TERRA NULLIUS

1

The ship had been loading since morning, and night had fallen by the time the last DP[1]had boarded and the gangway had been raised. There was no waving or throwing of streamers—no one was at the quayside. Instead we went down to the ship’s dining room, to get to know our travel companions and find our bearings. I soon found the two Hungarian boys who had jumped to my aid when an overfilled case had slipped from my hand and its contents had spilled out on the surface of the quay. Its handle had given way, but I had not been able to reach for it, as my other hand was clutching the handle of our small homemade bag, in which my six-month-old son was slumbering. My wife Panni was grasping the other handle of this improvised bassinet while leading our four-year-old daughter Ancsi with her left. The two boys, Kálmán and Tibor, had stuffed our scattered belongings back into the case, bound it with twine, and carried it to the sleeping quarters in the hold of the ship. They had then vanished just as abruptly as they had appeared. The dining room was thronging with people, we couldn’t hear our own voices above the din, when suddenly I felt the floor move under my feet. Of course it was not the floor, but the ship: we had set sail. I stepped out of the smoky babble of voices and went up on deck. With a quiet shudder the ship’s hull began to tremor to the rhythm of the engines, our constant companion all the way to Australia. My new-found friends also came up, and I thanked them for their assistance. Leaning on the rails we looked back at the receding coast and the string of twinkling lights of Bremerhaven. Seagulls were fluttering overhead, and as we stood there with the sea breeze in our hair we felt as if we belonged together, and we would keep an eye on one another during the voyage to the distant island continent, the promise of adventure helping us forget the necessity of our journey.

 We had arrived in Bremen after a train journey of a day and a half from the Bagnoli refugee camp near Naples. We spent three months in the IRO[2]  huts, where refugees who had drifted in from any number of places were waiting to be granted asylum in a host country, like the debris of a big flood waiting to be cleared away. We lived in partitioned units called paravans and had our meals in a long hall reminiscent of a sheep-pen, eating off tin plates that we had to rinse under cold-water taps in troughs along one wall. The head of the camp’s personnel department, a Hungarian named Marton, was said to be a half-brother of the writer Sándor Márai. He employed me as a payroll clerk. I used to accompany him on trips to Naples, and on one occasion he showed me the famous bordellos the staff of which included some Hungarian girls. Stepping out of the camp’smiasmal atmosphere, I would breath a sigh of relief in the bustling city with its frenziedtraffic, where the world seemed to have been stood on its head, yet everyone knew where he washeaded and what they were doing. I longed to get back to the routine of normal life as soon aspossible. Australia held out the promise of an early passage, and the state would pay our fare inexchange for a two-year work contract. I signed the papers and we were put on the list. Before they sent us on our way they had us disinfected. Stripped naked, women and menseparately, we took our turn in front of an orderly (also a DP) with a bored  expression on hisface, who puffed a yellowish powder over us from a contraption resembling a sausage-stuffing pump, the hairier men dusted twice, better safe than sorry. This was DDT, a poison ifthere ever was one.

It would have been simpler to sail from Naples, but the bureaucracy had other ideas, probably because the majority of those waiting to embark— Poles, Balts—had beengathering in Bremen. So two days later, en route for the Suez Canal, we were again treated to a view of the Mediterranean. Taking a long, roundabout route, we bade farewell to Europe, the source of all our woes, or so we thought at the time. The ship was the SS Fairsea,[3] but in the Bay of Biscay she hardly held true to her name. The 13,000-ton vessel, with1,909 emigrants on board, was tossed about by huge waves; we tied our son’s cradle to the legof the bed so he would not be swept away. The separate dormitories for men and women werebig open spaces with triple-decker bunk. Panni slept on the lowest bunk, Ancsi in the middleone and an Italian girl on the top. There were many Italians on the ship, from Venezia Giulia,the part of Italy the Yugoslavs annexed after the war. Panni soon established her authorityamong them when they saw how she defended Ancsi from the badgering of a portly signora inthe foul-smelling washroom. She lifted up a wet mop-rag and told her in eloquent Italian that she would fling it in her face if she did not desist. From then on the womenfolk lookedfavourably on Panni, and they welcomed me, too, in the mornings when I brought milk, whichwe warmed up on a portable cooker using Meta cubes.

Panni had learned to speak Italian in Rome, and I had picked up a little at the time I hadstudied at the Summer University in Perugia in 1939. We went to Rome in order to makearrangements for emigration at the IRO office there. While sightseeing we went into a shopselling light fittings. The woman who  ran the shop overheard us saying that we werepreparing to emigrate and offered to teach us how to make lampshades. We seized the opportunity and started work the following day. Panni cut and sewed the material and I worked at the foot-operated machine used to solder the wire frames of the shades. The seamstresses’melodious chirping rose above the clatter of the sewing machines, and I could hear thesound of Panni’s voice in the chorus, which was counterpointed by the sober rapping of the soldering machines.

 We spent the last of our money in Rome. We lived on cheese and milk in a small boardinghouse on the Via Gregoriana, and when my old friend Hubertus Pallavicini treated us tofreshly-made pizza at the street vendor’s it seemed like a veritable banquet. We washed themeal down with Coca Cola, the magic elixir of the day. Hubertus worked at the Grand Magistry of the Knights of Malta on the Via Condotti, where he also got board and lodging.My visit was interrupted by a valet in knee-breeches announcing that the Grand Master of theOrder was on his way to the refectory. One of the virtues of the Knights of Malta waspunctuality, and to be late for a meal was more than bad manners, so I left with a grumblingbelly.

In the evenings Hungarian émigrés would meet at a nearby trattoria. The good local redwine was cheaper than Coca-Cola, and if we had enough money we had calf’s liver or lungs, asthese were the cheapest dishes. This was where we came across the painter János Hajnal and theSulner couple. Hajnal painted pictures of ecclesiastical subjects, his talent being recognised by the Vatican itself, and for that reason he sought to stay in Rome. Hannah and László Sulneras handwriting experts had forged documents that were used in Cardinal Mindszenty’s show trial in early 1949. Revolted by what they had done, they had fled Hungary and oncethey were abroad they disclosed the forgeries to the US press. László Sulner himselfunexpectedly dropped dead later the same year in Paris. He was thirty years old. Heart attack,they had said, but Hannah insisted that he had been poisoned by agents of Hungary’s secret service police, the ÁVÓ. I spotted Feri Juranovich, a former classmate, on theterrace of a café on the Via Veneto; his father had been a hotel proprietor in Pécs.

As he stirred his espresso he would let his eyes wander over the throng of passers-by. Allwho counted as a celebrity who passed through Rome, whether film actor, artist, Americanmillionairess, aristocrat or courtesan, would feel almost obliged to put themselves on show onthe famed corso, which later was immortalised by Federico Fellini in his classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita. I sat down next to him. We were pleased to see each other again. He recounted that he was working as an extra in a film studio. “Ever since I went through the refugee camps Ihave felt that I am a kind of extra,” he explained. “and a film studio pays me to boot!”

Feri’s words came to mind as I went around the ship. The emigrants who swarmed the deck could be extras in a crowd scene, I thought, guided by an invisible director to act out the scenes of an imaginary drama. The next act would be disembarkation, but we were still a long way from that! Until then we had to strive to make life on a crowded ship tolerable. The Hungarians and Poles soon set the tone, dispatching deputations to the Italian captain. Both officers and crew were Italian, so we did not have to spend much time explaining things. They knew what being crowded meant. Former air-force officer Jenô Péterfy and his rather forthright French wife were the most outspoken. They managed to ensure that better provisions would be provided for mothers with children and their families. Gábor Csáky, a fellow soldier in the war, made himself popular by organising parlour games and taking photo- graphs, as well as playing the piano. He was never seasick. When most of us, going green at the gills, would lean at the ship’s rail, he would sit contentedly with a glass of rum in the dining room. His plan was to set up a pig farm in Australia, following in his father’s footsteps, who had been the director of the Budafok state pig farm. Kálmán kept a diary, which he readily showed me if I asked (unfortunately it was lost). He made friends with the Italian girl who had the bed over Ancsi, and one morning he brought Panni the milk. He was a lanky lad, his head reached the top bunk, and when he handed the milk to Panni he gave the girl a kiss. We became close friends with the Aczéls, a married couple older than us. They became very fond of Ancsi and paid her a lot of attention. Joe Aczél had been chauffeur and trusted servant of Jenő Weisz, one of the two sons of renowned armaments manufacturer Baron Manfred Weiss of Csepel Island. He had relatives waiting for him in Sydney and he planned to start a car- repair business there. He befriended the ship’s engineer and often lent him a hand. We did not suffer the same fate as another ship, which was stuck for weeks on end in the tropical heat of the Indian Ocean because of engine failure. At Port Said the Arab vendors rowed out to the ship to offer their trashy wares, thrusting them up on long poles while the money was sent back the same way. I brought up from the sleeping quarters a brown winter coat of coarse cloth that I had been given by the Germans in Bremen and, showing it to one of the Arabs, asked what he would give me for it, the bargaining all done with hand signals. When we had come to a deal he pushed up the money and I hungthe coat on the pole, glad to be rid of a rather unattractive overcoat. Fellow passengers shooktheir heads but later congratulated me for having  outwitted the Arab—after all, who wouldneed a winter coat in Port Said? Meanwhile of course the Arab was no doubt already calculating the profit he would make later by selling it to a passenger on a ship returning toEurope.

We crossed the Equator in the Indian Ocean on New Year’s Day, arriving at one and the sametime in the southern hemisphere and the latter half of the twentieth century (1951). Wouldeither be better than its other half? No bottles of champagne were uncorked in the ceremonies,but Ancsi won first prize in the girls’ beauty contest and as a reward was allowed to dine at the captain’s table. Wiener schnitzel was served, and Ancsi asked the captain to cut it up forher. Gábor Csáky played hit tunes, and at midnight he jumped up on the piano and did aheadstand, as if to illustrate our geographical and personal situations. The piano wasbeing taken by one of the officers to his sister in Melbourne. To save having to pack it, he had put it in the dining room; but he had not reckoned with Csáky. Due to the heat, a lot ofpeople slept on the deck. It seemed a bit as if the waves were gently rocking the couplesentangled under their blankets, though the ocean was as smooth as a mirror. As the familiarimage of the Great Bear slid into the water, the Southern Cross began its ascent on the other side. The Italian girls romped about in the officers’  cabins.

2

In Melbourne Harbour the dockers boarded the deck and handed out bananas as if we were monkeys before slinging our bags and baggage across to a train waiting alongside the ship,which took us to Bonegilla Migrant Camp. Through the windows of the train all I saw was parched fields and barren hills. Blackened tree stumps were the only sign that the area had once been a verdant woodland. Halfway there we halted at a station. Along the length ofthe platform there was a row of tables laden with plates of sandwiches and cakes. Behind the tables women in summer frocks were bustling about, pouring tea into china cups. They gave the children milk. Never has a cup of tea tasted so good. The ladies were members of theCountry Women’s Association, the wives and daughters of local farmers. Without any fuss or ostentation they made us feel welcome.

We had been almost five weeks at sea. As I queued up for breakfast in the camp’s canteenI was almost surprised to find myself standing on firm land. In addition to porridge we had toast, a lamb chop and a rasher of bacon, and it took us awhile to get the cooks tounderstand that this was not exactly the most appropriate food for babies. The former armycamp comprised timber ‘blocks’ (huts) alternating with one-room shacks. We were quarteredin one of the latter. The iron bedsteads had kapok mattresses with sheets and a blanket, andwhen I lifted the blanket a huge brown spider scuttled away, reminding me of a warning I hadbeen given by a German factory-owner when he heard that we were bound for Australia: “Whatwill you find there? Snakes, spiders and crocodiles,” before cautioning us that we would bebest advised to stay in Europe. In fright I stamped on the spider and took its remains to myneighbour, who laughed: “It’s a Huntsman! Totally harmless. It’s the little black ones with a redspot on the back whose bite can be deadly.” The interpreter for the officer interviewing newlyarrived emigrants was Erzsébet Barcza, daughter of György Barcza, the Hungarian Minister inLondon from 1938 to 1941. The officer, an Englishman, was utterly polite while speaking tome, but Erzsébet told me later that he had commented afterwards that he had had the feeling I was holding something back. I racked my brains wondering what it might have been: therewas so much.

Single immigrants were sent off to pick fruit or fell trees, families were allotted to farmswhich provided them with quarters. Qualifications did not carry much weight, as the mostpressing need was for manual workers. Bonegilla was in Victoria, and most of those in thecamp were assigned to farms in the area, but we were trying to get to Sydney, where ourfriends lived, which is in New South Wales. One was not supposed to leave the camp withoutprior permission. Jóska Aczél acquired a motorbike with which he went on a long trip withoutpermission (and indeed without a licence). He did not wear a helmet or a cap and was so badly sunburned when he returned that he had to spend days recovering in the camp’s infirmary. I preferred to take a train. The railways of the two states used different gauges, and it was necessary to change trains at the border station of Albury. The New South Walesservice was waiting on the adjacent track, and changing trains amounted to little more thangetting off one coach and boarding another, while porters took the luggage from one luggage van to the other.

Vilmos Sebők had been a lawyer in Budapest. He had left Hungary right after the war, a few years ahead of us. He was now renting a place in seaside Vaucluse, one of the loveliest suburbs. It was on the way there that I first saw the dazzling city lying along the harbour, shimmering in the reflections of sea and sky. Sebők was the manager of a hotel in the nearby Blue Mountains. He offered to give me a job and put me up until I was earningenough to rent a place. The hotel offered recreation to businessmen from Europe. Theyretreated with their families from the steamy summer heat. I went back to Bonegilla with the good news and within a week we had set off—without  permission.

    We arrived early one morning at the Karraweera Hotel in Blackheath, near the top of theBlue Mountains, in the middle of a big park and within walking distance of Govetts Leap, alookout offering spectacular views, clothed in a bluish haze, of the Grose Valley with its nearby waterfalls and hills. We were given quarters in one of the lodges surrounding themain building. After the cramped conditions and filth of camps and boat, it seemed likeheaven. On the first morning I awoke to an infernal cacophony like nothing I had ever heardbefore. It was a large-beaked kookaburra, its cackling song keeping its fellow birds—andus too?—informed of the boundaries of its territory. I was unable to pick out from the ominoussnickering whether it was pleased or annoyed by our presence. The Hungarian owner of the hotel, a Mr Mandel, and the bulk of his guests had moved to Australia before the war,having left their homeland because of the persecution of the Jews. When war had broken out, those who had not yet been naturalised were considered enemy aliens and were interned,though later they were released. Once they had created a secure living for themselves in their new homeland they led comfortable lives. However, they never forgot the tastes ofhome cooking, and they found what they craved at the Karraweera Hotel: Central European, Magyar cooking, which at the time was still largely unknown in Australia. The clear, sharpair of the Blue Mountains merely whetted their appetite and it fell to me to clear up the piles ofdishes after their bounteous repasts: I became a dishwasher. My fellow worker, Luigi, spiced upwork with Neapolitan songs and it went like clockwork. I reported my employment at the Government Employment Office in nearby Katoomba. The sole employee, an elderly man,paid me not the slightest attention when I entered. He was scouring the newspaper, lookingfor something. When he  deigned to raise his head he protested that he was checking to seewhether his lottery number had been drawn (it hadn’t). This was a foretaste of the traditionalAustralian love of gambling, which manifested itself in a whole gamut of activities, fromthe state-run lottery to horse racing. The official sanctioned my job, relieved he didn’t have to worry about me and could return to his paper.

Once I had a few weeks’ wages in my pocket, I rented lodgings in a house owned byanother Hungarian, Friedman, an upholsterer, who had his workshop there. The Friedmans themselves lived in a roomier house, travelling between their home and the workshop. MrsFriedman came over more or less every day, and she taught Panni the various tricks of Australian housekeeping, including how to iron a man’s shirt in under three minutes. She was agreat admirer of our barely one-year-old son, who had acquired the pet name Pubi back inAustria. We were near a Catholic primary school, so Ancsi was enrolled, though we had tofib a bit, as she was not yet six. Nor were the nuns disappointed in her, for in her first year she was outdoing classmates who were quite a bit older. We also made friends with someAustralians. I helped two old maids with their gardening. They baked a cake and brought it withthem when they paid us a visit. Seeing the  double bed, they warned Panni that if she wanted themarriage to last, we ought to sleep in separate beds. Panni would have loved to have a job, butdoing what? It had to be work that she could do at home. Someone suggested having a word withMr Hilton, a manufacturer of women’s underwear and brassieres, who  happened to be a guest at the hotel. He employed innumerable outworkers in addition to those at the factory.Outworkers did work they were handed out by the factory at home for a fraction of the pay ofa factory worker. Mr Hilton “received” Panni at the side of the swimming pool in hisswimming trunks, but he managed to put her off with his haughty manner. Any inclination shemight  have had to ask her compatriots for help vanished. She looked on them with distrust,for she felt that the fate of “new” immigrants was only of interest to them insofar as they could be exploited. Panni, as our own experience showed, was not really fair, but she stuck by her opinion all the same.

As autumn set in I looked for work in Sydney. I was given a lift by Mr Mandel in his hugeAmerican limousine, he lived in a small mansion on the North Shore. Initially I found work in aspinning mill and then a mill, where I was bagging corn flakes—at both places working nightshifts from Monday night to Friday morning. This also solved the separate beds problem,except for weekends, which I spent “at home” in Blackheath. By then we had rented another house where we froze, it was so cold in the mountains in winter. The brown coatwould have come in handy. In Sydney I shared an upstairs room in a terrace house withJóska Aczél’s son by his first marriage, who also worked in the mill. The ground floor was asandwich shop run by a German relative. The previous day’s ham and other cooked meatsstood in a big cooking pot in the back kitchen, so we were able to tuck-in handsomely before turning in to bed. Both factory and shop were in Pyrmont, an inner suburb. In theafternoons I wandered around town, went to the movies or the City of Sydney Library,where, to my great surprise, I found quite a lot of good Hungarian books.As soon as the leaseon the flat in Blackheath had expired we moved to Sydney, where we rented a holiday flat in Cronulla, a beachside suburb, for very little, for these lodgings, which were rented out for a fortune in the summer, were empty in winter. There were two flats in the ramshackle timber cottage—it was probably built around 1900. The windows of our rooms opened onto a verandah which encircled the house. The other rooms were rented by a young couple while their own house was being built. Their flat was only separated from ours by a wooden partition, so we would have needed earplugs to avoid hearing the racket accompanying their lovemaking, which we reciprocated with the din our children made during their nightly   baths.

Hot water was supplied by a cylindrical boiler-shaped chip heater next to the bathtub.Anything combustible—wood chips, paper, pine cones, etc.—could be chucked into the ironstove. The boiler suddenly flared up and after a few minutes of huffing and puffing it wouldspew boiling water into the bath. To the great amusement of the children, it was rather as if a steam engine were bowling along through the flat.

I worked the afternoon shift at my new job, as a yarn winder at the Marrickville Davis Coop Textile Mill. Jóska Aczél taught me how to make a weaver’s knot, knowledge of which was indispensable. A bonus system was in operation, with dawdlers getting no more than the basic wage, which was pretty low. I would arrive at my machine five or ten minutes before the shift in order to get the spools ready and not lose a single second when the hooter sounded. The foreman, having watched me for several days, eventually came over and, with his head tipped slightly to one side so as not to look directly at me, muttered from the corner of his mouth, “We don’t do that   here!”

From then on I would only walk across to the machine when the hooter went off. I later came to understand that the foreman was simply trying to safeguard the work norms; if everyone had done what I did, then with the growth in productivity the bosses would have raised the norm. I had not even realized that there was a sort of cooperation: workers on the previous shift would leave the machine for the relief man (if he was a mate) in such a state that it could be started straight away without any preliminary setting. They would pay not the blindest bit of notice to a novice, especially if he was a foreigner. All this was explained to me by a table companion during a supper break; he had cast only a fleeting glance at me when I sat down next him, as he had been reading while he ate. Full three-course meals including cake and fruit were on offer in the self-service canteen, and by then I was already nibbling at my lamington, a traditional Australian cake, when I asked my neighbour what he was reading. He took a look at me before turning the front cover of the book towards me: it was Vol. 1 of Paul Hindemith’s The Craft of Musical Composition. I rubbed my eyes to check to see if I was seeing straight. I was familiar with the original pre-war German edition from having turned its pages in Rózsavölgyi’s music shop in Budapest. “Are you a musician?” I asked. He nodded, and now it was his turn to be amazed: how did I know what the book was about? I gave a hurried explanation, and we began to chat. It turned out that my fellow worker, James Murdoch was getting ready to travel to Europe and was working at the factory because he needed money to pay for the fare. Mornings he was a student at the Sydney Conservatorium.

“It’s odd how things work out, with me coming here, you going there,” I noted somewhat wryly, as I was suddenly struck by the thought of what I had left behind when I boarded the ship in Bremerhaven. “You were driven here by necessity,” James replied, “whereas I’m driven by sheer curiosity to get to know England and Europe. I would like to find work as a répétiteur in an opera house or with a ballet company and learn more. I have never been overseas.” “Overseas!” I savoured the word. From an Australian viewpoint everything was indeed overseas, and the music that James played on his piano too having been composed in far-off Europe, on ”the Continent” or in the ”Old Country,” in England. For the time being, though, I had more pressing concerns than meditations on my geographical situation. We had to move from the place in Cronulla, for any stay of over three months terminated its status as a holiday flat and thereby the freedom of the landlord or his agent to charge several times the fixed rent in summer. Rents had been fixed during the war, but this did not apply to holiday lettings. We moved to another timber house by the sea, one with a garden the foot of which was lapped by the water at high tide. On stormy nights we could just as well have been a ship driven onto the shore, carried off by the tide at any moment.

There were Hungarians living in the next street, a married couple with children. A young Frenchman, Claude, lived with them. In fine French tradition he had transformed his status as lodger into a ménage à trois, and he treated the woman of the house, who was in an advanced stage of pregnancy, with the greatest tenderness. Claude was a chef, and on Sundays he would cook delicious meals, on some occasions in our house. I invited James over so that he could accustom himself to French cooking. With his hooked nose and black hair, James could have passed for a Spanish Gypsy had he not been blue-eyed. He lived in Marrickville close to the cotton mill. I paid a visit to his place: his room was full of musical scores and books. His friend Charles Blackman often stayed with him, a painter whose favourite subjects were girls and cats, and who was a devout reader of Proust. He was planning to go to Paris.

As summer approached we were finally obliged to leave Cronulla for good. While James studied Hindemith’s book during our dinner breaks, I would comb through the to-let ads in the Sydney Morning Herald. I soon came across an appealing proposal: a big house near the water. I still had a few minutes to put in a call to the person who had placed the ad. It was not long before it turned out that he too was Hungarian. We arranged to go and see the place the following day. No wonder James had smacked his lips when I had told him where I would  be going to look at a home: the bus took me to Hunters Hill, Sydney’s oldest garden suburb. The street was covered in pale purple jacaranda petals, and there were peach trees in blossom in the garden of the slate-roofed house. Mr Gruber had left Hungary before the war, had founded an import business and, together with his wife, was planning to travel to London to renew contacts there. He had no plans to include Hungary in his itinerary; none of his relatives there had survived. As my wages would barely have been enough to pay the rent, the plan was to share the house with another family until Panni’s parents managed to come, at which point we would need more room anyway. This satisfied Mr Gruber, so we sealed the deal by telephone and later at his solicitor’s office. The move itself did not involve very much as we had only two items of furniture: a kerosene heater, which an “old” Hungarian acquaintance had lent us (he later asked us to return it) and a Hoover washing machine. The latter had been sold to us by Ödön Paizs, a fellow immigrant, on the instalment plan. He had got round the contract of employment by becoming a door-to- door salesman. We packed the various odds and ends we had acquired on the back of a hired truck and made the move.

We felt at home in the spacious house. The garden’s cast-iron garden furniture imported from England reminded me of the park of my childhood home, Kivadár château. From the terrace we had a view of Sydney Harbour, and the wind wafted the blasts of ocean-going vessels our way. There was a regular ferry to the centre of town. The depot of the Vacuum Oil Company sprawled at the end of a headland jutting into the Parramatta and Lane Cove Rivers. It jarred with the area’s atmosphere, but it suited me, as I was able to get a job there with the assistance of the local employment office. Within days we had found tenants to share, the Kuchinka family, though quite how that happened I no longer recollect. There was plenty of room for all of us in the big house. It soon emerged that Tádé Kuchinka was an irascible, cantankerous chap, who was always either bickering with his wife or lecturing his daughter. Back in Hungary he had been a journalist on the Pester Lloyd. Unable to find employment in that field, he was perpetually dissatisfied with his fate, despite the fact that his wife Carla, who was Austrian and much younger, also worked, so they had two incomes, whereas we had to live off what I made as Panni could not leave our son Bert, still barely more than a babe in arms, on his own. The Kuchinka’s daughter, Csibi, went to the same school as Ancsi and they became close friends. Her parents did not have to worry about where their daughter would go after school. A kind of order was established, but under the surface a swamp of frustration continued to bubble, from which Tádé was unable, and maybe was unwilling, to extricate himself. His rows with Carla sometimes went on late into night, the tranquility of which was shattered more than once by her screams and her rush to the bathroom. It’s possible that he struck her, though otherwise he proved to be a polite gentleman, even apologising when he flared up at me over a camera. As it happened, the Kuchinkas were not around for very long as Tádé returned   to Vienna and Carla, having found a gentler partner, moved out with Csibi.

Up until then oil drums were things I had only seen in garages; at my new workplace I came into direct contact with them. The work entailed shifting 44- gallon drums that had been trundled off ships onto pallets. The pallets were then shelved by forklift in a draughty, tall warehouse, from which they were distributed by truck all over the city. A pair of thick leather gloves was provided for the job, which was hard going. Anyone who failed to get the hang of tilting the drums would struggle with a single drum while his mates hoisted dozens. I soon regretted having quit the job as a shuttle winder. When a drum slipped from my grasp I would curse profusely, in Hungarian. On hearing this, a skinny but sinewy young man came over and with a “Will you permit me, sir,” in old- fashioned, respectful Hungarian, and without waiting for an answer, he proceeded to show me how a tilted drum could be lifted onto a pallet by its own weight. That was how I got to know László Pintér, born in Makó, an Arts student at Szeged University, who had to skip the country because of something political he said. He lived in neighbouring Gladesville. From then on we worked together as a team, but however hard I tried I never really got the knack with the drums. Bill, the foreman, watched my clumsy efforts with a scowl, but he only snarled at me once—admittedly with unexpected ferocity. During loading and unloading there would always be short pauses when we stood around idly, waiting for a forklift or a ship, and Bill didn’t mind, as he himself would sit down in the little cabin that he called his office to listen to the latest sports news. This time, however, he had barely gone in and he was right back out, for he had spotted something that proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back of his patience with me. He tore me off a strip, and all I could make out from the flood of words was “akimbo”, so I was left guessing what had set him off. “Because you were standing around hands on hip,” László explained at the lunch break. “In convict days a hand on the hip was a symbol of loathed authority—the pose struck by supervisors andofficers. Bill considered the way you were holding        yourself to be a challenge, a piece ofNew-Australian effrontery, and it made his blood boil.” It reminded me of the strange way inwhich the foreman at the textile mill had spoken to me. “Well yes,” László enlightened me.“Talking out of the corner of your mouth has also come down from convict times; it’s howthey outwitted the guards. And look at the way they hold their cigarettes with the live endinside the fist.” It was possible that László, influenced by what he had read, was exaggerating a bit, and that the convicts had actually been protecting their cigarettes againstthe wind. But the fact that Australia’s first settlers were convicts and marines who guardedthem had left its mark on the psyche of a people that had grown into nationhood since the penal colony days. From then on I strove to make friends with all my Australian fellowworkers, for whom the influx of immigrants must have been just as big a  change as fitting into their world was for  us.

It may have been thanks to this incident with Bill that I was transferred to the bottle-washingsection, where returned kerosene bottles were cleaned. The premises where this was locatedwere dominated by a huge, old-fashioned furnace which supplied steam to the bottle-washingmachine. The furnace was tended by Jóska Kalmár, a tall peasant lad, and I was made hisassistant. The furnace turned out to be a capricious beast, but Joe tamed it with self-confidentauthority. He would have stood out even in a village blacksmith shop. “If you feed it too littlecoal, it goes out; too much and it blows up,” he explained, as he handed me a shovel. Ensconcedon a high throne, he himself regulated the steam with which the kerosene bottles, running roundon a conveyor belt, were washed out; any bottles from which the deposit of dirt could not beshifted he would pluck from the line and toss in a big arc into an iron bin, where theyshattered. The throw and the shattering provided a welcome relief from the monotony of thecirculating bottles, and there were times when Joe, for reasons best known to himself, wouldalso chuck away the odd clean bottle. He gave me a conspiratorial smile when he saw me following his example.

At lunchtime there were always visitors who would brew tea using steam from the furnace. Joe would stay on duty beside the furnace while I would go off to the canteen on the first floor to eat the sandwiches cut for me by Panni. On one occasion a hulking bear of a character settled down next to me. This was Kurt von Wolff. He asked me if I knew how to play bridge. I politely said yes, and he indicated a pair of other players, one a retired Dutchship’s captain, the other a diminutive Latvian lad whom I already knew as he had come by thefurnace room to dry his clothes one day when he had fallen into the water. His workmates had roared with laughter as, ashen-faced, he had dragged himself onto the pier (against which thelighter could have easily crushed him). We sat together, and the ex-skipper didn’t lose anytime in dealing. From then on we  would play cards as we ate lunch in our oil-stained overalls.After work I would  stroll home with Kurt, as he lived nearby. He was a Baltic nobleman, abaron, his wife Dita Cobb had fled with her Jewish family from Berlin to London, which was where she had met Kurt after the war. They had come to Australia after they were married. We became friends and Dita often came round for a chat. This is where she learnedhow to change nappies. She served as a baby sitter on the rare occasions when we both had to leave the children at home. She later became a highly regarded newspaper columnist andradio broadcaster, and eventually a TV personality.

One of our more remarkable new acquaintances was Ödön, a fellow Hungarian, a man nolonger young. He had been an art collector and dealer but had lost everything during the war,and anything the fascist Arrow Cross Party members had not stolen from him while he was on forced labour service, the Communists had taken after the war. He had managed to hang onto (and get out of the country) a painting by the highly regarded József Rippl-Rónai, thesole decoration in his sublet lodging. I met him in a shop selling antique furniture andtrinkets. It was owned by Bruce Arnott, a member of the famous Arnott’s Biscuits family. Thediffident Bruce was fond of talking to Ödön, an older man, and what might be described asa shop-talking camaraderie developed between them. Ödön would also pay calls on us, and during one of these conversations—I don’t remember in what context—he said, “When Iget up in the morning and look at myself in the mirror, I spit myself in the face.” Whether heintended this as a joke or a tragic confession, I do not know because I never asked. It smackedof Budapest cabaret humour, but still—why? “It’s a Pest thing,” Panni declared, and I left it at that.

The timing of Tádé’s departure and László becoming homeless (he was given notice) somehow coincided, so I suggested that he move into our place as a lodger. The lonelyyoung man who replaced the irritable Tádé instantly aroused Ancsi’s interest, and shebesieged him with all sorts of questions, such as why did he eat fried calf’s liver with onions (well seasoned with paprika) for breakfast. When she grew up, she warned him, she would behis wife, and if he resisted, she would hold his head under a tap.

Our neighbours on one side were the Pickering sisters, on the other there were nuns. On thatside the house had been converted into a convent of the Josephite teaching order. Theyimmediately took Ancsi  under their  wing, and as her sixth birthday was approaching theyprepared her for her first Communion. The Pickering ladies (a widow and her younger sister)invited us round for tea. They were the offspring of an Australian family that went back anumber of generations, and we learned much from them about Australian customs and life. Theypresented me with a wonderfully illustrated book about native birds. I used it to get to know thesongbirds that visited our garden. The sisters attended services at an Anglican church, and onone occasion I went with them. They pointed out that the rearmost two or three pews had oncebeen curtained off from the rest because that was where the convicts used to sit. The church, likemany other public buildings, was of sandstone, since it was easily available: half of Sydney sat onsandstone. After the service the sisters introduced me to the vicar, and he cordially invited me tocome again. When I pointed out that I was Roman Catholic he replied that it did not matter, hewould still be glad to see me. There was no lack of goodwill on the part of Australians, but it wasnot rare for someone to grumble on a bus or tram about “bloody foreigners” or “wogs”. TheWhite Australia policy was still in force. A dictation test was used to exclude unwanted—including non-white—immigrants. There was no disagreement among the parties on this.Anyone who was unable to take dictation in Welsh, or any other European language, was turnedback, and nobody could accuse the Immigration Department of racial discrimination.Exceptions were generally made in the case of shipwrecked crews. The Aborigines weresegregated in missions or reserves, and they were not even included in censuses until 1967: theywere not citizens of their own land, which the British colonists declared to be terra nullius,[4] orno man’s land. This act of annexation, and the total disregard for the rights of the indigenousAustralians which implied that the hunter- gatherer Aboriginals (at least what remained ofthem after massacres by early settlers) were not viable and would therefore become extinct. Theyintended to “salvage” half-caste children (black mother and white father) by seizing them fromtheir mother, if need be by force and with police assistance, placing them in state or religiousinstitutions. The goal was that these half-caste children, brought up amongst whites, should merge with the conquerors’ society becoming servants and labourers. “Forced Removal” wasthe official policy from early in the twentieth century until the end of the 1960s. The policyof assimilation also applied to us, the post-war influx of Europeans, with every possible effort being made to preserve the predominantly Anglo-Celtic character of Australian society.The dictation test was no longer used in the 1960s, but the “White Australia” policy continued tothe end of the 1970s. We were labelled “New Australian”. Later, when it became obvious thatthe assimilation policy had failed, “New Australian” was replaced by “ethnic” within the general notion of multiculturalism.

László, with his Makó-Szeged accent and knowledge of Hungarian poetry, was well armedto resist Anglicisation (or Australianisation), but he played along. He drank tea and scotch(with water but no ice), chatting away with our Australian friends like a character in a P.G. Wodehouse novel. On the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (2 June 1953) we raised oursherry glasses to drink to the health of the young queen, to whom we would be loyal Magyarsubjects, declared László’s friend Kornél, who had come round to visit. Kornél ’Sigmond was a stocky, strong and hirsute man sporting a monocle. Of noble Székely stock (presentoccupation: tram driver), he wore an ex-British Army greatcoat—“the Queen’s uniform”since the weather had turned cold. In Hungary he had been secretary to the ResearchInstitute for Public Opinion, which operated under the aegis of the Department of Psychology atthe Pázmány Péter University in Budapest. When the Communists had taken over, he told us, hehad been an immediate target, so he had skedaddled. His family had resettled from Transylvania (by then part of Romania) after Word War I, so Kornél had already known from childhoodwhat it meant to lose one’s home. He had been promoted from tram conductor to driver, whichcounted as a career promotion under present circumstances; his monocle must have reassuredhis superiors that he would not derail a tram entrusted to him. László introduced his friendwith all the enthusiasm of a disciple: Kornél was equally at home in literature, history andpsychology, and simply dazzled whomever he talked to with his ability to juggle the ideas ofboth antiquity and the modern age. At the same time, clothed in a garb of conservatism, he raised himself above bourgeois conventions and a bourgeois way of life, so on that day he notonly drank a toast to the health of the Queen of England (and Australia), but also to our ownuncrowned King of Hungary (as a member of a future loyal Opposition).

László, though taller, was the Sancho Panza to Kornél’s Don Quixote. As the evening wore on,we switched from sherry to table wine and the conversation grew ever merrier. Kornél bore astrong grudge against Gyula Ortutay, the eminent ethnographer, for carrying out the nationalisation of all Hungarian schools as the Minister of Education and alsocollaborating with the Communists in the destruction of his own party, the Smallholders. Kornélwould have “sentenced” his former friend to a place on a sprinkler truck on the streets ofBudapest. On the cleaning vehicles in use at the time one worker sitting in the back facing thestreet, had the job of revolving the various spray heads so that pedestrians and other vehicles would not be soaked by an unexpected shower, and if he did not succeed he was assailed by a flood of abuse. We laughed at Kornél’s wit. Hungary was a long way away, and we had nextto no knowledge of the real horrors that were taking place there, behind the Iron Curtain.

The next morning a grim-faced László drew me aside: “Kornél is challenging you to a duel and he has asked me to be his second,” he said (László had been informed of the challenge while accompanying Kornél to the bus stop, by which time both of them were pretty drunk). “On what grounds?” I asked with a chuckle, “What kind of prank is he contriving now?” “Because you smiled when the pianist Kornélia Kovács was mentioned. Kornél is deeply attached to the lady, and he thinks that by smiling you were casting aspersions on her morals. He demands an apology and satisfaction.” “On what   terms?” I enquired “Pistols.” László replied. “In the Botanical Gardens at dawn within three days. Name a second of your own.” I was quite happy that the scene of the duel was to be the picturesque Botanical Gardens, and I wasn’t too bothered about the pistols (I would be able to shoot into the air), but sadly I had to strip László of his illusions. “I haven’t the slightest intention of fighting any duel. Where does Kornél think we are? In Hungary, or the Wild West?” “Yes,” László responded. “That’s what he thinks, and he also has a pistol, which he purchased not long ago. As a Primor[5] it is not only his right but his duty to bear arms.” Having discharged his mission he went over to the stove in order to cook his fried liver. For my part, I pictured Kornél with a pistol in his pocket as he tinkled the bell on the tram, dreaming of Gary Cooper, or the Spanish knight and his Dulcinea, turning the pages of Vilmos Clair’s Code of Duelling in his mind, which Kornél had possibly taken down from his father’s bookcase as a boy. “I need to speak to him,” I announced to László, seized by a desire to enter the fantasy world that burgeoned around Kornél like a jungle. We met in the ground-floor bar of the venerable Hotel Australia. Labourers, shopkeepers hobnobbing with company directors were drinking at the bar, where the silvered head of Bob Menzies, the legendary prime minister, could also be seen on occasion when he visited Sydney. Kornél shepherded me to a corner table from which he could safely observe all who entered (gangsters, cowboys). I immediately got to the point, his chivalrous concern, and told him that I was not acquainted with Kornélia, sad to say, and that the smile which he had thought sarcastic and even malicious might have been prompted by a passing, involuntary scrap of thought that had come to mind, but certainly had nothing to do with her. (I made no mention of the fact that there must be something about my facial expression, the set of my mouth—something Panni had already brought to my attention—which people thought was a sarcastic or supercilious smile, the sort of thing that the English call a smirk; I later found out that my elder brother Józsi suffered a week in solitary confinement at the notorious Kistarcsa prison camp for the same sort of thing. A guard had been explaining something and had thought that Józsi had been mocking him.)

Kornél accepted my explanation and got off his high horse; he produced his cigarette case and offered me a smoke. We both lit up, a peace pipe so to speak, he apparently resigning himself to the fact that I had no intention of reciprocating his show of courage, though I could see from his eyes that he regretted having to abandon the scenario: he had demanded a duel by the light of the rising sun (if not pistols, then swords) on the lawn of the Botanical Gardens, and afterwards a handshake that would mark the beginning of our friendship. All of this in front of László, his disciple-second (for the latter’s edification). It was past five, we stretched out on our armchairs, but the spirit of  Kornélia was still there, between us. “Tell me about her,” I asked him. “It was a long time ago,” he gestured disdainfully. He drew deeply on his cigarette and then exhaled. “She initiated me to the world of music and love. I loved her, but our paths parted: she went to Paris, and I exiled myself to the Antipodes, to a white man’s island in a sea of Asians. Now we are glad to have shaken off the chaos that is Europe, but who can tell: perhaps it’s a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire. We are now living in a Kali Yuga[6] and we are all in the hands of the dark demon of destruction, who, having reduced Europe to ruins, is continuing his work in the East and the southern hemisphere. From our near neighbour, Indonesia, to India and China the nations are in ferment, blood is flowing. The dreadful monster is holding the bomb in one paw: that’s his trump card,” Kornél went on. “And how long does such a Yuga last?” I asked with some trepidation. “Roughly 4,325 years,” Kornél answered, “though opinions differ about the duration.” That reassured me. I thought of our favourite beach, Balmoral, shaded by its centuries-old fig trees, the peace that prevailed there, as if there had been no war, and the feeling I had deep down that here there was nothing to be afraid of. It was the same sort of feeling that had come over me in Bonegilla when I realised that the floor under my feet was no longer moving. “Here’s hoping that we shall find ourselves in a peaceful pocket of that horrendous length of time in which we shall have an opportunity to put right our ruined lives.” “Let’s trust in the mercy of the gods,” Kornél concluded the conversation, and never again was Kornélia mentioned.

In the year following our move to Hunters Hill Australia went into recession. Quite a few companies went broke or laid off some of their workforce. Mr Rockefeller’s company dismissed me too on the “last in, first out” principle, with Jóska Kalmár following suit and becoming a warden in Parramatta Prison; prisons evidently were not affected by the downturn in the economy. At the employment office I mentioned my work contract. “That binds you, but not us,” a cheery-faced official enlightened me. Obviously he had no reason to fear losing his job. It was almost with relief that I stepped out of the office, and I resolved then and there that from now on I was going to be my own boss. For want of anything better, I became a sales agent for Watkins, an American company, which marketed toiletry and household goods. Their salespeople lugged around cases full of samples, calling at houses in the city’s dreary suburbs, every one in a designated area. Housewives in dressing gowns, brooms in their hand or a child on their arms, would open the front door to find a door-to-door salesman speaking in a foreign accent who would pressure them to buy American articles like face cream, rouge, detergents, hair curlers and such like. If no one was buying or it rained for days on end, we would go hungry, so I took another job as well, looking after the garden of a prosperous Swiss stockbroker. His house was midway between ours and my old job. At the beginning he sent my afternoon snack out to me in the garden, and I ate in the shade of a big tree, but later on he would invite me into the house, where his wife would serve tea. On one occasion I asked him what thebest shares were. “In the long run those of the mining companies,” he said, “in  particular ofthose that dig for coal, iron ore and uranium. There is untold wealth lying hidden in theinterior of the Australian continent,” he said, his eyes sparkling. It was at that time that acanny farmer had hit upon the world’s largest deposit of iron ore in the mountains of the vastPilbara region in Western Australia.

Through a common friend we got to know the Káldors. András Káldor used to be a textile engineer with Goldberger’s in Budapest. He imported and distributed theproducts of a former colleague now settled in Britain and      the proprietor of a factory. In thecourse of an after-dinner chat, during which we had mentioned that we were now obliged toleave our lodging in Hunters Hill, he suggested that I should call on Cardinal Gilroy, thearchbishop of Sydney, taking a crucifix that I should present to him as being a gift fromCardinal Mindszenty, and that I should later mention that I wanted to buy a house. Wechuckled over the idea, which was no more absurd than many other visions of an immigrant’s fancy, but nonetheless the  next  day  I mentioned it to our neighbours, thenuns, though I kept quiet about the crucifix. The plan appealed to the sisters. They reassuredme that their prelate was a good-natured man. They rang the bishop’s secretary and fixedan appointment. On that day we went to the archiepiscopal residence, next to the sandstone St Mary’s Cathedral in the heart of the City. It was a more modest building than the palaces ofthe bishops of Veszprém or Pécs in Hungary. The Cardinal received us in a simply furnished room. At that time he was fighting the government for state support for Roman Catholicschools, and once we       were past the “small talk” he mentioned that my family name wasnot unknown to him. He had studied in Rome, where he was ordained a priest. ThroughJusztinián Serédi[7], an  older fellow priest doing research in the Vatican Library, he had met Count József Somssich, the Hungarian Minister to the Holy See. Were we perhaps related?After I had confirmed that he was my paternal uncle, the mood became much more relaxed, andthe Cardinal strongly approved of the idea of buying a place of our own. “House ownership iscentral to the Australian way of life,” he said, writing down the name of a lawyer who would beable to offer guidance. I had no wish to trouble waters by mentioning that we hadn’t apenny to our name, but perhaps there was no need to anyway: Cardinal Gilroy was the son of Irish working-class parents (his father had been a tailor’s cutter), so he was fully aware of what poverty meant, but he also knew that nothing was impossible. His smile suggested as much, and by way of encouragement he offered to give us a parting blessing. But before doing so he wanted to show us something, he said mysteriously, and he went into the adjoining room. He returned with a crucifix. “It belonged to Cardinal Mindszenty,” he said. “and was given to me by a fellow countryman of yours.” And he blessed us with it.

Mr Beswick’s law office in the City occupied the whole floor of a building. He received me behind an enormous desk in a corner room, with the window offering a view of Sydney Harbour and the Harbour Bridge. He would be able to help. But we should not count on apalace. We would be able to get a low-interest mortgage from a building society of which he was one of the directors[8].  He had several building contractors as clients and would let me know if a suitable house was put on the market. While he spoke the telephone was constantly ringing and talk of deadlines, interest rates and thousands of dollars was casually tossedabout. Mr Beswick managed his own company’s matters. He was a jovial fellow, a pillar of the New South Wales “Catholic Irish Mafia”. We parted under the impression that he was not going to forget about us, and indeed a week had not yet gone by when he rang and gave us an address. We took the train and bus to South Granville. The house stood at the end of a longstreet. It was a soundly built “fibro” house with a tile roof. The builder had built it for himself,but moved out for family reasons. Two horses were grazing on an adjacent vacant lot, andbeyond that were new factory buildings, including a cigarette works. Behind the house, at the foot of vacant lots, a creek trickled. Before we signed the 25-year mortgage Mr Beswick asked us if we were quite sure about the area in which we would be living. What he clearly had in mind had become obvious in the course of the nearly one-hour trip by train and bus: we would be moving from a well- heeled, patrician neighbourhood into a bleak working-class outer suburb, and on the edge of newly built housing or houses still under construction where even the weather was different from that of sea-breezy Hunters Hill. We turned a deafear to his word of warning. The fact that by paying a minimal deposit (part of which was lent by Mr Beswick’s finance company) and signing a low-interest, long-term mortgage, wewould be able to live in our own house outweighed any other consideration. We signed themortgage, and as soon as we were handed the keys, we packed our belongings on the back of a truck and drove to South Granville.

Panni and the two children sat next to the driver, I sat on top of the load with our dog Jimmy.We drove through West Sydney along Parramatta Road, the main road to Granville, and from there to the very end of Clyde Street and into South Granville. It was reassuring to see that the two horses were still grazing in the vacant lot, but the floor of the dining room and kitchen in our house had been stripped bare: instead of leaving behind the linoleum as he had promised, the owner had pulled it up and taken it away. That afternoon the furniture that wehad bought on hire purchase was delivered, so at least we were able to sleep in our own bed inour own house that night. A neighbour, Mrs Edwards, turned up with a platter of freshly baked scones. Her husband was an electrician who worked on construction sites. We could not haveasked for better neighbours: Mrs Edwards— Anne—told us why the previous owner had sold thehouse. Because of the sloping   land, he had built steps leading to the back door, but he had leftmaking a handrail   until later. His mother-in-law had slipped in the dark and fallen, andshortly afterwards she had died. His wife accused him of negligence and was unwilling to stay inthe house. I hurriedly saw to putting a railing in place lest an accident happen to one of us. Mymother-in-law, who had lived with us for a while in Hunters Hill, had taken a job in the country ata boarding school run by a quirky American, but she did not like the job, so we had invited her to move back in with us.

Later on my father-in-law also came to Australia and moved in. Their presence was a great assistance to us. Panni’s mother, Terry, grew up in America and spoke English moreor less as a native. She became a teacher at a correspondence school teaching English as aforeign language to immigrants and in addition also worked as a secretary of a professor at the University of Sydney. My father-in-law, by contrast, was by then in his sixties and found it hard to cope with learning a new language. His attempts to engage in business ventureswith fellow emigrants of his age were, by and large, unsuccessful, but the formerly thriving businessman and factory manager did not complain. He took on casual jobs, helped Panni out with the housework. Panni planned to make toy animals and her father helped with that, too. Drawing on the experience she had gained in the lampshade business in Rome,Panni cut out and stitched together coloured plastic sheets and scraps of material andstuffed them with cotton (using the handle of a ladle) to make teddy bears, rabbits andkittens, painting faces on them by hand. She performed the painstakingly detailed work in the sunroom: in the evenings we would lend a hand with the stuffing. The animals were a great success, not least because they were all unique. When she had managed to sell the firstbatch she bought a small car and drove around to baby shops. By that time I was working ina department store in the City, and before Easter I showed samples to the buyer in the Baby section, who put in a written order for twelve dozen bunny rabbits. I worked in thedepartment store as a sales assistant in the electrical goods section. The work was easy, but thepay was poor, I lost two or three hours a day commuting. So when I heard that an electrical store in Blacktown on the outskirts was looking for a travelling salesman I applied for the job. The owners, Paul Doff and George Skidelsky, were Russian Jews, who left the city ofHarbin in north-east China (Manchuria) after the Communists had taken over. László Zólyomi, a Hungarian travelling salesman (a guards officer in his previous life), wanted tomove on and they were looking for a replacement. A robust and vivacious man and a successful salesman, he had resigned having undertaken something more challenging. He became an estate agent running his own business. His exceptional power of persuasion hadalready been evident in Hungary when the Germans had occupied the country in March 1944. They had sought to capture the prime minister, Miklós Kállay. Zólyomi happened to be on duty in the Sándor Palace, the prime minister’s office and also residence on Castle Hill, when the Germans came. On seeing them, Zólyomi immediately signalled to Kállay that heshould flee. When the officer leading the German detachment said that he wished to ”speak” tothe Prime Minister, he claimed that Kállay was still “getting dressed”, and to pass the time heexplained and demonstrated a new Hungarian invention that would improve the fuse on handgrenades. The officer was so absorbed by the presentation that Kállay had been able toescape via an underground passage built by the Turks in the seventeenth century, which led to  the Royal Palace. From there the Turkish Minister drove Kállay to the Turkish Legationwhere he found refuge for a while. Having duped a German officer, it must have seemedchild’s play to Zólyomi to persuade immigrants who had settled in Blacktown and thesurrounding chicken farms that life was not worth living without a refrigerator, washingmachine or radiogram. Business had been booming, and Paul Doff clearly hoped that because Itoo was Hungarian, I would do just as well, if not better. He had great plans; he wanted to expand.The Snowy Mountains Scheme, a huge hydroelectricity and irrigation complex, was  then in itsfourth year, with a workforce of 7,000 to 8,000 (the majority of them immigrants fromEurope) who lived in huts or, if they had a family, in cottages. They were Paul Doff’s target.His business partner George Skidelsky and I had the task of making their lives more pleasant.

 Cooma was the headquarters of the Snowy Mountains Scheme[9]. It was our job once a fortnightto drive there. From dawn to dusk we were there to wheedle money out of the pockets of workers,technicians and engineers, who were earning multiples of European wages at that time. Amidstthe beauty of the wild landscape one barely noticed the jolting caused by the unmetalled,potholed, weather-worn dust road leading from Canberra to Cooma, dusty in summer andslippery in winter. The spectacle of the rocky, scrubby countryside, overgrown with eucalyptustrees, the flashy parakeets and the bobbing heads of inquisitive kangaroos could not havechanged much from what had greeted the pioneers when they first clambered up the mountains towering around them, snow- covered in winter, to the source of the Snowy River.The river would periodically be swollen by melt snow, and it was no easy job to tame it.

George and I would take turns driving the firm’s van. When I drove he would light up his short-stemmed pipe, filled with English cured tobacco, and amuse   me with idle chatterduring the long journey, which we often made at night. He was almost 20 years older and lived with his young wife fairly close to us in a more middle-class outer suburb. Onholidays, celebrated according to the Russian Orthodox calendar, they would throw bigshindigs to which we would be invited. At tables creaking under the weight of Russian fare wegot to know the members of the Harbin Russian colony who had made it to Sydney.

George Skidelsky’s grandfather Leon had owned a county-sized stretch of land comprisingtimber concessions, logging mills and property in Siberia, and he had headed the construction of the stretch of the Trans-Siberian railway that connected Manchuria to Vladivostok. 

The family fled to Harbin when the Bolsheviks came to power. By then the grandfather was no longer alive, but his sons, George’s father included, had carried on the business in Manchuria, exporting agricultural produce and timber, acquiring a mining lease, and supplying coal to the railway. That was up until the Japanese and then the brief Soviet occupation of Manchuria, after which it fell into the hands of Communist China for good, obliging the Skidelskys to make tracks yet again, albeit not empty-handed. Part of the family moved to England, George to Australia. He spoke excellent English, and he spoke a lot, his parents had had him schooled in England. He found it easy to chat with the engineers and workers, whether Norwegians, Ukrainians or Poles, whereas I busied myself more with the German, Hungarian and Italian customers.

George went to bed early while I would continue to walk the streets of the small town.The restaurants that offered home (i.e. European) cooking were packed on weekends. I would go into a bar in which music was being played; they would serve Serbian dishes andall sorts of other things could also be ordered: Wiener Schnitzel, spaghetti, dumplings. In factI would find it hard to list all the nationalities seated at the tables, eating and drinking, playingcards, throwing dice, or even dancing with the few women who dared to mingle with the crowdof overwhelmingly unmarried, work-hardened men. As I tucked into cevapcici with finely diced onions, it flashed through my mind that the work of  constructing a gigantic hydroelectric power station and irrigation system amid these hills and valleys would notonly transform the face of this part of the world, but also the lives of Australians across thecountry. Those sitting around me and talking in their own languages, eating their own ethnic foods (as were their fellow countrymen across Australia), would inevitably be woven into theEnglish warp of the Australian fabric. I mentioned this to George the next day. “Yes, that’show it will be, something like that,” he said. “This metamorphosis Australiæ will be the pricethat has to be paid for the Australians to inhabit this sparsely populated island[10]. The processof knitting-together however will not move ahead without hitches. Don’t think that we canescape what we left behind—we will always have to lug that around with us. And us includesthe Australians: they are also immigrants.”

We talked about all this at the house of Tibor Bisits, a Hungarian engineer. Bisits was afriend of George’s, and George would invariably pay a call on  him each time we went toCooma. His name was one I recalled from my days in Hungary back in the 1930s. With co-pilot pioneer aviator Antal Bánhidi he had flown a two-seater biplane named Gerle(“Turtle Dove”) all the way around the coast of the Mediterranean. We read about theirexploits in the boys’ magazines. “Peaceful and even enthusiastic cooperation,” said Bisits, “isdue to William Hudson, the chief engineer. He realised early on that the project was notgoing to be attainable unless the multinational work- force were forged into a unit, so hemade it his personal business to see that his workers, putting aside the war and the enmities ofthe Old World, work both with each other and with the Old Australians as equals. He preventsany form of discrimination. In that way he is also moulding Australia’s new society.”

3

It was around this time we noticed that Bert’s right leg was thinner and shorter than his leftone. We couldn’t believe our eyes; we kept looking at it,  measuring it. It was a fact. Thespecialist we took him to, Dr Wherrett, suspected polio. We could recall only one occasion—in Hunters Hill—when he had been sick. He ran a temperature; he was crying and slept fitfullyin his little   cot. We thought he had simply caught a cold, and indeed, his symptomsdisappeared within a few days. His grandmother—Panni’s mother, who had recently arrivedand lived with us, slapped his bottom when he wouldn’t stop      crying. At the time I was prettyupset with my mother-in-law. Dr. Wherrett’s diagnosis came to us like a bolt out of the blue; itcompletely upset our inner equilibrium and like the roots of a poisoned plant penetrated everycorner of our lives. The use of the Salk vaccine became common only the following year. Bertpaid no heed to his disability; although he walked with a limp in his orthopædic shoes, hedidn’t lag behind his schoolmates, whether cycling, climbing trees, or swimming.

Paul Doff’s local business began to slow down and to fill the time between our visits to Cooma I worked as a taxi driver. Among the people queuing at the taxi rank at Granville Station the drivers chose those heading the same way and would not start until their cars were full. This was called multiple hiring: having paid the customary 10 per cent of the fare to the taxi firm (which could not run a check anyway) the driver pocketed any extra profit. Any fool could see that this was good business and was worth getting into. Apart from the two miles or so of Blaxell Street in Granville known as the Golden Mile, the four-mile ride from Granville to Fairfield still further out west of Sydney was the most profitable route.

In these outer suburbs, where Italian, Yugoslav and Polish immigrants lived, new shopping centres including department stores were springing up. The minister of the Presbyteriancongregation was Attila Sóos, a Hungarian, who had studied theology in Rome and subsequently in Sydney. To support his family, he too had become a Watkins salesman at much the same time, which was how I came to know him. On one occasion he opened the doorof my cab. He told me that he had been appointed minister in Fairfield and had been given a placeto live by the church. A shopping arcade was being built behind the church, he told me. “It’s a great place to open a café. There would be somewhere to go after the service.” He had notdrunk a decent cup of coffee since his time in Rome; if I were to take the plunge, I would be the first to open a café in Fairfield. I took a look at the building site: all it consisted of was a bare shell with yawning gaps where the door and windows of the shops would be put in. I measured up the spaces as I stumbled around amid the cement sacks and wheelbarrows. Awalkway separated the row of shops from the small chapel which had been built by Scottish immigrants; one could use it as a place to put tables and chairs. After a hurried discussion Panni and I decided to go ahead. It would only have been worthwhile to continue making children’s toys if we had been willing to mechanise production, and Panni did not care to do that. The fact that neither of us had relevant business, let alone catering experience, did not even enter our minds.

Thanks to my excursions to Cooma and work as a taxi driver, as well as to the teddy bears, we hadmanaged to put aside a bit of money. The rest was lent by the shopfitting firm and the equipment makers. By the time we opened for business we were up to our ears in debt. The café was namedCapri, perhaps after a trip there from the camp in Bagnoli, the memory of which wassomehow blurred by memories of evenings spent in a Capri bar in Pest, somewhere near the Western Railway Station. In addition to us a newsagent, a women’s hairdresser, a solicitorand a radiologist had premises in the arcade. It took awhile before customers found their waythere, given that the shop fronts were not on the main road. Business was slow and we hadtrouble meeting the interest payments on our loans. So we introduced Friday and Saturdaynights dances. The music was provided by the harmonica-guitar duo of Don and Simon. Don wasan Italian lad, who for his day job delivered Coca Cola, and Simon, a Croat, was a carpenter, andthe two were fabulous musicians. Pubs in Australia had to close at ten o’clock at the time, and thecustomers, mostly European migrants who drifted over to our place after closing time, werethirsty. There were some who would ask for an “Irish coffee“, coffee and whiskey topped upwith whipped cream, but instead we offered our own concoction (we called it the “Special“ or “Pepsi“), brandy with black coffee or Coca Cola, bootleg, of course, as we had no liquorlicence. It was not long before news of our “Capri Specials” spread. Taxi drivers kept bringing the clientele and on weekends, the place was packed to the rafters. I was smiling allthe way to the bank as was the manager. Where drink is at work, there are arguments. We needed a bouncer, and I asked László if he would take on the job. If he could handle oil drums,why wouldn’t he be able to chuck out a couple of pugnacious drunks? The suggestion appealed tohim, as he thought of it as an adventure. The following weekend, with his sleeves rolled up and aconfident smile on his face, he saw to maintaining the good reputation of the premises. For somereason, however, our customers did not take to him, perhaps he seemed haughty to them, and whenhe intervened in a brawl they ganged up on him. I went to his aid and then sneaked him outthrough the churchyard to the station, where he hopped on an incoming train. By the time I got backthe rowdies had patched up their differences.

László was succeeded by Eddie Maas, an even-tempered Dutch giant of a fellow whomour guests nicknamed “Big Eddie”. He could ensure order simply by his presence. We also took on Eddie’s wife, and our neighbour Anne was active in the kitchen. I kept the bottlesof brandy in the backyard as it was easier to get rid of them if there was a raid.

The local police did not bother us because we did not cause any trouble, but when the liquorlicencing inspectors got word of what taxi drivers all over the city knew, they swooped. Disguisedas football supporters, two of their detectives ordered and were served “Specials”. When theyasked who the owner was, Panni stepped forward. I should stay in the café, she reckoned, and shewould talk to the police. Eddie’s wife had served the coffees, so she was also taken in forquestioning and fingerprinted. Panni could not refrain from dressing down the police.Recollections of the Korean war were still fresh in the minds of Australians. China’s interventioncarried the threat of further conflict and had shaken the Australians’ sense of security which hadalready been shaken during the war by the spectre of a Japanese invasion[11]. These fears fed thepolicy of “White Australia“. “The Yellow Peril is at our gates, and all you can do is worry aboutsuch piddling matters,” she rebuked the policemen, who were fiddling around with writtenstatements. But they just smiled at this New Australian woman.

The case came to court, and our lawyer’s argument that the customers had themselves putspirits in their drinks was in vain. We were fined. Our place was not suitable for a liquor licence,so we had no choice but to continue with what we had been doing, but being more cautious. Wewere on good terms with the local cops, and they continued to turn a blind eye, but we did not realize that we had aroused the suspicions of the Customs and Excise Office. One daywhen we were away one of their sleuths had a sniff around our house and  noticed that I hadbuilt a partition wall in the garage out of crates of empty bottles of brandy. I used to do mymorning yoga exercises behind it. This discovery prompted him to take a look at the Capriin order to satisfy his curiosity. He reassured us that he only wanted to know where all theliquor had come from that I kept in the many bottles. He was sceptical, to say the least, aboutmy response, which was that I just emptied the bottles and did not refill them, and that I boughtthe liquor from a firm named “Hungaria” (the owners of the firm, an elderly marriedcouple, concocted a drink using a distillate imported from Hungary; it was cheaper than Australian brandy).

The excise man suspected an illicit still. Many of the New Australians who owned a farmin the green belt would distil their own liquor, be it grappa, slivovitz or Hungarian pálinka.There was a flourishing black market in such hooch, with clubs and restaurants buying it and avoiding tax.

Just as the Capri changed from a quiet café into a rowdy night club, so the kitchen staff turnedover. My father-in-law would still lend a hand, but Anne was replaced by Juliska, a shapelylady from the Voivodina[12] a superb cook, who baked homemade cakes to order. They weredelivered by her boyfriend Jóska Vighogyel, also Hungarian, and when we took Juliska on, he too became a frequent guest. Vighogyel left Hungary before the 1956 Revolution, getting a headstart, as it were, on the Hungarians who came to Australia after the Revolution was crushed. Hehad been a tractor driver, and he had schemed until he got a job on a state farm directly along the border. He fitted bullet-proof iron sheets to his best tractor and behind this shield he swoopeddown on the gate at the frontier crossing. By the time the Hungarian border guards got over their surprise he had reached Austria; the story even made the papers. He was a burly, pockmarked fellow whose very eyes radiated humour and audacity. He made friends with an Australian small farmer who let him use his shed as a workshop where he set up livingquarters for himself in one corner. The other farmers in the district soon found out about him and they brought him tools, machines and chicken coops that needed mending. They let himkeep whatever was beyond repair, and he collected unwanted odds-and-ends from them. The areaaround the shed became a junkyard where spare part hunters and scrap dealers would pick upparts among discarded sewing machines, car engines, lawnmowers, chaff cutters and sheets ofiron. Jóska had no time left for cake deliveries. Juliska, too, had given up baking and had givenus notice, because she was planning to open her own restaurant with a new partner, who back in Budapest had been a chef at the Dunapalota-Ritz Hotel. This was in Kings Cross, the bohemian district of Sydney, and their cooking drew in Hungarians and other customers fromfar and wide. Vighogyel himself was not averse to driving the twelve miles or more to get a bitof his old girlfriend’s grub. Their relationship blossomed anew. They bought a house and movedin together.

The Keményvári twins were the first of the ’56 refugees to cross the door- step of the Capri.They and their younger sister, along with a few companions, had left Hungary in an old bombof a truck. They were tall, self-confident young men and their manner betrayed an old gentrymiddle-class background, which even a decade of Communism had been unable to obliterate.The two lads had taken jobs as truck drivers on the Sydney-Adelaide route, the uncrownedking of which was my landsman and neighbour, Jóska Balatincz, from Szigetvár. The twinswere followed by many fellow ’56-ers and the Capri became a sort of information centre and meeting place for the ’56 refugees who had ended up in that part of the world. There weremany who helped, from the bank manager to the editor of a Polish paper, and Attila Sóos,who mobilised his flock to  provide support to the Hungarian refugees.

The tailor Ferenc Zsidró received his customers at a table in the Capri, showing them samples. That was the time when zip flies and slacks for women came into   fashion—he had plenty of work. A sharp young woman who had worked in the meat industry back home noticed thatabattoirs would throw sheep’s and pigs’ intestines in the rubbish since no one wanted them. Onan outlying farm she set up a plant where these were washed and sold to European butchers and meat processors. Initially she made the necessary telephone calls from the Capri. Herengaging manner and well-groomed appearance belied the image her occupation evoked. Kapui,a painter and decorator, got on first-name terms with Prince Pál Esterházy in the lock-up of thedreaded secret police headquarters of ÁVÓ on Andrássy Avenue. His off-sider, the gnome-likeepileptic Lajos, spent his weekend  nights at the Capri, as he had no family. As we knew about hiscondition, he got  his coffees plain, but even plain coffee got him high and he would startdancing on his own. With his awkward, yet somehow graceful movements and unexpected littlehops he managed to express what he was unable to put into words.

4

 We sold the business at the end of the 1950s and then our house as well, moving to Chatswood, on the North Shore. We found ourselves in a very different world compared with our first dwelling, in a neighbourhood for Sydney’s well-to-do middle class, the leafy garden suburbs on the North Shore. It was like moving from a Pest suburb to verdant Buda. Panni became the manager of the coffee shop of a newly built department store, and I becamean agent for Carinia, who imported and distributed European gramophone records. We bought asolid brick home close to Bert’s school on account of his leg. Ancsi enrolled at university and I started my own business, which I registered as   Omnisound. I imported gramophone needles and records from Japan and Europe. The rapid spread of stereo and hi-fi equipmentensured a growing market and my firm flourished. I had extensions built to our house, and anoffice and storeroom on the lower level. I worked from home; others wasted hours in ever-denser traffic jams. Recollecting the advice I had been given by the Swiss stockbroker, I started to buy stocks and shares. Panni had trouble with her eyes, then because of maculardegeneration she gradually lost her eyesight, but she did not stop working. She would box upOmnisound goods and take on other manual jobs. As she had learned to touch-type when she was young, she was able to write letters and sketches in English on a “talking” typewriterand later a computer doing her correspondence and writing short stories. Her memory andmanual dexterity helped her overcome all obstacles, and she never complained.

Jóska Aczél started his first repair shop in one of Sydney’s outer suburbs, but later hemoved closer to the city. At first he refused to handle German cars, but as time went by he saw that the wartime generation was being replaced by a new one, so he took on a dealership for Volkswagen spare parts.

Kornél got married and also moved to the other side of the Harbour, to North Sydney. Heenrolled at university and got a degree in librarianship, landing a job in the library of the University of New South Wales. His wife Rita was a journalist and Australian by birth; shevalued her husband’s complex personality, which Kornél was able to develop freely with herat his side. He was a night owl. On weekends he could be found in Sydney’s bohemianquarter, pistol in pocket, in the company of artists, Zen philosophers, and other odd fish.Legends began to circulate about him, most of which he authored. Later he became chieflibrarian at the Bendigo Technical College (later University). He bought a spacious house inBendigo where there was plenty of room for his library, which until then had crowded his small dwelling.

László studied accountancy and then went into partnership with an Englishman. The floor of our house in Chatswood was fitted with parquetry sheets they manufactured (unfortunately we had to have them removed a few years later as the parquet warped). For a while he had a Hungarian girlfriend, but then, after a torrid courtship, he married a good-looking Australian woman who bore him two children. Following the collapse of his business he handled the finances of a medium-sized company. His marriage broke up, and after his retirement he moved to the country, renting a flat above a butcher’s shop and writing mythologically inspired poetry in English.

James Murdoch toured Europe with a Spanish dance troupe. His life was changed for good by an unfortunate accident; he cut the nerves in his hand on a sharp dagger and was unable to play the piano afterwards. He moved to England and became the assistant of Peter Maxwell Davies, the avant-garde composer, organising concerts of his music in many places, including Hungary. On my way home from a late night visit I caught sight of a swaying figure in the drizzling mist on Pacific Highway. I recognised James; he had returned to Australia.

    At first he worked for a newly established record company. Then, under the aegis of ABC, he introduced contemporary Australian composers on radio and TV and also wrote a book about them. Later, as director of the Australian Music Centre, he coordinated performances and lectures connected with the Bartók centenary in 1981, drawing me into his work as well. He carried on his activities as a maker and writer of documentaries after moving to Bali, and I visited him on several occasions in a villa built on a riverside hill. 

   We made many new friends in our new surroundings, and we witnessed and participated inAustralia’s renewal and continued progress. With the granting of equal rights to indigenous Australians and the acceptance of refugees in the wake of the Vietnam War the White Australia policy became a thing of the past. It was replaced by multiculturalism, which furthered the immigration of Asians, Africans and Pacific Islanders. They came in droves, political and economic refugees alike, and Australia’s Eurocentric society underwent yet another transformation. The lure of commerce banished the spectre of the Yellow Peril, as Japan and China became Australia’s largest trading partners. Then—in 1992— the High Court of Australia delivered its landmark Mabo decision on Aboriginal land rights thereby nullifying the legal fiction of terra nullius. What had once been no man’s land became everyone’s land.

  2009 Chatswood, NSW Australia

          Translated by Tim Wilkinson.

 Thanks to Ann Major for her help in editing the English version of this memoir, which was published in “The Hungarian Quarterly” in 2011.

 ________

Footnotes

[1] Displaced Person

[2] International Refugee Organisation.

[3] During World War II she was an escort aircraft carrier. After the war she    was converted into a troop carrier and eventually into an immigrant ship.

[4] In International Law ‘terra nullius’ describes empty land that no one owns.

[5] Székely nobleman.

[6] According to Hindu philosophy—and Kornél—the world goes through four ages — yugas, which change cyclically like the seasons. The last of these is the Kali Yuga, after which the universe will be destroyed, then reborn, and a new cycle will begin.

[7] Jusztinián Serédi (1884–1945) was the legation’s canon law counsellor. From 1928 Prince Primate of Hungary

[8] Everybody was given the opportunity of buying a house as long as he had work (income) and cash for the deposit.

[9] The construction of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme remains one of the greatest engineering feats in the world today. It interlocks seven power stations and 16 major dams through 145 kilometres of trans-mountain tunnels and 80 kilometres of aqueducts. It provides electricity for three major towns and water for irrigating the inland’s arid soil. An estimated 100,000 people worked on the Scheme between 1949 and 1974, the year of its completion. Two-thirds of them were newly arrived immigrants from Europe. The joint efforts of former wartime enemies and squabbling nationalities symbolized the maturation of Australia and the birth of multiculturism.

[10] Arthur Calwell, a minister in the wartime cabinet was the chief architect of Australia’s postwar immigration scheme. He overcame the resistance of trade unions and voters, convincing them of the necessity of mass immigration with the argument of  ”populate or perish”. However, he remained a staunch advocate of the White Australia Policy.

[11]  In the Second World War, the Japanese bombed Darwin, occupied New Guinea and destroyed several Australian cargo ships. Three of their midget submarines penetrated Sydney Harbour and launched torpedoes at the USS Chicago and other shipping. All three mini-subs were sunk.

[12] The Serbian region called Voivodina was part of Hungary until 1918.

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