Today's asylum seekers get put up in beautiful inner-city hotels and often live off the government's purse for years without ever giving anything back to their host country. Not so back in 1965 when I arrived and in 1961 when this photo was taken.
We were bundled into ex-army camps, of which Bonegilla was the biggest, and lived under spartan conditions, which made some of us wonder what we had got ourselves into. We were quickly bundled in and quickly bundled off again to such inhospitable places as the Snowy Mountains, to do jobs no locals wanted to do. We were grateful all the same, and quickly learned the language and integrated and assimilated.
Take a good look at this brilliant photo taken in February 1961 at Bonegilla. All those young faces - all Germans who had arrived on the same flight - ready to start a new life in a new country. They helped to build the nation that some of today's aylum seekers want to tear down.
