The Last of the Bonegilla Girls Read online

  Guten morgen. Auf wiedersehn.

  Ciao. Comme va?

  Yas sas. Efharisto.

  And there were a hundred variations of what sounded to her like hello, just with new and different accents.

  When the new Australians at the camp called out to her with a wave and a smile, she listened hard and repeated the words back to them. They mostly laughed and waved again, before turning to whoever they were with and continuing their animated conversation with a nod and a wink in her direction. She’d caught couples kissing more times than she had fingers and toes. She’d spotted Italians by the clotheslines, hidden between flapping white sheets, crouched around an illegal kerosene primus, a frypan balanced on top, cooking something. She’d heard fights between adults that had sounded rage-filled; crying children and sobbing women and shouting men. And she’d heard lullabies through the open windows of the huts in every language she could imagine.

  With an index finger, Frances traced the borders that snaked across the map of Europe in her atlas. There were new borders now. She’d learned at school that some people’s home countries had been swallowed up by the Soviet Union and didn’t exist the way they had before the war. That’s why so many people needed somewhere new to live.

  There were young people everywhere and she was fascinated by them. Everywhere she went there were little ones playing hopscotch or marbles; teenagers twirling a skipping rope in the air or walking in twos and threes, arm in arm, laughing and chattering in their own languages. Australia only wanted young and fit people to come and live here, because there simply weren’t enough Australians in the whole country to do all the jobs that needed doing if the country was to grow, to do the work in factories and on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme. Tom said it was about Australia needing extra people to fight the Japs in case there was another war.

  No one wanted another war.

  There were lots of young men at the camp and Frances found herself paying close attention to them in particular. With an energy and enthusiasm she was always surprised by, they seemed to be into everything. There were regular soccer games and a fierce basketball competition. On warm days, the young men walked over to Lake Hume and swam and laughed and dunked each other in the shallows. They were always on the move, from the mess hall to the cinema, on the bus to Albury, as if they were intent on discovering everything in this new country. While some of the parents seemed sour, unhappy, displaced, the young men and women seemed happy, released, free.

  She was watching a new country unfurl like a flag.

  There was no place Frances would rather be.

  She checked her watch. It was time to help her mother prepare dinner. They were to have roast chicken, a rare treat because Tom was home for a week, with baked potatoes, peas, carrots and gravy. With Tom home, today was going to be a special occasion.

  Frances pushed back her chair and left the atlas open on her desk. The countries of Europe stared back at her, and she smiled. She was determined to leave Australia one day to visit each one.

  Chapter Four

  ‘More people came yesterday. From the Fairsea. And you know what more people at Bonegilla means? More waiting for breakfast.’

  Vasiliki Mitropoulos, her mother Dimitria, and her two younger sisters, Eleni and Constantina, were seated at a table in the mess. It was always noisy at mealtimes, and voices and the clutter of cutlery and crockery echoed around the room. Eleni and Constantina were devouring their porridge. Dimitria half-heartedly nursed a warm cup of instant coffee. Vasiliki spooned crunchy and bright yellow corn flakes into her mouth, milk dripping from her overloaded spoon back into her bowl.

  Vasiliki had never tasted corn flakes in Greece.

  She missed her family’s small village in the Peloponnese Islands. She missed the Greek sunshine and aqua blue sea, even in the cooler months, the whitewashed buildings and goats and Yiayia and Papou in the house next door and her cousins and their cousins all in the same village. But things hadn’t been the same since the war. Everyone said that. One of her uncles, too involved in politics for his family’s liking, was the first to leave. He’d hopped on a boat to Athens and then got on another boat to Melbourne, and that had planted the seed among the families in the village. Her grandparents had cried when her family had left Greece. Her papou in his fisherman’s cap and her yiayia all in black, still mourning for an older sister who had died six months before. The goodbyes were hard. She and her family had gone house to house in the village to say goodbye to everyone. Vasiliki didn’t know if she’d ever see her grandparents again. Or her best friends, Athena and Agape, who waved her off, crying. Their families had stayed behind, not crazy enough to go. Or at least that’s what Vasiliki’s grandmother had said.

  There had been angry words when they left the village.

  ‘What’s left for you here?’ Dimitria had asked her own brother that last day, before they’d boarded the boat to Athens. ‘First the big war then our own war. Like one wasn’t enough. The Germans or the Communists. Take your pick. No thank you. I choose kangaroos.’

  When they’d got on the boat at Piraeus outside Athens, strangers lined the dock, calling out good wishes and blessings for the voyage to people they didn’t even know.

  ‘See?’ her mother had said. ‘Some people are happy for us.’

  It seemed to Vasiliki that her mother was happier here at Bonegilla than she had been in Greece for the longest time. Even though her husband was already away in Melbourne working, Dimitria was settled at Bonegilla. She teased Vasiliki about boys and tickled the tummies of her younger daughters to make them giggle. At night, in their hut, she sang songs from home until her daughters fell asleep. And when she heard a bouzouki, she looked like the happiest woman in the world. There was a ragtag band of musicians in the camp who sometimes played on Saturday nights in the hall near the mess. A Yugoslav drummer. A Lithuanian guitarist. A Greek called Andreadis on his bouzouki and an Italian on the accordion. They sounded so funny, this United Nations of musicians, that they made not only Dimitria but all the adults laugh and dance on Saturday nights at Bonegilla, twirling and shuffling around the dance floor. And when the musicians let Andreadis let fly on his bouzouki and he began the familiar strains of a rembetika favourite, every Greek in the place cried out and leapt to their feet and, if Vasiliki closed her eyes, she could smell ouzo, and lamb roasting on a spit, could almost see her yiayia and papou, her uncles and her aunties and her cousins, dancing in a circle, their arms on each other’s shoulders, their feet flying, their handkerchiefs twirling.

  Vasiliki loved watching the dancing through the windows of the Bonegilla hall. She didn’t want to go inside—her mother would most likely make her dance with that horrible Nikolas Longinidis—so she made sure her younger sisters were asleep before walking across the camp to watch through the windows. She loved the smoking and the twirling skirts, so elegant. Her mother was an excellent dancer and had lots of partners.

  ‘He’s looking at you again.’ Dimitria sipped her coffee but her eyes darted.

  Vasiliki dropped her eyes to her corn flakes. ‘He is not.’

  ‘Yes, he is. And why shouldn’t he be looking at you? You’re a beautiful girl. You’re sixteen. He is Greek. You can get married to him.’

  ‘Mama,’ Vasiliki hissed under her breath.

  ‘He’s handsome.’

  ‘He’s not handsome. And even if he was, I don’t want to marry him.’ She didn’t want to marry anyone, especially not Nikolas Longinidis. He looked at her breasts all the time and stood too close to her when he talked to her. He had a knack of finding her in the playground, where she would take her sisters in the afternoons. While they played on the swings and laughed and called to each other, he would sneak up behind her and pinch her bottom and ask her if she wanted to go to the movies or take the bus into Albury for a milkshake. He never seemed to want to take no for an answer but that didn’t stop her from saying no, over and over.

  ‘Oh, come on, Vasiliki. All his family ar
e back in Greece. Take pity on him. He’s here all by himself. An orphan.’ Dimitria lifted a hand and waved at someone across the room. ‘It’s only natural that he wants a Greek wife.’

  Vasiliki lifted her chin. ‘I heard he has a fiancée back in the village who’s waiting for him to send for her. A nyfe.’

  Dimitria waved a hand dismissively. ‘You think he’ll wait that long? He’s here in this camp with all these girls. He’ll find a Greek girl here in Australia and then break the heart of that girl back in the village. You wait and see. If you’re not going to marry Longinidis, who else is there? Look around, Vasiliki. Make sure you find a nice Greek boy to marry you. I don’t want you with one of those Polish. Or Russians. And don’t you ever think of going near a German.’

  Vasiliki changed the subject. ‘Has Baba found us a house in Melbourne yet?’

  ‘Not yet, but he will soon. All these new people in Australia and nowhere for us to live but here. It will be soon, I promise. He’s working very hard in that cafe.’

  It had been six months since Vasiliki’s father had left for work in the cafe owned by his brother, Theodorous. Spiros was proud that there had been no railways or factory work for him, that he hadn’t had to rely on the government to find him a job. But housing had been harder to find and he was sharing a house with four other men while he looked for a place to rent for his wife and daughters.

  Vasiliki wasn’t fussed about ‘soon’. They wouldn’t be at Bonegilla forever, but she was in no hurry to leave just yet. She had grown to like life at the camp. There were things to do every day. She had even made a best friend, a girl who wasn’t Greek. She’d met Iliana on the boat coming to Australia and in the six months they’d been at Bonegilla they’d spent time together every day. They went to different churches—Vasiliki was Orthodox and Iliana was Catholic—but that didn’t matter to them. Vasiliki could have Greek friends any day but she liked having an Italian friend. She also liked the escape from her younger sisters and her mother’s teasing, and she decided that it was a good thing to finally have a friend who wasn’t your cousin. The two girls walked every day, in the high heat of summer over Christmas and New Year, and now in the cool of the April mornings that raised goosebumps on their bare legs. They practised their English as they walked. At first it was porridge, breakfast, lunch, dinner, toast, shower, mess hall, hello, goodbye, boat, camp. They hadn’t needed words to marvel at the kangaroos in the paddocks at twilight or the ook-ook-ook-ook-ahk-ahk-ahk-ahk sound of the funny birds in the trees or the oranges that arrived on trucks freshly picked from orchards in Victoria. Now, after six months, they had learned employment office, factory, work, domestic, home, marriage, husband.

  They looked after their little brothers and sisters while their parents were doing official things—when Iliana’s father was at a job interview or at the Social Security office; or their mothers were in the communal laundry doing the family’s washing by hand in the frigid water. The girls wrote letters to their friends and relatives back in Greece and Italy, posting them at the post office at the camp, and sometimes went to the cinema or to the shop to buy lollies. There was table tennis and three meals a day and ice cream, and there had been fresh peaches when they were in season. When it had been warmer, they’d swum in Lake Hume and laid out in the sun browning their skin.

  Vasiliki wanted breakfast to be over with so she could find Iliana.

  Iliana Agnoli was her treasured first Australian friend.

  Chapter Five

  They had barely set foot out of their hut to walk to breakfast when Iliana’s father began joking about the food again.

  ‘What day is it? You see, I can’t even keep track. It’s this place. There are no Mondays or Fridays or Saturdays or Sundays. There is just day after day of nothing.’ He closed the door of their hut and jumped from the top step onto the cement path below. He spun around and held his arms out wide, as if he’d just performed a circus trick. Iliana’s little brothers laughed and he swept them up, one in each arm, and kept walking.

  ‘Stop complaining like an old man. It’s Monday, Giuseppe,’ his wife, Agata, called out, a wry smile on her tanned face. She held her tray and Giuseppe’s, one underneath the other, their plates and cups and cutlery piled on top and clattering as she walked. ‘And Monday means the boys will go to the school after breakfast and learn more English. Those teachers are helping them learn how to be Australian.’

  Giuseppe turned back to her. ‘How to be Australian? Never. They will always be Italian. And we must always speak Italian to them. Always. They can’t forget our language. Our culture. Our food.’

  Agata chuckled. ‘No chance of that when you’re shouting at the top of your lungs all the time.’

  Giuseppe laughed and his two sons giggled along with him. Iliana loved the sound of it, her father’s deep booming happiness. She loved that no matter where they had been on this journey to a new life, leaving the village, at the port in Naples, on the boat for the slow journey to Australia, he’d made his children laugh every day. He’d made the entire upheaval an adventure for all of them.

  He gently lowered his sons, Stefano and Giovani, to the ground and ruffled their hair. They skipped off ahead, and Giuseppe turned and walked backwards as he spoke. ‘Cibo. The food. So it’s Monday. Let me remember. Monday is “porridge”.’ He said the word in English and it made Iliana laugh.

  ‘“Bread with jam”,’ Iliana added.

  ‘And “lamb’s fry and gravy”.’ His face contorted. ‘Disgustoso.’

  Agata laughed. ‘You can complain all you like, but I’m happy. I don’t have to cook. All I have to do is walk over to the mess with my tray and my plates and the food is there. Pronto.’

  ‘You call that food? No, no. There is no decent pasta. The tomato sauce is too sweet. And that bread! It’s nothing. It’s like fluff. And is it too much to ask for tomatoes? When we leave here, when we get a house of our own, we will have a huge garden. We will grow our own vegetables and fruit and olives, just like home.’

  ‘I’ll be too busy looking after the bambinos. You can look after the garden,’ Agata told him.

  ‘With pleasure.’

  The morning was chilly and Iliana leaned down to rub at her bare legs. Her woollen skirt and ankle socks left her calves exposed and they prickled in the cold. As they walked across camp to the mess, Iliana tried to distract herself by thinking of food from home: her nonna’s freshly made pasta, juicy tomatoes from their garden and chewy pane di casa. There was nothing like that here at Bonegilla. She hadn’t seen olive oil since they’d arrived. Everything was cooked in dripping and there was so much meat it sometimes gave her a stomach ache.

  When her father and the other Italians weren’t talking about the food at Bonegilla, they were talking about jobs. When they had work, they would be able to take their families and leave the camp for good. Where were the jobs? How many men were needed? When would the jobs start? Why weren’t there more jobs? They had been promised work when they came to Australia. That’s why the Agnoli family had got on the boat in the first place. Her father had seen a sign in the barber-shop window in the village that had said, “Male emigrants required to work in Australia”. It had been hard waiting. Where would they go when her father finally got a job? The Italians had many valuable skills in a country short of labour: they were carpenters, builders, painters, concreters, stonemasons, architects and engineers. There was talk around the camp that jobs were coming up on the railways in the desert, in factories in Melbourne and fruit picking in South Australia’s Riverland. Every day, Iliana’s father went to the camp’s Employment Office for news. Some days there were jobs, other days there weren’t. And, with accommodation scarce, there were more choices for single men than there were for men with families. Iliana didn’t like the idea of going to the desert. It sounded like a place that would be filled with wild animals like lions and tigers. Did Australia even have tigers? She didn’t know. It wasn’t until they’d arrived in Australia that she even knew Australi
a had deserts. In her mind, she had pictured it as a tropical island, like Hawaii. The only deserts she’d ever heard about were in Abyssinia, where Italian troops had been sent to fight for Mussolini.

  With no work to occupy people, there was plenty of time to think about the food. A few times, Giuseppe had joined with some of the other Italian men and headed out into the paddocks surrounding the camp, hunting. They’d dug up rabbit holes and killed the animals with sticks. Someone had a furnello—a small gas ring—and the meat would be fried with chopped onions and devoured as if it were the most succulent steak. No one was allowed to cook in their own huts—the staff had warned them they might burn down—so these secret meals were like picnics.

  It wasn’t just her father. Italians had been complaining about the food for years. There had even been food riots back in 1952. The gossip among the Italians they knew was that the cousin of Giuseppe’s neighbour from the village had been involved, and that he and his friends had stormed to the director chanting, Is this the kind of food you expect us to eat? Six hundred of them, or at least that was the story she’d heard, had held up plates of overcooked spaghetti, floating in a grey-coloured sauce. They had tossed that pasta to the ground right in front of the director’s house.

  Things had improved a little after the riots when Italians began to be employed in the kitchens, but the food was never quite like it was back home. Complaining had become a sport, something to do to fill in the long days and weeks. Iliana had decided that she liked the strange and exotic food. She loved toast with marmalade for breakfast. There were peanut paste sandwiches at afternoon tea on bread so white and soft that it was like eating a cloud. She loved to drink crunchy Milo in cold milk. She had eaten fresh peaches and pineapples—real ones, not from the tin—and hot milk and bread with jam any time she wanted it. There were bowls of oranges on the tables in the mess and sometimes she took one back to hide under her pillow. One day, a truck had driven into the camp loaded with apples fresh from an orchard and they were the sweetest and crispiest things Iliana had ever tasted.