Happy Mothers’ Day to all good mums, stepmums, grandmas, foster mums, aunts, mentors and role models. I hope you all had a good one! 💗
Last year, we weren’t able to gather in large groups to celebrate our mums because, you know - COVID-19 but I did get to go down memory lane and I shared some pics of my mum and me and our family. You can have a look here.
Today, to celebrate my mum, I’m sharing a little of her life story - particularly the part of her journey to Australia from her birth country - Slovenia.
Years ago, while in my undergraduate degree at university, I enrolled in a course, unsuitably named Studies of Man. It was the 80s and no, it wasn’t a course concerning men, masculinity or gender. It didn’t examine what it means to be a man in contemporary society. It was a course that examined humanity and culture.
One of the course requirements was to complete a major project of personal interest. I chose to write a biography of sorts, a somewhat detailed description of my mum’s experiences of her early life in her birth country and her first few years in her new adopted country. I focussed on her experiences and emotions during this period in her life, but also a little about what led her to make this life changing decision.
It took a good part of six months to conduct the biographical research I needed through conducting in-depth unstructured interviews - basically, I asked a lot of questions and she narrated 25+ year memories.
Each word was lovingly written by hand on delicate translucent parchment paper. I know, it was a risk - I couldn’t use liquid paper. For those of you who are unfamiliar with liquid paper (or handwriting), it is . . . oh, forget it. Let’s move on, shall we? I then had the book bound by a professional bookbinder. Do these people still exist?
Ok, it’s time to move away from me and onto the story.
It begins with Theresa’s memories of a happy and carefree childhood in a rural Slovenian village, Srednja Bistrica which sat on the left bank of the Mura River in northeastern Slovenia. The memories were vivid and untroubled and plentiful.
“Family life , looking back on it, is like this - a mess of memories and impressions scattered about then roughly juxtaposed to form a total picture.”
We’re then transported to Theresa’s late teens where she pines for a different life to the one in which she found herself. Many of her friends had already left the country for a new life in Canada and she had received letters and photos of their experiences there. She was somewhat restless and understood that her parents could not afford for her to continue her studies and …….
“The year was 1956 and I was seventeen. It was a confusing time in my life. Many of my friends were leaving home for Austria so that they could be transported to such great countries as Canada and Germany. Australia was unheard of then! It wasn’t until I received a letter from my girlfriend who escaped to Canada, that my interest grew. She had left earlier that year and I felt a lonely sensation capture my heart.
Theresa vividly remembers the last day she saw her family.
“The date was the 20th of August 1957 and I was eighteen years of age. I left very early in the morning so I would not disturb my family’s sleep. My sister Vera however, did hear me setting out. We hugged each sorry other as we said our goodbyes and I asked her to say goodbye to my mother, father and my little brother Joe who I thought was asleep. Fifteen years later in 1972 when I went back to Yugoslavia, Joe mentioned that I didn't say goodbye to him when I left. He had overheard my conversation with Vera and was confused and upset by my seemingly casual departure. I did not say goodbye to him on that last day and he still remembered fifteen years later.
Her third and final attempt to cross the border into Austria is also detailed in the memoir.
“I came to a creek, where I was grateful to wash my face and hands which hadn't been given much attention. I crossed a shallow creek and saw a post directly ahead of me. I immediately I thought that this must be the border. I looked left and then right, just like a child crossing a busy street. I saw no soldiers. no others. I ran as fast as I ever did run in my entire life. I think it was about 50 metres when I reached a road. I stopped and with thumping head and puffed breath, I looked back and was glad to see no one was there. I prayed that I was in Austria.”
She recalls the six days spent at a police station just across the Austrian border.
“Many of the girls had come from cities and their experiences had been grand compared to mine. At that particular time in our lives, however, our experience was the same and would always remain in our memories. The conditions were dreadful. There were three steel bed bunks squashed in a tiny room. Our toilet was a small sanitary pan in the back corner of the room. We had no washing facilities. The wooden floors when we arrived were filthy with mud and dirt and we took turns to scrub them. A police officer would enter our room, bringing breakfast, if one could call it that. It consisted of a cup of black coffee and a tiny piece of stale bread. We ate this in our room, on our bed, and after each meal, we dreaded the next.”
When she finally made it to Australia on 18th January 1958, she was sad and lonely and miserable. She was whisked away to a migrant camp and recounts her impressions of those early days in Australia. One memory, though was quite heartening.
“We were each given a tray which had on it a bowl of Cornflakes, a little sugar and a small jug of milk. All of us looked at each other puzzled. How do we eat it? I had never seen such food before. So, we all ate our cornflakes first, then drank our milk and finally, licked the sugar. It was unusual but it tasted good.”
Life became somewhat bearable when she moved to Sydney later that same year and got a job as a housekeeper for an American family in Bellevue Hill.
“Once again I was almost heartbroken when I thought that I would disappoint this family because I could never ever clean the house - that's how huge it seemed to be.”
Well, it seems she did clean the house and had wonderful experiences with the MacKellars. They were kind and thoughtful and helped her acclimatise to a life in a strange country and speaking a foreign language.
The rest as they say is history or herstory!
