the presence of water enters our lives once we step on to the ship. It is swaying, despite its size and the great weight of its cargo.

  I can see people crying.

  Neither of my parents is crying.

  There is too much to be done. Too much excitement.

  The finality of departure is overshadowed by the prospect of what lies ahead in the New Land. No one considers words such as “racism” or “bigotry” or “discrimination”. The war supposedly brought an end to all that. Adolf Hitler was dead. The Holocaust was over. The Allies had saved the people of Europe. Sanity and Reason would prevail. This was a new beginning. Decisions had been made. Besides, weren’t we the lucky ones? What about all those who had failed the medicals and been rejected because of ill health? There was nothing for us to cry about.

  Nearly fifty years later I will visit the Australian Archives in Canberra and discover the nominal roll of the General R. M. Blatchford. I will read the documentation relating to the ship’s departure and arrival at each port. When I find our names — father, mother, child — listed on page 22 and see our numbers (529, 530, 531) I will cry as if I had stumbled across an awful truth. This is not a secret about myself that I choose not to disclose. This is a fact about myself and somehow it helps me to understand just a little more of where I fitted into the scheme of things in 1949. The rest of the nominal roll reads like a statistic from the war that has no relevance to what is happening in my life today. Or does it? There was a total of 484 males on the ship; 402 females; 144 boys aged between two and ten years; 160 girls aged between two and ten years; 29 children under two years. Total: 1219. Where are those people today? How many of the boys and girls whom I played with on that ship are dead? What became of their lives?

  Images of water continue to haunt me.

  In the file of the General R. M. Blatchford I find the facts relating to another memory: the burial at sea of a boy named Jan Dul, not quite two years old.

  The sky is grey, as bleak as concrete, and a wind sweeps the deck, bringing rain. The waves are choppy and their crests break into foam. We are in the Indian Ocean and the ship will be docking in Fremantle next. A burial service is being conducted. I see myself standing between both parents on an upper deck, holding their hands, looking down at people crowded on the port side. Flags are tearing in the wind. Suddenly a small platform is raised, at a steep angle, so that it resembles a slippery dip; it is held in that position briefly, an object slides off it, then it is returned to its horizontal position. The service is over. People want to escape the rain. We return to our cabin below deck.

  As we climb down, I stare at the ocean with its hissing spray and granite-blue hardness, wiping rain from my eyes.

  Illnesses were not uncommon on the ship and stops were made at Colombo and Perth to allow passengers who had contracted various contagious diseases to disembark; they were then taken to hospitals. Their families were also taken off the ship. At Colombo, in the inky blackness of the night, small boats pulled up alongside the ship. These boats resembled large, flat baskets with one or two people in them. These were sellers and traders bringing silver and gold ornaments, beads, spices, silk scarves and small black elephants. They wore strange clothes, white and loosely hanging, with their heads wrapped in what looked like towels. They spoke a strange language. We couldn’t understand them, and they couldn’t understand us. The water was flat, like polished metal, as the ship lay at anchor and the lights of Colombo twinkled in the distance. People sang on deck at night, just as they did when we crossed the Red Sea, or someone played a harmonica or piano accordion. They were wistful melodies, laments and love songs, underscored with an exquisiteness that somehow made me feel they belonged more to birds and sea creatures than to human beings.

  No sooner did we leave Fremantle than I was quarantined with measles. The next port of call would be Sydney, a six-day journey, and there I would be taken off to hospital.

  Watching from the porthole in the sick bay, I remember passing through the Great Australian Bight. The waves were mountains, peaked with foam, unlike anything we had encountered. My mother would visit me daily, smuggle in food that she had prepared, and spend as much time with me as was permitted. If I fretted at the thought of going to hospital, she would assure me that it wasn’t going to happen.

  By the time we get to Sydney most of your spots will be gone. You must learn to believe me.

  The doctors will take me away.

  No one will be taking you anywhere.

  Her eyes were set, looking straight into mine, and although I failed to understand intellectually, I knew that she meant what she said when she spoke in that tone of voice. She would not break her word to me. That kind of determination must have helped her survive the years she spent alone with me in various Displaced Persons camps in Germany before she met Feliks Skrzynecki, who was to become my adopting father, in Lebenstedt, she and my biological father having separated before I was born.

  Before the ship docked at number 13 Wharf, Pyrmont, I found myself reunited with my parents whether or not my traces of measles remained.

  Our arrival was all too exciting, too important to allow other issues to overshadow it. There was much to be done by the bureaucrats. The refugees had to be dispatched to Bathurst, to the Department of Immigration Reception and Training Centre. Trains were leaving that same night at 10 p.m., 11 p.m. and midnight. Escort officers would travel with the new arrivals. Luggage was loaded immediately in special vans; medical histories, X-ray photographs and Letters of Authority were being forwarded to the Director of the Reception Centre in Bathurst. Displaced Persons were bound under a two-year contract to undertake any work that was found for them in Australia, unless sponsorship had been arranged.

  This was the experience of my parents and the hundreds of others who arrived with them on 11 November 1949. Their exile had been officially recorded into the annals of Australia’s history. Not convicts. Not squatters. Not landed gentry. Just refugees — reffos, wogs, dagoes, bloody Balts.

  The inscriptions on the back of our passport photographs read Labourers for Australia. I wo
nder if it read the same on the back of Jan Dul’s photograph?

  The Day that Lasted Forever

  The camp in Bathurst was a former army training camp on the Lime Kilns Road outside the township; it consisted mainly of Nissen or “igloo” huts — long, semicircular sheds of corrugated iron that were an American innovation. After two weeks we were transported by trains and buses to Parkes, and it was here, during the next two years, that I would spend some of the happiest times of my life.

  Parkes is the place that has left me with the most vivid and lasting memories of those very early days in Australia. It represents everything that Australia stands for as a country: the people, the land and its wealth, the wildlife and the extremes of climate, the fields of wheat, sheep grazing in flat paddocks or huddled in a flock under a huge gum tree, cattle, galahs clanging and wheeling over a farm and its homestead with willows or peppercorn trees, grain sheds and tractors … and a road of red dust and stones cutting through it all, east to west, but also leading to Sydney and the outside world, a road that I would travel on and never expect to return.

  The two years at Parkes were spent in the knowledge that one day we would be leaving, though my parents never knew when that was going to be. That decision had everything to do with hard work, money and opportunity, just as it had to do with making a future for us in this new country.

  My father left the camp and travelled to Sydney where he found work with the Water Board as a pipe-layer. He was a labourer, “a pick-and-shovel man”, and became a member of a road gang that would be relocated to a different part of Sydney every few months, but mostly in the outer, south-western developing suburbs like Bankstown and Liverpool. He lived in a place called Tent City at the Water Board’s depot at Pott’s Hill, between Birrong and Brunker Road, in Yagoona. Every month he would visit us at the camp, stay a few days and return by train. For children like myself this was a thrilling time. The day before the train arrived from Sydney we talked about nothing except what we thought (and hoped) our fathers would bring us. These ranged from boxes of chocolates, felt toys, comics, Meccano sets, scooters, tricycles or bicycles, spinning tops, games such as Snakes and Ladders, Ludo or Dominoes, boxes of coloured pencils. Anything was a treasure that arrived from that magical place called Sydney — far away from the dusty roads, galahs and hot weather that we associated with the countryside around the camp. For us kids, the distance was so great it could have been to the moon or Mars.

  Parkes railway station consisted of one platform with a wide roof arching over it, supported by long, curved steel frames; it was both a terminus and a junction where passengers changed trains for the Condobolin and Broken Hill lines. Standing on the platform and looking east or west presented one of the loneliest sights in the world. Although on the edge of town, the sidings with shining crisscross lines cut across the sleepers and blue metal. Grain would spill from passing freight trains along the tracks and in the grasses that grew alongside them. Standing on the edge of the platform was to be confronted by an unreachable horizon, a landscape that shimmered in the heat, almost bare, as on the red-dust road that ran in front of the camp.

  The railway lines stretched, silver and metallic-hard, from one distance to another. Joining one world to the next. And there, on the edge of a cold grey platform (almost frosted in winter, icy like the rails), I held my mother’s hand and waited for my father’s arrival.

  Back in camp, while the adults sat around and ate, played cards and sang, we children played with what we’d been brought — pop guns and wind-up toys, marbles and dolls, all or any of those wonderful presents that we’d waited for so excitedly. In the evenings and into the nights, as thick clouds of cigarette smoke filled the barracks, we read comics and fell asleep behind a wall of voices, dreaming under black skies and golden specks of stars, ignorant of the time when any of us might have to leave the camp. We were just happy that our families were together.

  Once, when my father returned, I learnt something about him that I never knew. His present to me was a white biplane, a Tiger Moth made entirely out of wood, without a single nail. Every piece of wood had either been glued or fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. He even painted a red, white and blue RAAF “bullseye” on the wingtips. A roundel. The propeller spun in the wind when I ran and held it up. What seemed most wonderful of all were the wheels. Carved from wood! And two cockpits! My father had spent months of his spare time in Sydney carving and building this surprise. After he gave it to me, a neighbour from one of the huts snapped a photo of the three of us standing under a large gum tree, one of its branches fallen behind us, bark and weeds at our feet, My father is dressed casually, in an open-necked shirt, one foot forward, holding a cigarette, wearing a sleeveless jumper my mother had knitted for him. My mother wears a skirt, with a puffed-sleeved jumper in the Ukraine’s national colours, three blue horizontal stripes on a yellow background. I stand between them, dressed impeccably in the same suit I wore at the Christmas party in Lebenstedt. My hair is combed neatly, in a huge bodgie-style wave. I am holding the hands of both parents, squinting at the sun. The Tiger Moth stands before me. My pride and joy.

  The camp itself was a former RAAF Flying School whose facilities had been converted into living quarters for over 1000 immigrants. The gates were opened in 1949, when it officially became the Parkes Migrant Holding Centre. It had its own hospital, school, post office, dining hall and had the appearance of a small town — except there was a barrier, a boom gate, at the main entrance that had to be raised and lowered whenever a motor vehicle arrived or left. The “real” shops were in Clarinda Street, Parkes, the main street that cut the town in two like a wide river. That was where my mother took me shopping for new clothes, for ice-creams and lollies and any “extras” that we needed for our hut and weren’t able to get at the camp.

  For most of the two years that we lived on the town’s outskirts, my mother worked as a domestic on various farms and in the town itself, including the house of the mayor, Mr C. J. Barber, in Gapp Street. A long stone and brick building with high verandas, it was the most impressive house I had ever seen. Neat lawns and beautiful front and back gardens surrounded number 6.

  My mother took me with her to Gapp Street on one occasion, but when we arrived there we found that one of the Barbers’s grandsons, Allan, was also there. He and I were to be playmates for the day, despite the fact that my English was still poor and I depended a lot on sign language. We were a surprise to each other, him with his long yellow locks and freckled face, me with my short black hair and olive features.

  Disaster, straightaway, when I was told it was his birthday and his grandmother produced his present, a toy carpentry set. Hammer, saw, chisel, rule, pencil and nails. I started to bawl when he wouldn’t let me play with it and continued when it was time to go home, even though he’d been persuaded to let me share it with him. We’d had a cake, lollies and cordial, and now I wanted to bring him back to the camp with us — or else for me to stay there for the night. I was led out of the yard crying, with Allan and Mr and Mrs Barber waving goodbye.

  After dinner that night my mother and I went for a walk around the camp, as we often did. The night sounds of crickets and other insects followed us and echoed through the darkness. Noises crept down from the trees. Soft, rustling whispers. Frogs in the distance, creating a chorus. Stars twinkled as tiny jewels and the Milky Way streamed overhead like it was about to pour stardust over Parkes and the whole sleeping world.

  My mother made reference to my behaviour in Gapp Street.

  You must behave yourself. Don’t be jealous.

  But I want a toy set like Allan’s got.

  Not now.

  Why?

  I can’t afford it.

  When?

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  Maybe when your father returns from Sydney. But that’s not what I want you to learn.

  I don’t want to learn anything. I just want what Allan’s got.

  That’s exactly what I want you
to learn.

  What?

  That you can’t always have what you want.

  I was angry with my mother. When she spoke like that I knew she was being wise; but I just wanted what I wanted.

  Mum! I protested.

  Look at the stars, she said calmly. Where I grew up in a village in the Ukraine we had mountains called the Carpathians. The stars were brighter than they are here. We were poor. Sometimes we cried because we were hungry and couldn’t sleep, but we also knew how to love and laugh … and we learnt to go without. We survived all that, and the war.

  She started to hum and sing very softly as we headed back to our hut, away from the forest and the empty space of what had once been an airfield.

  Paddocks in the distance looked like they were a part of the moon, like the landscape of snow in the camp in Germany except that everything looked more grey, more silver. I imagined a small plane like my Tiger Moth droning over the hills, coming in to land, silver light reflecting off its wings, spinning off the propeller as it slowed down, the pilot waving from the cockpit. Moonlight was shining through him also, making him look like a ghost.

  Whatever the lesson was meant to teach me, I knew it was over when my mother began to dream about her homeland. I knew that she missed it, but I never, never understood the depths of her homesickness.

  Next day I was invited back to Gapp Street on the condition that I behave myself, whether Allan was there or not.

  Before we entered the house through the back door, Mr Barber came out, followed by his wife who was holding Allan’s hand. I stood back suspiciously. Why were they smiling?