After the wave.......

I tell this over and over….....
There was this WAVE and my parents and I rode it.

It picked us up from a neat, comfortable apartment, at the edge of Gouda, over-looking the dike, where cows grazed beside the canal, – which we had swapped for a neat, comfortable old house, which had seen my parents through world war two and the hunger winter and the loss of two babies, after the war.
And this wave dumped us in a paddock on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, in May, 1956, and we went to sleep in the basic ex-army camp rooms which had a bed and a chair, in Bonegilla.
That was the first camp / hostel / migrant reception centre (Depending on the spin.) that we lived in for a very short while.
Then there was Scheyville, Villawood (Now a refugee detention centre) and Matraville. (No. Not the slightly better hostel, for the British migrants, in Bunnerong Road. But, the one in Pozieres Ave.).

All right. The decision to migrate had been made. Rightly or wrongly and now we had to make the best of it.
My mother had cried, that first night in Bonegilla but she was a doer!!
My parents and our friends, the van Hoorns, made many friends in the process of moving through those hostels.
We’d come to Australia together, after swapping that house for that apartment, in Gouda and we moved into an old house together, in Hillsdale, then known as Matraville.
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We visited and invited many friends. We attended a play, in which mutual friends from Gouda performed. That little drama group became a social club, nominally centred on Bankstown but with members from further afield.
Other Dutch-Australian clubs (societies) formed roughly at the same time in a number of locations, spread through Sydney.
Some had a special theme, like the carnival clubs and there were other networks, e.g., associated with the different faiths (Catholic and Dutch Reformed?).
One or two or more Dutch shops and restaurants…......and all loosely connected as quite a few migrants from the Netherlands (and some via Indonesia and elsewhere, e.g., those who’d tried South Africa) met and kind-of networked. (While others took the assimilation policy 100% to heart. At least on the surface. (I’m personally not convinced that they were instantly true-blue, when they stepped ashore.)
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All this can be found in books, in much better detail but I wish to outline what I experienced.
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Soon these social clubs and other organisations provided dances, balls, bus trips, picnics, film evenings, etc..
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So much energy, while, at the same time rebuilding their lives here, often with young(ish) families.
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So, when I rummage through my photos, slides, and other memorabilia, I remember the Dutch navy, in Sydney. The Dutch consuls-general, making speeches, to Dutch-Australians, in Bankstown Town Hall, an hour into the evening, when there had already been quite a bit of dancing and drinking and general good fun.
I remember visiting club houses and NSW Holland Festivals and presenting radio programs, at 2EA, and huge and small picnics, with either one club or many clubs attending, from different parts of Sydney, and Wollongong and Newcastle.
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And my personal theory / belief is that this softened the blow for all those immigrants from the Netherlands, when the wave crashed on to the shores of New South Wales and other parts of Australia.
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I believe that politicians and those who lobbied them, often with trade (money) in mind, in the Netherlands and in Australia, put us on that wave and left it to the energies of mainly unrecognised individuals, to make something out of the situation, which turned out to be a little less sunny and comfortable than it had been painted as, at information evenings and in promotional materials.
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And just today, I’m in a mood to think that not enough is being done to recognise the Dutch-born immigrants who came on ships which took five weeks; who made do in basic army-style accommodation; who worked in unfamiliar situations, like factories, to rebuild their lives; who did all the physical work to make social occasions successful. More than successful, good fun events.
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I doubt that few Dutch people, today, would like to bring only what they could pack into a crate of one or two cubic metres, to ex-army camps, in Australia, with very little or no money left over and start new lives, say, at the age of 35 or so.
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My father (91) repeats over and over, about any situation: ” But I must not complain. There are people, worse off than me. ”
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This isn’t intended to be a complaint (e.g., about the way governments and officials persuaded people to migrate) because the two-thirds of Dutch migrants who did not return to the Netherlands, seem, to me to have had lots of good experiences, likely to outweigh the bad.
Personally: Gouda and the Netherlands have atmosphere, history, interesting seasons, a few relatives left and friends made, via the internet, but I couldn’t live there.
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I hope that a way is found to recognise the work done by immigrants from the Netherlands who helped to ease the way into this life in Australia.
A year or so ago, I visited the Dutch club, in the Illawarra and more recently the one in St Marys ( and I have a strong impression that I can include the one in Newcastle, ) where I believe there is still that energy and that voluntary work being done to recognise the bit of Dutch in people that wasn’t just all left behind on the docks, or the tarmac, when people migrated.
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Elsewhere, here on Redbubble I have reported on the celebration of St Nicholas Day, in the Rembrandt Club, just as an example of how that behind-the-scenes work is still going on.

There are still a lot of people around who arrived on that wave.

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Tags:

camps, dutch, hardship, hostels, migrant, migration, recognition, ships and volunteers