The Last of the Bonegilla Girls Read online

  ‘I think she is trying to see Germany. Angelika thinks that perhaps if she can climb high enough in the sky, she will see home.’

  What was home now, Elizabeta wondered? What was that? What would it feel like to live in a place that was yours, where the streets were familiar, where there were friends and family, in which you understood people’s jokes and everything that was said on the radio between the songs? What would it feel like to have the language effortlessly inside your head mirrored by the language you heard on the streets and in the shops? Australia didn’t feel like home yet to Elizabeta. But where was this place of her heart? It wasn’t back in Europe, either. But here? She still didn’t feel settled in or part of anything.

  She still felt like a stranger in Australia.

  Elizabeta glanced up to Angelika in the limbs of the tree. She was Luisa’s age, and the realisation of how alike they were created a wave of fresh memories and grief in Elizabeta. The sadness came at the strangest times. Sometimes when she was serving a customer, she would see a small child standing by her mother. A little girl’s smile would make her scared all over again and she would hold it in tight until she was at home that night and sob into her pillow.

  ‘Pass auf, Angelika,’ Nikolas called out to warn his sister. She waved to her brother and poked out her tongue.

  ‘Why is your sister trying to see Germany? Doesn’t she like Australia?’ Elizabeta lay back on the rug, her face up to the pale sun.

  Nikolas leaned in closer to her and spoke quietly. ‘She had a dog in Germany. When we got the papers to say we would come to Australia, we had to give it to the Dorfmanns next door. He was Oskar. She loved him very much.’

  Elizabeta held her breath. Luisa had so wanted a dog. Now, when the dog next door barked, she and her parents pretended not to hear it.

  Elizabeta and Nikolas watched Angelika. She jumped onto the grass, tumbling happily and then sprang to her feet, running her fingers across the long branches of the willow, as if they were the strings of a harp. Their fathers had finished their tour of the vegetable garden and had walked over to their wives, joining them at the table, and were now drinking beer and talking.

  ‘Elizabeta,’ Nikolas said.

  ‘Yes?’ She looked over at him.

  ‘Perhaps you would like to go to a dance next weekend?’

  ‘Me? A dance?’

  ‘Yes, you. A dance. I am very good.’ He laughed and it warmed her from the inside. ‘Would you like to go and dance with me?’

  This was the first time Elizabeta had ever been asked to go to a dance. It would be the first time she had danced since Bonegilla. She swallowed the memory, pushing it back deep down where it lived like an ogre.

  ‘Yes. I would like it.’

  Chapter Twenty-four

  ‘Why hello, Frances. This is a lovely surprise. You’re calling and it’s only Thursday.’

  Frances Burley stood in the busy hallway of her student digs. The shared phone sat on a small desk and she pressed the black Bakelite handset hard against her ear. ‘So tell me, Mum, how’s everything at Bonegilla?’

  ‘You know the routine here. People come and go. Your father is in Canberra this week, so I’m all by myself. It’s not the same here without you, you know.’

  They had developed a routine since Frances had begun studying at Sydney Teachers College: she would call every Sunday night and the conversation would include the inevitable questions about the food (‘Are you eating enough?’), her studies (‘You’re not finding the subjects too hard?’) and whether they needed to put any extra money in her account. She was proud of the fact that she had never overspent her allowance. Eighteen-year-old Frances Burley was too careful to ever be so careless.

  It was the kind of chitchat with her parents that Frances had missed terribly since she’d moved away from them. She was in her second year of teachers’ college and she was living in the student digs with loads of boarders from the bush who only went home in the holidays and spent most of their time having too much fun or, like her, missing home too much. Her life was very different now than it had been at Bonegilla. There were no exotic languages spoken and no cultural differences to learn more about. It was just as well she hadn’t lugged her atlas all the way to Sydney for she didn’t need to consult it to find out where her fellow students were from. They were from Tamworth and Coonabarabran and Orange and Wagga Wagga, not Greece or Italy or Germany or Poland or Lithuania.

  When she had announced to her parents that she had decided to become a teacher, they weren’t surprised by her choice, although her mother had tried to convince her to specialise in home economics rather than languages.

  ‘Languages? Everyone coming here will need to learn English, darling, not French and Italian. Yet every girl needs to know how to cook. You’ll have a good job until you get married if you can teach home economics.’

  Some of her fellow students at the teachers’ college shared the same view, although they made their opinions known in a less sophisticated way.

  ‘What’s the point, Frances?’ one young man had memorably pointed out to her. Thommo was from Bathurst and had never met anyone who wasn’t born in New South Wales. ‘All the reffos and the wogs should learn to speak English. That’s how they’ll get on in Australia. Why should we learn to speak their lingo?’

  No one—not even her mother—seemed to understand that learning a language meant so much more than being able to ask what was on a restaurant menu for lunch. If she could speak the words of other cultures, she would have a window into those worlds, those exotic and foreign places she’d studied in her atlas since she was a child. She’d had a taste of the world at Bonegilla and it had lit a fire in her to one day see it all for herself. She imagined herself staring up at the Eiffel Tower and into the blue summer skies over Paris. Touching the stone of the arched entrances to the Colosseum in Rome. Hearing Big Ben sound and touring the Tower of London.

  ‘How’s the weather in Sydney, Frances?’

  ‘It’s been warm and sunny today, Mum. Just lovely.’ Frances hadn’t called her mother to talk about the weather, though. She had disrupted their routine because there was some news she had to share with her parents but she wasn’t sure how to broach it. ‘Mum. The reason I’m calling on a Thursday is that there’s something I need to tell you. It’s about Tom.’

  ‘What’s the latest with that brother of yours?’ Frances heard the smile in her mother’s voice.

  ‘A letter came from him today. Someone had slipped it under my door and I found it when I got back from lectures.’

  Her mother harrumphed. ‘A letter? Well, you’re lucky indeed. It’s been months since he’s written to your father and me. Come to think of it, perhaps even longer than that.’

  Frances sighed. Damn her brother for giving her the responsibility of breaking the news. ‘Mum, it seems that Tom is off to London.’

  There was silence from Bonegilla. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I’m a little flummoxed, too. He wrote that he’s booked his passage with P&O and he leaves in two weeks.’

  ‘Two weeks? He hasn’t breathed a word to me. Or your father. What on earth is all this about?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’ Frances felt a responsibility to lighten the mood. She tried to sound jolly. ‘Just think. In eight weeks he’ll be in London. Perhaps he can pop in to Buckingham Palace and have a cup of tea with the Queen and Prince Phillip.’

  Her mother huffed indignantly. ‘What else did he tell you about this plan? He has his career to think about. He’s in a good firm. He has the brains and the drive to go places if he puts his mind to it. Your father thinks he might even make the Supreme Court one day.’

  ‘He didn’t tell me much of anything else. I must admit to not having heard from him lately.’

  ‘Nor I. Oh, goodness me. I’ll have to call your father. Will you ring on Sunday?’

  ‘Of course I will, Mum.’

  ‘We’ll talk then. Bye, darling.’

  Frances
hung up the handset and trudged back to her room, flopping down on her familiar watermelon chenille bedspread and staring at the ceiling. She felt more than a pang of envy at Tom’s adventure. She turned over and cupped her chin in her hands. It wouldn’t be long now, she reminded herself, and she too could have her own. Once she was qualified as a teacher and was able to save up enough money, she would begin her own adventure. With Tom in London, she would have somewhere to stay at least. That thought cheered her. And from there? Paris and Rome, just as she’d promised herself. And perhaps Morocco and Egypt, too.

  It wouldn’t be long now.

  A month later, in early July, Frances received another letter from Melbourne. Vasiliki had written with news of her marriage and details of her new address. Once she’d recovered from the shock of her friend being married at such a young age, Frances meticulously recorded Vasiliki’s new details in the notebook she’d carried with her since Bonegilla. She noted that all that had changed about Vasiliki’s address in Oakleigh was the street number. She had written down every detail of her friends’ whereabouts, from immigration hostels to rental homes to homes of their own. There were workplaces and now, the first marriage. It was a big country and it would be easy to lose people if one didn’t take care not to.

  There was a photo and as Frances studied it, bringing it closer to her eyes to make out the detail of Vasiliki’s wedding dress, she tried to tamp down the little pang of hurt at not having been invited. The only wedding she had ever been to was her cousin Betty’s and she’d been eight years old and had been asked to be a flower girl. Betty’s husband had been sent home from the war after being injured in Singapore and they’d married as soon as he’d been released from hospital. Perhaps the Greeks only invited other Greeks to their weddings. Maybe that was their tradition.

  And wasn’t eighteen too young to be married, anyway? Was that a Greek tradition too? She and the Bonegilla girls had talked once about weddings when they were together at the camp, but they’d brushed it off. Vasiliki had been adamant that she didn’t want to get married yet, hadn’t she? Frances thought on that for a moment. One of the other teaching students in her French class, a girl from Bourke, had left after only six months and gone home to Manildra to marry a farmer. She was just eighteen as well. Maybe it wasn’t just the Greeks after all. She couldn’t imagine that for herself, walking down an aisle on her father’s arm wearing a big white dress and then having a husband and children to look after. Perhaps if these girls were older, twenty-one maybe, it would be more understandable. That was a much more sensible age to marry, Frances thought.

  She grabbed her pillow and covered her face.

  Oh, what did she know about boys and men, about marriage, anyway?

  She screamed silently into the linen, pressing her face more deeply into the pillow to muffle the sound.

  Why, oh why, was she still in love with Massimo?

  She screamed into the pillow for him and at the ridiculous longing she’d carried since Bonegilla. When Iliana and her family had left, at such short notice that it seemed to happen in a day, she’d cried for her friend, to be sure, but she’d also wept for him. Standing at the front gate of the camp, Frances had watched the Agnoli family climb onto the bus. Giuseppe, Agata, the young boys Stefano and Giovani. Iliana had held back and clutched Frances as she’d said goodbye, crying as she’d accepted Frances’s gift of one of the books they’d used for their English lessons before running to the bus in tears. Massimo had been the last to board. He had come to her to shake her hand and he’d held it longer, tighter than Frances had expected. She had never wanted him to let go. Then he’d slipped a hand into his pocket and pressed something into her hand. It was a coin, with Italian words on it. Then he’d turned and was gone too. She’d clutched it in her palm until she’d gone to bed that night, willing the warmth from his hand to remain enclosed in her fist.

  The coin was in her jewellery box sitting on the chest of drawers in her room at the college. When she finally made it to Rome, that was one coin she would never throw in the Trevi Fountain. In all the letters she had written, she had never asked Iliana about Massimo, and Iliana had offered no news of him in her replies.

  He was her secret.

  She was eighteen and had never even been kissed, for goodness sake. Thommo from Bathurst had tried once at a mixer but she’d pushed him away and called him a yob.

  She put the pillow back in its place and flipped to Iliana’s page in her Bonegilla notebook. She was still in Cooma with her family. Her father and Massimo were working on the Snowy Mountains Scheme. At least she knew where he was.

  She would write to Vasiliki to congratulate her and thank her for the photo and then she would write to Iliana and Elizabeta and tell them how happy she was for Vasiliki. It had always been her responsibility to bring the Bonegilla girls together and she wouldn’t let a marriage get in the way of that now.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  1957

  ‘What took you so long, Iliana? I send you out for flour and rice and it takes two hours?’

  Agata Agnoli stood at the wood stove, waiting for a pot of water to boil. Her face was flushed from the heat of the fire, the sleeves of her dress were pushed up to her elbows, and there was a smudge of flour on her cheek. Iliana looked to the table, still dusted with flour, and saw the rows of orecchiette her mother had just rolled sitting like tiny puffy clouds.

  ‘Mamma, why didn’t you wait for me? I said I would help you when I got back.’ Iliana crossed the room to put the paper bag of groceries on the sink. She quickly reached for her apron and slipped it over her head.

  ‘What were you doing all this time in the shops, huh?’

  Iliana avoided her mother’s gaze. She opened a cupboard door and took out a dinner plate, then scooped some of the little pasta ears onto it, before handing it to her mother. Agata slid them into the boiling water.

  ‘I forgot what time it was. The rain stopped and I went for a walk.’ That was half the truth. Being sent on an errand into the main street of Cooma had given Iliana the chance for some privacy and time to herself. The small house was barely big enough for a family of six and since she stayed at home helping her mother, she never seemed to be able to leave it. Her two little brothers, Stefano and Giovani, went to school each day. Her father, Giuseppe, and her big brother, Massimo, had jobs on the Snowy Mountains Scheme and they left every day too. Most of the time, it was just Iliana and her mother and while she loved her mother, sometimes she loved her solitude too.

  While the pasta cooked, Iliana thought back to the dress she’d seen in Woolworths. She loved that shop. She hadn’t even cared that she had to scurry past the Australian Hotel next door and listen to the wolf whistles of the men on the footpath. She loved many things about Cooma that were so different from Italy. The saddler, the laundromat, the florist, the Hain’s department store and the wide main street with Holdens and Austins parked at angles on both sides. She had picked up a copy of the Women’s Weekly at the newsagents for nine pence, which she would flick through in more detail in the evening when her brothers were in bed and the day’s chores were complete. She loved looking at the photographs of the young Queen Elizabeth and was able to understand some of what was written in the stories in the magazine. It was hard to come by things written in Italian so she practised and practised and she had convinced her father that listening to When a Girl Marries on the radio would help her with her English.

  The dress. Oh, the dress. She had thought about it all the way home. It was simple, in a floral fabric of pink and purple swirls, with three-quarter length sleeves and a boat neck. Its cinched-in waist would easily fit Iliana’s slim frame and the flared skirt folded in ruffles to the knee. She coveted that dress. She had compared it with her plain brown house dress that she was wearing under her second-hand coat and felt plain. She had no need for a dress that pretty because there was nowhere to wear it in Cooma. It wasn’t that she wanted to still be living at home with her family. She would like a h
usband, but she wasn’t likely to find one while she stayed at home with her mother all day, cooking and cleaning like she was already a wife.

  Agata spooned the cooked pasta from the boiling water into a dish. ‘Where is your father and your brother?’ She glanced up at the clock on the wall by the kitchen table. ‘They are never this late.’ She tsk tsked. ‘If they are drinking beer at the pub instead of being home here with the family…’ Agata said pub in English, almost spat the word out, and made sure to cross herself three times.

  ‘I’m sure they are not drinking beer, Mamma.’

  It wasn’t drinking beer that her mother was worried about. The pubs and clubs were a big distraction for men in the town who worked hard underground in difficult and dirty jobs all week, and then liked to let off some steam. One of the other Italian ladies in Cooma, Francesca Milese, who cleaned at one of the town’s motels, told Agata and Iliana after church one Sunday that women arrived every Friday on buses from somewhere called Kings Cross.

  ‘Puttana,’ she had whispered fiercely before crossing herself. ‘You should see the hair teased up to here and the makeup. They say they are dancers.’

  ‘Prostituta?’ her mother had queried.

  Signora Milese had nodded and pinched her eyes closed, as if merely saying the word would send her straight to hell.

  ‘The men here earn too much money. They spend it on women instead of saving it up for the future.’

  Iliana had asked Massimo once if he’d ever been to see the dancers. He’d glared at her and told her it was none of her business.

  ‘This food will go cold,’ Agata complained as she shifted the pot to the other side of the stove where it was cooler.

  ‘Papà and Massimo should be here soon, Mamma. Here, let me take that.’ Iliana took the dish and set it in the middle of the table. She covered it with folded tea towels to keep the pasta warm and then quickly set the table for six.