No one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.
Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up until then had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen.
If I had become what I was intended to be, I would probably have been desperate, because I would have had regrets. You know, like you work in an office and you say, "One day I will go to see the world." Instead, I went to see the world and I said, "Maybe one day I will be obliged to work in an office."
Some people see and some people don't see; much the same way they hear music or they hear noise, they only use their vision so as not to bump into trees or fall into a ditch. My vision was more than that and it led me to emigrate to Australia of which I wrote in this article.
According to his registration card from the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, Gerhard David, the butcher, was one of the three or four young Germans of whom I wrote: "It was two days after I had arrived in camp and while I was 'thawing' out in the midday sun when another 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 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. The 'German Lady' had turned out to be a very enterprising roly-poly German housewife who with her German husband, a bricklayer, operated something of a boarding-house from their quaint little place at 456 Brunswick Road in West Brunswick in Melbourne. The place seemed already full to overflowing with young Germans from a previous intake, with bodies occupying the lounge-room sofa, a make-shift annex, and an egg-shaped plywood caravan in the backyard." How could I have forgotten? But then again, I didn't stay long enough in Melbourne to remember much of it because during the first days in Melbourne I had written to Hans in Canberra to let him know where I was. Hans was a young German who had come out to Australia many years before as a child with his parents and whom I had befriended aboard the ship. He was then already married and on his way back from a trip to Europe with his wife, baby, and mother-in-law with whom he had revisited his own hometown and that of his Yugoslav wife. Before long he was on the 'phone to me suggesting that I might want to come up to Canberra. I didn't need much persuading! Hans got me a job as storeman/driver in the hardware & plumbing supplies company of Ingram & Sons in Canberra's industrial suburb of Fyshwick. This friendship with Hans had such a major impact on my future life in Australia that I have remained good friends with him to this day.
Gerhard David, the butcher, and all those other single German men - Wilfried Bassler, born 2/7/1941; Klaus-Dieter Hanel, born 7/9/1944; Erwin Hess, born 31/12/1943; Gunnar Korths, born 11/6/42; Bernd Kress, born 2/2/1942; Erwin Lange, born 7/7/1942; Karl-Heinz Meisel, born 26/9/1937 - appear on the database of the National Archives of Australia but not one of them has ever applied for his records to be made public, although I found Karl-Heinz Meisel's and Erwin Heess's registration cards from the Bonegilla Migrant Centre on the Bonegilla Identity Card Lookup. One being a mechanic and the other an electrician by trade, they found ready employment on the Snowy Mountains Scheme at Khancoban, a town especially constructed to house some 2000 workers involved in what was then Australia's largest engineering project in the coldest part of the country.
How many of them are still in Australia or, for that matter, still alive? They were just eight of the 134 German migrants who boarded the FLAVIA with me and, in addition to the butcher, four of them could well have been with me in the same six-berth cabin (with no private facilities!) If you know the whereabouts of any of them, please email me at riverbendnelligen@mail.com
Altogether some 229 "Auswanderer" boarded the ship FLAVIA on that fateful day, and I have sometimes wondered how their lives turned out.
When, some five weeks later, we reached Sydney in early August 1965, one other young German - whose name I have since forgotten - and I ventured just far enough from the FLAVIA which was tied up at Pyrmont, to explore the Rocks and to sit on the steps leading up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We still had some distance to go before we would finally disembark in Melbourne and be processed through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, but we had already decided to come back to Sydney and to this spot every Sunday and wait for the other one to turn up.
I never did, as I moved from Bonegilla to Melbourne and from Melbourne to Canberra and on and on from there, and I've often wondered how many Sundays my mate may've sat on those stairs waiting for me to turn up.
P.S. I never heard from any of the others; however, one person, now residing on the Gold Coast, read my article and sent me this email:
"Hello Peter,
I haven't finished reading your webpage yet as I'm too emotional. My parents and I were on the Flavia with you. I was only 4 but still have many memories of that voyage. Mum is sitting here with me, also quite teary. I came across your webpage when I googled 'Flavia'. Thank you for the memories. Yes, we are still in Australia, living on the Gold Coast. Mum sends her regards, unfortunately dad has dementia.
I do have photos, including a group photo the day King Neptune came on board. I'll scan them and email them to you, perhaps there's one with you.
Regards Anja"
