We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 115
SUMMER 2008
MEMOIR
Nursery Rhymes and Falling Stars
Peter Skrzynecki
The year 2009 will mark the sixtieth anniversary of my Polish/
Ukrainian family’s migration to Australia. It will also be the year in which my poetry migrates back to Poland to be translated from English into Polish. Strange circles are being completed in 2009.We arrived in Sydney on 11 November 1949 on board the General R M Blatchford as part of a government program to bring workers to this country. I was four years old. The back of my passport photograph in 1949, as well as those of my parents, carried the inscription ‘Worker for Australia’. A strange classification for a four-year-old boy, one who would go on to spend the rest of his life handling words and knowledge
for a living, never a pick or shovel.
After our arrival, language was the primary hurdle: in the classroom or in the street, in the shops of small country towns or while being transported over the Blue Mountains on the zigzag railway the night of our arrival in Sydney. ‘Zigzag’? What did the word mean? Seven years later, I was invited to ride on this train to the Blue Mountains as part of a school friend’s birthday celebrations and immediately made the connection. I remembered that I had been on the ‘zigzag’ train before. It
was a train that did not travel in a straight line. It zigged and zagged its way up steep blue inclines. Zig zag.
We lived in Bathurst for two weeks. Then, while my father lived and worked in Sydney, my mother and I were transferred further west, to another migrant camp in Parkes. This was a converted air force training centre. Under a hot sun or under the icy stars, surrounded by the khaki bush, hills of wattle, paddocks of sheep and wheat where white cockatoos
screeched and crows cawed, I developed my love for the Australian landscape. It was there that I undertook my first lessons in English. It started with nursery rhymes and children’s poetry, not that either my mother or myself knew the difference. But it was words, the rhythm of lines and the rhyme of words – sounds that stirred the blood and made you clap your hands, made you sing, smile and be happy. I knew nothing about money, government immigration schemes or our refugee status, nothing about the officialdom that ruled our lives. I was happy because I was with my mother and even happier when my father visited.
In the camp I attended a preschool while my mother worked as a domestic for various families and on one farm in particular, ‘Bartley’s Creek’. When she returned from work, and we were alone in our hut, I would teach her the rhymes and songs that I had learnt during the day. ‘Little Jack Horner’, ‘Baa-Baa Black Sheep’, ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. While she sang or recited, I made hand actions and played out various rhymes. I especially liked being Little Jack Horner because he got to pull out a plum every time he put his finger into his
Christmas pie – and I liked plums very much!
‘Bartley’s Creek’ is significant in this growth of my awareness of words and their sounds. Occasionally, my mother would allow me to accompany her to this property on the condition that I was to play within the immediate vicinity of the homestead. Three years earlier, in a Displaced Persons’ camp in Germany, I had wandered off and ended up falling into a cesspool. Only the fortunate intervention of an unknown woman who saw my
hand sticking up – and the fact that I was wearing a balaclava – prevented me from drowning. There was a spacious lawn in the grounds of ‘Bartley’s Creek’, visible from most rooms where my mother worked. Anxious for my safety, she would say firmly, ‘Play there, where I can see you.’
While my mother worked she sang to herself, and her voice, above the sounds of car wheels driving over a cattle grid, dogs barking, wind blowing through eucalypts and casuarinas, a gate opening and closing outside the laundry, gave the day’s outing a richness of sensory perceptions – like the first visual impressions – seeing a dead wedge-tailed eagle strung across the gate of the property when we arrived after being picked up
from the migrant camp – or seeing sheep rubbing their woolly rumps on the trunks of trees. While she worked in the laundry my mother used a washboard, and, like my mother, it had a voice of its own.
Washboard
My mother washed clothes
for ‘the lady of the house’
in two concrete tubs in the laundry –
on the farm in Parkes
where she worked each week,
she would travel from the migrant hostel
five or six miles away.
In the tub her arms disappeared
in soapsuds up to the elbows
and she sang as she rubbed
the clothes on a washboard –
such a marvellous invention
that she laughed and said it must be
a musical instrument
because of the music it made.
Her fingers made the washboard sing
with a snare-drum rhythm
through cotton, canvas and woollens.
The soapsuds burst, made
tiny popping sounds
and the happy splish-splash of water
was a song we shared – even though
the times together came with a warning.
‘Don’t go far away,’ she’d say.
‘Always play where I can see you.’
Fifty years later –
‘the lady of the house’ has died.
My mother’s hands
are as wrinkled as an old grey tree
and from a distance I stand
and watch her in the laundry
beside her washing machine.
The washboard sometimes
echoes in my head with the song
of old-fashioned washing –
the same sounds that a child
once loved to hear as he played
never stopping to ask their meaning.
In the camp there were also English classes for adults. Today, these would be called ESL classes. My mother had been quick in picking up English in her work environment, but she also went to these classes. When she did I was left to be minded by friends. When she returned she would try to teach me what she had learnt, especially those rhymes that dealt with vowels, such as, ‘When I say O/ My mouth goes so /O... O...O...’ Or, ‘How now brown cow?’ And she would point to a picture of
a brown cow in a book. Then I would repeat after her ‘O...O...O...’ Or, pointing to a picture of ship, she would say, ‘This is a ship.’ Then, pointing to a picture of a sheep, she would say, ‘The ship is not a sheep.... Can you hear the difference?’
How much the gift of language and storytelling came from her I can only guess. There were times she told me stories of her girlhood, of growing up in the Ukraine, of mountains called the Carpathians. She talked of her brothers and sister. One brother was alive, the other had died in the war. His name was Peter. She said she named me after him. She said she was homesick and would like to see her mother again. Sometimes she cried. More than once at night we walked beyond the perimeter, along the Orange Road, looking at the stars, my hand in hers,
while she told me stories. True or not, it didn’t matter. If we saw a falling star she would say, ‘Look. Someone has died and their soul is going to heaven.’ I believed her. She told me stories about her family but she never talked about my father not being my biological father. I was now six years old and knew that Feliks Skrzynecki, my adopting father, had come into our lives in that other camp. When I grew up, I would learn
that this was the Displaced Persons’ camp in Lebenstedt, in Germany, where she and I lived. As far as I was concerned Feliks was my father and that was all that mattered. Forty-eight years later, shortly before she died, my mother would tell me my biological father’s name and where she kept a photograph of him. Her stories and mine spun us along, as we walked and talked in the dark, in the crisp cold air of the western plains. Eventually we turned back, guided to our hut by the
lights of the camp.
While my mother and I lived this existence in the migrant hostel, my father worked for the Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board in Sydney as a pipe-layer, a ‘pick-and-shovel man’ and would visit us once a month, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less. When newcomers like us migrated to Australia we were called ‘New Australians’ until taking out citizenship. A contract had been signed with the Australian government that men would go to work for two years where there was a demand for manual labour. During that time the cost of our transportation from Europe had to be paid back. The men went to work in places like the Snowy Mountains Scheme, to factories in Sydney, for the Water Board and on the railways, to the mines of the Illawarra and the Hunter Valley, to the cane fields in northern New South Wales and Queensland.
One of the images from this time is of my mother and me waiting on the platform in winter on the Parkes railway station, watching for smoke to appear on the horizon. When it did, it meant that the train was coming from Sydney and my father as well as the other fathers would be on it. That meant presents. Dolls, games of Snakes-and-Ladders or Ludo, pop guns and spinning tops, bicycles and scooters. The play with words would begin in my head with the sound of words like ‘pop guns’ or ‘spinning tops’. The guns ‘popped’ their corks when shot and the tops ‘spun’ magically, as if they were never going to stop.
After our two years in the camp we returned to Sydney and moved to the western suburbs where my father had put a deposit on a house in Regents Park – a suburb that was mostly bushland, but connected with rail transport to the city and other suburbs. A creek ran behind our house. Bulrushes and watercress grew in it. Guppies lived in its recesses. The bush was mostly filled with paperbarks, wattles and prickly scrub.
Blackberries grew along the creek, as did wild peach trees and lemons. It would become my childhood paradise. Birds too numerous to count sang from dawn to sunset.
As idyllic as it was to me, it did not compensate for the farms and rural life that my parents had left behind in Poland and the Ukraine. As soon as my father had bought the gardening equipment needed, my parents set about creating a flower and vegetable garden. They worked tirelessly, on weekends and after work, weather permitting. Soil was dug, plots arranged, seeds and seedlings planted. Season after season, year after year, the gardening rituals continued. The skills they possessed
in Europe were transferred to Australia, in the grounds of a fibro
cottage, until flowers bloomed like wildfires in the front of the house, vegetables and fruit trees filled the backyard and chooks flourished in their allotted fenced-off corner.
I attended the local convent school without giving much thought to what my parents were achieving. My father continued working for the Water Board and my mother found work as a domestic for a number of families in another suburb. My parents went to work, they brought home money, we ate the food they grew; we went to church on Sundays and socialised with friends afterwards, the friends coming to our house or we going to theirs. However, below the surface, I knew there was tension, a concern about the house being paid off in time – how careful
one had to be with money, that it was not to be wasted. We were moving forward on a tide of progress and working-class prosperity but there was always a sense of an invisible tide waiting to move against us if we failed. At least that was what I thought. My worry was needless because the house was paid off in four years, but subconsciously I probably felt that I was not equalling the efforts of my parents. I was not the brightest
pupil at school. Bad at arithmetic, I earned the title ‘dill’ from one of the sisters of St Joseph. I felt shame and humiliation because I didn’t understand the long division of money.
However, I was good at spelling and compositions,remembering what words meant even though I didn’t own a dictionary. I knew about sentences and their construction. I even won first prize in English. I was good at words. So what? Words didn’t pay the bills or plant vegetables that could be eaten. I read comics, listened to serials on the wireless and mentally participated with my heroes in their adventures. What good was it having an imagination in a world where pragmatism and bank interest rates prevailed? I wrote, hoping to find compensation in my
own world, with the world of the gardens always in the background.
Blood Plums
Fruit of my childhood
and a time
when language
was still strange –
when vowels and consonants
had to be learnt
in new combinations
and tomorrow was a school
that always had to be attended.
Of all the fruits
my parents grew
in the backyard garden
the plums’ colours
shone the darkest –
green, mauve, a clotting red,
among apples, peaches, mandarins.
Their flesh was soft,
almost human,
bruising easily
when squeezed
or dropped.
Sweet juice dripped from lips,
ran down fingers,
onto clothes and kitchen lino.
This was Australia,
my parents would say –
where we’ll have plenty
of everything
because we work for it:
a house, nice clothes,
good food,
one day, even a car.
I never thought
what any of this meant
except when I had to learn the language.
Words came easily,
their meanings and phrases,
spelling, grammar, tenses.
I was able to describe
the fruits that grew in our garden
when I wrote my compositions.
And yet, sometimes
I’d write uneasily –
remembering how hard
my parents were working
to save money
to pay off the house they dreamt
of owning as soon as possible.
The image of blood plums
figured in my head
when I wrote like this and stopped to think.
They never tasted
as sweet as when picked from the trees
and I’d hurriedly blot the ink.
It was not just a journey to another country for me that began in
1949, but a journey also into another language, a language where I learnt about metaphor, symbolism, imagery, syntax, where I studied history and languages. Whenever I travel to Europe I am acutely aware that I had my beginnings there and something in my blood responds jarringly to that knowledge; but Australia is now my home and I would never live anywhere else.
My earliest childhood memories of Australia return frequently with their magic and mystery, their undying sense of wonder – and, equally jarringly, I respond again to those walks with my mother. Again I am listening to the stories she is telling. We watch a star falling. We laugh in our hut while we play out the parts of nursery rhymes. We are waiting on a railway platform in a country town in the frosty morning, craning our necks above the crowd to see if we can glimpse smoke on the horizon.
Or I am in a shop in a suburb in Sydney, buying lollies, waiting to get served. I can hear other children talking. I know what the words mean.
PUBLICATIONS
Poetry
There, Behind the Lids, Lyrebird Writers, 1970
Headwaters, Lyrebird Writers, 1972
Immigrant Chronicle, University of Queensland Press, 1975
The Aviary, Edwards & Shaw, 1978
The Polish Immigrant, Phoenix Publications, 1982
Night Swim, Hale & Iremonger, 1989
Easter Sunday, Angus & Robertson, 1993
Time’s Revenge, Brandl & Schlesinger, 1999
Old/New World: New & Selected Poems, University of Queensland Press, 2007
Short Stories
The Wild Dogs, University of Queensland Press, 1987 (reprinted 2007)
Rock ’n’ Roll Heroes, Hale & Iremonger, 1992
Novels
The Beloved Mountain, Hale & Iremonger, 1988
The Cry of the Goldfinch, Transworld, 1996
Memoir
The Sparrow Garden, University of Queensland Press, 2004 (reprinted 2007)
Anthologies
Joseph’s Coat: An Anthology of Multicultural Writing in Australia, Hale & Iremonger, 1985
Influence: Australian Voices, Transworld, 1997
PETER SKRZYNECKI was born in Germany in 1945 and migrated to Australia in 1949. He has won several awards including the Grace Leven Poetry Prize and the Henry Lawson Short
Story Award. In 1989 he was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the Polish government. In 2002 he received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to multicultural
literature. His memoir, The Sparrow Garden, was shortlisted for the National Biography Award. He is an adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at the
University of Western Sydney.
Island, PO Box 210, Sandy Bay, Tasmania 7006 Australia
Ph: (03) 6226 2325 Fax: (03) 6226 2172
E-mail: island.magazine@utas.edu.au