Nonja Peters

Transcript 

My name is Nonja. It comes from Java where my father was born and it means ‘woman’ or ‘lady’.

I was born in the Netherlands at the end of the Second World War, which began in 1939 and finished in 1945. Many people called the Netherlands ‘Holland.' It is a country in Europe that is linked to clogs, tulips, windmills, canals and dykes. People from the Netherlands are called Dutch.

When the Second World War came to an end, in 1945, lots of people had nowhere to live and not much to eat. Many people wanted to leave their countries and so did my parents.

Mama and Papa were going to take us to Australia because they hoped for a better life there. I remember I didn’t want to leave my best friend Elsje and especially not my Oma as we called my grandmother. I was five and half years old when we finally left Tilburg the town where I lived in the Netherlands on our big, big journey to migrate.

The first part of our journey was to Italy on a huge train with many carriages. Some carriages had sleeping bunks.

I remember most the awesomeness of the very high, very tall Swiss Alps and they were covered in snow.

We arrived in a big city called Milan many days later… but we were told the boat had gone without us! We were very sad. We were then sent on to Genoa, which was another big city in Italy on the ocean. That was to catch another boat.

I remember eating a very strange soup there called minestrone. Now I love it, but back then I thought it was very strange. 

Papa had gone to Australia already so we were very much wanting to join up with him. We were very happy when they found a different boat for us to catch in Genoa. But we were very disappointed. It was a big Italian ship and it carried lots and lots of cargo as well. It was crowded and dirty and lots of us were very sick. I couldn’t eat the strange food and at one point we given a whole lot of food we thought were cherries that were in fact olives they just looked the same! My brother Eddie was really sick because he couldn’t drink the milk. He nearly died!

My brother Eddie and I weren’t allowed to bring any toys because there was no room. We were only allowed two suitcases and two tea chests.

Mama put some of clothes and our paintings in the tea chests along with kitchen items, silver spoons and pictures so that we would have something to hang up in our new home. We left everything else behind in Holland.

I missed my dog Ficky most of all. I loved Ficky.  Ficky and I used to play on the cobbled road outside the house or on the pavement - with other children from our neighbourhood.

On the boat I remember watching flying fish coming in through the porthole from the top bunk where I slept and just running around trying to keep busy and playing with my three cousins, Jan, Tony and Sjannie. But we had no toys. We had to imagine all sorts of games we could play.

We got to Fremantle about 6 weeks later after going through the Mediterranean Sea and then through the Red Sea, which was very, very hot at that time. Our ship didn’t have any air conditioning. There are many ideas about why it’s called the Red Sea but no-one really knows what the right answer is. It's not really red.

I was very frightened when we got to Fremantle … until I saw Papa on the wharf! He actually pulled me out through the port hole … and then gave me a lovely doll! It was a great big doll, almost as big as I was and dressed in a beautiful white knitted dress and bonnet. I felt a lot better then because I had a doll to play with!

Papa took us to a house in Subiaco. Mama cried a lot, she just didn’t like it here and she couldn’t speak any English – the language spoken here. Dutch and English sound very different when you hear them spoken.

 

I wanted to play with the other kids but they teased me because I wore funny clothes and sounded funny. The teachers were the same. I thought they were horrible at the time. They used to make me say “Hi my name is Nonja and I’m a ‘New Australian’. When really all I wanted was to be like the other children.

When we went shopping I used to get really terrified of getting lost. I knew my way around the streets where I lived in the Netherlands. But when I arrived here, everything was strange, and it really frightened me. I was even too scared to let go of Eddie’s stroller.

About a year after we arrived in Western Australia, we moved to Northam, a country town, because Papa got a job there. He had a bike shop.  The Aussie kids still didn’t play with us and their mothers didn’t like us either.  Not at that time they didn’t.  I played with my friends in the migrant camps outside town but I missed my Oma, my uncles and aunties and Fickie my dog very much indeed. My brother was very little compared to me, so I didn’t play with him much either.

We were sharing a house with an Irish family. I am surprised that I don’t speak English with an Irish accent actually. They showed mama how to make fairy bread and cake for my 8^th birthday. The cake was very different from the ones in Holland. It didn’t have all the layers of cream and meringue and nuts but it was yummy anyhow.  The other kids all loved it.  I loved the new games the children showed me how to play. They were so different from the ones we played in Holland.

Mama still cried for many years after moving to Australia, so Papa arranged for other people from our town in Holland to come and live here too. They stayed with us while they were looking for a job and places to live. It was very hard to find a place to live in Australia then. Mama was very happy about this.

Guess what?? I suddenly had a twin brother and sister! They were very small and they cried a lot, but I liked to play with them anyway. Mama said that I would have to look after them when she and Papa went out. And I did! I used to look after them lots! As well as my other brother Eddie and the children of other migrant families as well, because none of us migrants had any grandparents, aunts, uncles or other relatives to help look after the children.

I can remember feeling quite scared when I had to look after the twins for the first time. Dad played in a band and so Mama and Papa would go out a lot. I was very worried as I didn’t know what to do if something went wrong and we didn’t have a telephone in those days.  Eddie was too little to help. He just cried because Mama and Papa weren’t there.

I started to learn to speak English pretty quickly though and as soon as I learnt to speak English the other kids started to teach me their games. It was a lot more fun and I began to feel much more at home in Australia then. And I was going to school. I went to three or four different schools because we shifted a lot.

I got many other migrant friends also. Some Polish and Latvian friends who lived in the migrant camps at Northam. Their fathers were working on the railway line or the roads. After their families left the migrant camps they went to live in tents that had lean to corregated iron kitchens. It was very primitive where they lived. We all went off to the convent school together and we all looked the same because we had uniforms in those days. A lot of the kids names were being changed at that time by the teachers. If they couldn’t say their name then they gave them an Australian name. They changed my cousin Sjannie’s name to Joan.

Eventually Mama and Papa bought a block of land on the edge of Northam, looking over the town. Every weekend we would go down to the river with Mama and Papa (although because I wanted to be like the Australian children I had started calling them mum and dad).

 

Anyway, Mum and dad would gather rocks from the fields and sand from the river bed while I minded the twins and Eddie. They would then use the sand to make bricks. Mum would make bricks every day when dad was off to work. We did that for a couple of years until there were enough bricks to build two rooms. Mum, dad, the twins and Eddie slept In the first room, and I slept in the lounge that doubled up as a kitchen and my bedroom.

When the house was finished, mum and dad bought a café. They had to learn how to cook new foods for that – like steak and eggs and fish and chips.

In the Netherlands at that time, we didn’t get much meat. Papa tried to cook steaks on a pump-up primus stove but the butcher saw him and laughed. The butcher showed him how to do it on a wood stove.  He just got the steak, dipped it in the fat and put it on the wood stove, much like a barbeque. All the people who came to eat in our café really loved it.

At school the kids all ate Vegemite sandwiches for lunch. I asked mum to make sandwiches like theirs, but she made lamb and tomato sauce sandwiches on thick brown bread instead! I was very embarrassed about my lunch. My favourite day at school was Monday because I was allowed to buy my lunch because the bread was stale. I would buy a pie and cake and be just like the other kids. I loved weekends too, because on weekends we ate a lot of watermelon in the summer. It was so messy though so we couldn’t eat this at school.

The first year’s Christmas was great fun! We had two Christmases. The first would be on 6^th December at the Dutch club in Perth. Saint Nicholas would arrive on his white horse and he brought us presents if we were good. If we had been bad, Black Peter would have carried us away in his sack, just like in Holland. Then we went back to Northam and had an Australian Christmas and got another lot of presents on 25^th of December! We really loved it.

The only thing we didn’t like about Christmas was that it was soo hot! I remember the heat and I just always hated it. Even the sand was hot! At the same time in Holland it was snowing. It was so soft, white and beautiful. Here it was just so hot and you could fry an egg on the pavement and there were lots of flies, wolf spiders, wood bugs and other insects that I also hated.

It is a long time ago since I was a child, yet it seems like yesterday. Many, many things have changed since I arrived in Fremantle by ship. Migrating as a child meant that for much of my life I felt confused about where I belonged.

I went back to Holland many times but realised that I didn’t really belong there either. Australia is my home now. I have married here and have children and grandchildren here and I now feel as though we are a Dutch Australian family. This is home to all of us now.