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. For more, click here.
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 don't know when, but I still 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
Bonegilla is still on my bucket list.
