It's been fifty-seven years ago since I shared a cheap six-berth cabin somewhere near the waterline aboard the beautiful T/S FLAVIA with Gerhard David - in fact, I had forgotten his name until I found this Incoming Passenger Card on the naa.gov.au website.
As I reminisced here: "We were accommodated in 6-berth cabins on the lowest deck, Trinidad Deck, with no portholes and only shared facilities. As we headed south and out into the Atlantic. the warming sun spread animation among the passengers now settled into a daily routine, punctured by ample meals. English classes got under way properly where we were asked to form a credible 'th' sound and to differentiate the 'v' from the 'w'. Learning English was no game for us: our whole future depended on it. The shipboard cinema showed Australian documentary films which we watched with intense concentration. There were the usual shipboard diversions: deck games and the pool (always too crowded and always too low on water) during the day and music and dances and fancy dress balls and bingo in the evenings but overarching all these activities was the one question that was on all our minds: what would await us in Australia? We used to sit up in our six-berth cabin long into the night worrying and wondering about it. I will always remember one of my cabin-mates, a young butcher from Berlin, who was constantly dressed in a fishnet-shirt (to solve his laundry problem, as he put it, and which left an interesting tanning pattern on his upper torso). Nothing seemed to bother him much; not our uncertain future nor the English lessons which he had dispensed with in favour of the bar. As far as he was concerned, if things didn't work out he could always commit suicide! An interesting outlook on life, to say the least, and the solving of one's problems. I have sometimes wondered how he ended up?"
I had completely forgotten until reminded by the following registration card also found in the Natives Archives that he had also been taken to the Bonegilla Migrant Centre and, like me, two days later been one of the other three former ship-mates who had been picked up by what I described as the "German Lady" in my reminiscences, "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. The 'German Lady' had turned out to be a very enterprising roly-poly German housewife who with her German husband, a bricklayer, operated something of a boarding-house from their quaint little place at 456 Brunswick Road in West Brunswick in Melbourne. The place seemed already full to overflowing with young Germans from a previous intake, with bodies occupying the lounge-room sofa, a make-shift annex, and an egg-shaped plywood caravan in the backyard. My ship-mates joined that happy crowd but I was 'farmed out' to a nice English lady across the road who had a spare room. The very next day the 'German Lady' took me to the local Labour Exchange and in seemingly no time had secured me a job as 'Trainee Manager' with Coles & Company which had foodstores all over Melbourne. There I was, refilling shelves with groceries whose names I did not know, and had I known them would not have been able to pronounce, and helping blue-rinsed ladies take their boxes full of shopping out to their Austin cars. I still joined the others for breakfast and dinner in the 'German house' and also had my laundry looked after by the 'German Lady' but I was already making my own way in Australia. Looking back, my life seems to have been full of such serendipitous encounters because more good luck was to follow!" [continue to read here]
I lost contact with him because I had been "farmed out" to a nice English lady across the road, and only met him and the other German boarders at meal times, and in any case just a few weeks later I relocated to Canberra. So how did he end up? Did he eventually learn English? On arrival in Melbourne he hadn't even been able to complete his own Incoming Passenger Card, and I had to do it for him. You can tell from my typical upper-case "A" and lower-case "a" on my card and on his.
It was nice to meat you, Gerhard! I hope in the end things did work out for you and you solved all your problems without committing suicide!
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