Every Day of My Life. Beeb Birtles
was the only place where we went sightseeing as a family. It was world renowned for great deals on jewellery, cameras such as Leica and Nikon, and various brands of transistor radios.
We departed Singapore for our final destination of Melbourne, Australia. The route took us through the Strait of Singapore, the Java Sea, Strait Sunda and finally into the Indian Ocean. In the Java Sea we crossed the equator. The following night we sailed through Strait Sunda and reached the Great Australian Bight. After a couple of days of closely following the south coast of Australia we sailed into Port Phillip Bay. It was early in the morning when we arrived in Melbourne on September 4, 1959.
The Port of Melbourne lies directly behind Spencer Street Station. My parents had already made up their minds to settle in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia so after disembarking from the ship we caught the train to Adelaide. We had to sit the whole way on hard, uncomfortable wooden benches.
My new life had begun.
Two
ADELAIDE,
SOUTH AUSTRALIA
While still in Holland, Dad had learnt to speak a few words of English, which got him by. My mother, sister and I were thrown in the deep end when it came to learning the new language. We had to start from scratch, as did just about every family that emigrated from Europe to Australia, except for the English of course.
At the Adelaide train station we were met by a man in a Holden utility, who drove us up into the Adelaide Hills to a small country town called Woodside. This was to be our temporary accommodation, a kind of holding camp for migrants until space became available in one of a handful of migrant hostels spread around Adelaide.
As you do when you’re young, I made friends with some other kids and we started exploring the area. It was spring and walking along the hot, rugged outback roads we quickly learned about magpies. They swooped and pecked the top of our heads as a warning to stay away from their nests.
Living at Woodside was communal. Laundries and toilet blocks were shared between families but they were separate from the long blocks of huts where we lived. When the women did laundry at night you could hear their screams because the possums got inside the roof and ran rampant over the rafters or on top of the corrugated iron rooftop and stared at the women with their intense beady eyes.
My father didn’t waste any time finding work. Mr Smits, another Dutchman, hired him as a carpenter. We were invited to dinner at their place once. They were a religious family and gave thanks before eating their meals. I became friends with one of their sons, John, who was around my age. They also had an older son named Tony, who later became a minister in Adelaide.
John taught me to collect empty soft drink bottles because you got five pence when you took them back to the deli. We kept collecting them until we saved enough money to buy a couple of very cool plastic water pistols. We had been eyeing them in the window of the local chemist in the Smits’ neighbourhood.
Building houses in Australia was something totally new to my father. He had to learn new ways of construction but because he was such a skilled carpenter, he got the hang of it very quickly.
During the first few years in Adelaide, my mother suffered greatly from home sickness. She made a couple of trips back to Holland to visit her family whereas my dad showed no interest in going back; he lived for his work.
FINSBURY MIGRANT HOSTEL
Our stay at Woodside was brief, a couple of weeks at most, before space became available at the Finsbury Migrant Hostel on Grand Junction Road, not far from Port Adelaide. All the migrant hostels in Adelaide were built like army Nissen huts, made out of curved corrugated iron with each side almost touching the ground. There were blocks and blocks of them, all numbered. They didn’t have air conditioning, so they became unbearably hot in summer.
At night, families ate in shifts in the community cafeteria. During the week you could place orders for lunch to take to work or school. Your surname was written at the top of a brown paper bag and the meal usually consisted of some kind of sandwich, a piece of fruit, a piece of cake and a drink.
The Europeans complained bitterly about the bland Australian food compared to what they were used to from their countries. Most families couldn’t wait to move out of these hostels. The laundries and bathroom facilities were communal and lacked proper hand-washing facilities. There was never any soap around when you needed it.
For the remaining couple of months of the 1959 school year I was enrolled at Pennington Primary School and walked there from the hostel. Being a new kid and not able to speak the language, other kids goaded me into going up to the teachers and saying swear words. I didn’t have a clue what I was saying of course. As you can imagine, they were not the kind of words kids my age should be saying and I got into trouble.
Kids can be so cruel at times! But, you know, it didn’t faze us not being able to communicate, we just joined in with the kids who spoke English fluently and before too long we were mimicking and forming the words they were speaking. After a while, we could put a whole sentence together and eventually join in complete conversations. Within a year of living in Adelaide I was speaking English fairly well.
At Pennington Primary I got my first taste of cricket and football. I loved playing sports and joined as many different teams as I could. On the weekends I went to the pictures, either with friends from school or the hostel. Sometimes we walked all the way to Port Adelaide and hung out on the jetty. I joined in and did the normal kid thing for a ten-year-old, until one day I got sick.
Because there was never any soap at the hostel, I neglected washing my hands after going to the toilet. I contracted an infectious liver disease called yellow fever and was immediately admitted to Northfield Infectious Diseases Hospital.
Back in those days, if you had an infectious disease they isolated you. Your family couldn’t even visit until you were well again. My mother was worried sick because I was still so young and couldn’t speak English and now I was being taken away from the family for at least three weeks. However, it didn’t freak me out, I just took it in my stride. I was confined to bed and wasn’t allowed to get up, not even to go to the toilet.
The funniest thing about my time in hospital was when the nurses tried to explain about having to urinate into a stainless steel flask. I didn’t have a clue what they were trying to tell me. One night, I woke to the sound of trickling water. I sat up to see where it was coming from and, in the dark, I could barely make out the person in the bed next to me, sitting up and using the shiny weird-shaped stainless steel flask. Immediately it dawned on me. So that’s what they’ve been trying to tell me! It was a major breakthrough.
My mother must have put her foot down and told my dad we wouldn’t be staying at the hostel once I was released from hospital. Dad applied for a bank loan and put a deposit on a block of land in the undeveloped suburb of Netley.
43 HARVEY AVENUE, NETLEY
Caravan and shed
Netley is about halfway between the city of Adelaide and West Beach. Harvey Avenue runs between Marion Road and the edge of the Adelaide Airport. The land in that area belonged to a man named Collett.
When I was discharged from hospital, my parents took me to see the block of land. I saw nothing but sand. Recalling my wonderful summers at the beach in Holland, I took off my shoes and started running wildly across the ‘sand’. Ouch, big mistake! No one had told us that South Australia had these thorns called three-corner jacks and I had about a dozen of them stuck to my feet.
Life lesson number one — don’t assume that sand is the same everywhere in the world!
Behind our block of land stood a house owned by Jean and Dick Collett. Dick, Jean and their children, Merryl and Richard, were our nearest neighbours. Merryl had a horse, and a portion of their land was leased to Russell Thomas, who operated a riding school. The Collett family were instrumental in helping us get our start in Adelaide. They were extremely kind. Jean invited my mother on trips to the Barossa