The 6th of August is an important day for me. It was on this day in 1965, forty-nine years ago, when I arrived in Australia. We disembarked in some sort of organised chaos at Port Melbourne and soon afterwards boarded a train for the inland town of Albury from where we were taken to the Migrant Centre at Bonegilla. Remember the movie "The Great Escape"? Well, Bonegilla was a camp along the lines of what you saw in that movie - except that Bonegilla was a darn sight worse. We were put into corrugated-iron huts in what had been an old Army Camp - and I believe the old Spartans enjoyed more comforts than did the inmates of the "Bonegilla Migrant Centre". Although we were in the depth of the Australian winter (which can be pretty cold in the Australian inland), there was no heating, and only a threadbare ex-Army blanket to ward off the cold at night. For somebody who had just avoided conscription into the German "Bundeswehr", it seemed a poor exchange.
Deep blue skies and brilliant sunshine during the day made up for the freezing nights. It was two days after I had arrived in camp and while I was "thawing" out in the midday sun when another German who had come off the ship with me, told me about a "German Lady", a Mrs Haermeyer, at the camp's reception centre who was offering to take three or four recently arrived German migrants back to Melbourne to board at her house. I had been "processed" by the camp's administration on the first day and knew that in all likelihood I was destined to be sent to Sydney to work as labourer for the Sydney Water Board. So what did I have to lose? In record time I had myself signed out by the "Camp Commandant", my few things packed, and was sitting, with three other former ship-mates, in a VW Beetle enroute back to Melbourne.
I had made "The Great Escape"! What followed was almost an anticlimax - read more.
P.S. Read more about the Bonegilla Migrant Centre here.
