Had tummy troubles. Could not hope to go to sleep. At 4:30 a.m..!!!., on television would be the direct telecast of the Netherlands v. Uruguay game.
Got some blankets and the book, “Dutchies in the Illawarra”, by Bill Fikkers; settled on the lounge and started reading.
If I was going to get sleepy, well and good. The alarm on my phone was set, for 4:30.
But I read the whole book and then the game started.
And Holland won!
And I was relieved.
Many years ago, in Riverstone, (my first appointment as a teacher_) I once played a card game, right through the night, and then drove home to Matraville. But I was forty years younger then.
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I enjoyed reading Dutchies in the Illawarra
The experience was a bit like reading Marele Day’s books about the detective, Claudia Valentine, but different.
The fictional Claudia Valentine takes you through the streets of Sydney, as she pursues the villains and as I had danced with Marele Day, when she came to Potter’s Dance Studio, in Maroubra and we had become friends for a while mainly " by correspondence" it felt like I was looking in on her as her female sleuth chased the criminals. (_But Ms Day’s books were fictional. These “Dutchies” are real.)
Marele was in her last years at Sydney Girls High School and I had made it, by the skin of my teeth, into the brand new teachers college in Wollongong. (So new, that it hadn’t been built yet. We were in the technical high school building, that first year.)
Monday to Friday I was in Wollongong and Marele and I wrote each other letters. We both obviously like(d) writing.
Like everything else, I have her letters still. Quite a pile.
After I left Maroubra Bay High School (“Heartbreak High”) I became a clerk in the Department of Lands, because I did not qualify for a scholarship and that was the only way into college.
Luckily, enough students apparently rejected these scholarships when it turned out they could go to university instead, sothat a few days after I’d started in this awful, awful job, I knew that I could go to Wollongong instead.
It must have been through my parents that I found a place to board, in Fairy Meadow, a suburb of Wollongong.
I am not sure, but I suspect that that accommodation, where quite a number of single men boarded, was the address that Bill Fikkers mentions in his book,.
I was there only very briefly.
It was a huge ‘culture shock’ for me. I’d been an only child (Not my parents’ fault. Two more boys were born. One still-born. The other, Juultje, lived less than a year.)
Now, in my early twenties, I was suddenly sharing accommodation with a number of other men. But, becoming a teacher was my only wish and now I could be.
And so my parents drove me to Central Station very early every Monday morning and I caught the train to Wollongong, through those tunnels, where the smoke used to come in to the carriages. Other students got on along the way and we’d walk to the college from North Wollongong together.
On Fridays, the lectures finished early sothat we could be back on the train and in Sydney in the early evening, where my father waited for me, at Sutherland Station.
During the week, I’d catch the bus from Fairy Meadow.
The good thing about Fairy Meadow was that there was a Dutch shop or at least it was a shop that sold Dutch licorice.
Soon I found accommodation with a family in East Corrimal, and slept on the verandah. At least I was by myself. These people were not Dutch.
I mainly remember the belt, hanging on the doorknob, which warned the three young children to behave themselves.
That too, was a brief stay. I played records, borrowed from the college, to entertain myself. I think they were too loud and I found Mrs Ryan, also in Corrimal. That was the perfect solution. I boarded with her the rest of those two years and was a little puzzled when her son thanked me on the last day saying how reassuring it had been for her children that I’d been there.
Mrs Ryan cooked huge, hearty meals and talked a lot about the lovely priests whom she and some other women also served meals to.
I had a very nice small group of friends, at WTC. We played Euchre (card game) wherever and whenever we could. Like, in the second year, in the bays, where the coats hung, in the then new lecture blocks.
Among those friends was a “Dutchie”, called Harry Postema. (My mother’s name was Postma. No ’ e ’. ) Not that he was a close friend but, there was the usual understanding, as fellow Dutch-immigrant-“children”.
The college principal once caught us trying to escape the “Sports Carnival Day”, across the fields / paddocks that were then still clear between the college and the technical high school. (Now covered by a university.)
It was the ‘naughtiest thing’ I’d ever done in my life. He put us in his car and drove us to the carnival.
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What has all this got to do with the book: Dutchies in the Illawarra , by Bill Fikkers (And Marele Day’s books)?
Throughout these books I was mentally on familiar streets, “looking” for people I might know.
(In Marele’s book, Claudia Valentine goes past Sydney Girls High School, down Anzac Parade, at one stage and that made me smile, as Marele attended that school and for me it brougt back memories of going to see the girls play netball, across the road.)
In Bill Fikker’s book, Dutchies in the Illawarratheillawarra.html , the two men, whom I’d known about most, have done things which are, rightfully, not mentioned.
My father used to speak highly of one of them, for being down to earth and speaking his mind, at meetings. The other was the eldest son of a family, who owned a 10 acre property, at Leppington, where my parents and our friends, stayed for a week in tents and decided that Australia was not a bad place, after all, and changed their minds about returning to the Netherlands after the mandatory two years’ stay.
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My parents and I, and our friends the van Hoorns, also left the ship (Johan van Oldenbarneveldt) to visit Perth which HAD been our destination (but there turned out to be no work), just like people in Bill Fikker’s book, visited Perth.
We were also put on that old steam train to Bonegilla Migrant Camp, near Albury but not taken from the train to that ex-army camp by bus, (like the people in his book) but we had to climb down from the train after midnight and guided by teenagers with torches, walk across paddocks to the assembly hall to be allocated those bare rooms.
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Rather than the migrant hostel, in Bathurst, we stayed, after Bonegilla, in Scheyville, Villawood and Matraville Hostel and then moved into an old house, which the four adults, ( after heavy work in factories, during the week,) renovated ( on the weekends, replacing the interior walls eaten by white ants, with boards) clearing up the back yard etc., etc. and while that was (like so many Dutch people used to comfortable, cosy dwellings in the Netherlands) for us a huge shock to the systems, many of the people in Bill Fikker’s book did it much tougher.
At least, the taps and the primitive shower were inside our house. There was no need to dig a hole. we did have a toilet, outside, with the usual spiders, and the “dunny man” removing the can, (it was rumoured: whether you were sitting there or not. Hopefully that was a joke!).
While the setting between the mountains and the ocean, in the Illawarra, seems to me, to have been a nicer setting, many, perhaps most, of the stories in “Dutchies in the Illawarra” seem to be about people who had to do even more constructing of living spaces, themselves, with whatever materials they could find.

Bill Fikkers signed my copy of the book, when we met, at the DASI club house, last Sunday, where a midwinter dinner was taking place and where the main hall was filled to capacity with people, many of whom had my colour hair (now) and who, I am sure had all worked hard to make life good, in the Illawarra, for themselves, their children and their (great-)grandchildren and for this country.
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People there to whom I spoke very briefly, were so proud of Bill Fikker’s efforts in recording these stories and rightly so.
There should be so much more of this!!!

_{Practising tennis, in Fairy Meadow, near the Dem. School. Practising teaching, in Corrimal.}