Like a dog that returns to its vomit, I want to go back one more time to where it all began almost sixty years ago: the Bonegilla Migrant Centre where I spent my first two nights on Australian soil -and almost soiled myself when I first saw it.
I've written elsewhere about the many serendipitous encounters in my life - click here - but there was perhaps none more serendipitous than when another young 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 already 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 where only forty-eight hours earlier I had arrived aboard the good ship FLAVIA.
I won't make it for the scheduled "Post-war Migration Tour" on 17 May but sometime this year I hope to make the pilgrimage back to were I had my inauspicious start in what would become my new home and country, if only to inspect the plaque on their memorial wall with my name on it: Manfred-Peter Goermann - FLAVIA - August 1965
And I may be travelling in good company as an old friend from my days with the ANZ Bank also wants to revisit what was, before it became a Migrant Centre, an Army Training Camp where he spent many more than just two days, and probably in far more trying circumstances than I did.
