Biruta Pabrants (1922-1965): Was she happy?

The biographies posted here so far, with one exception, have been of men of achievement. 

Elsewhere, I have written the stories of two women of achievement from the First Transport, for a Canberra centenary celebration on the online Australian Women’s Register (Tündern-Smith 2013a, 2013b). The story of another woman of achievement, Helgi Nirk, is on this blog now too. 

Many of those on the First Transport would have been glad just to live a quiet life in Australia after seven years of turmoil, which started for them with the Soviet invasion of the Baltic States in the 1940 summer. They included 112 women, whom I have summarised in an article published in the Canberra Historical Journal (Tündern-Smith, 2020). 

Here is more detail about the life of one of the quiet women, Latvian-born Biruta Pabrants. We do not know much about her early life, only that was born in Riga, the capital of Latvia, on 22 August 1922 and she had had 7 years of primary school and 5 years at secondary school. 

Her ‘general appearance’ was rated ‘above average’ by the Australian selection team. She appeared before these three men in the Butzbach DP Camp on 14 October 1947. She travelled there, possibly even in the back of a truck, from a DP Camp in Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main in the middle of the far west of Germany.

A smiling Birute photographed in October 1947,
in preparation for her voyage to Australia
Source:  NAA: 2571/1, 201

The General Stuart Heintzelman sailed from Bremerhaven on 30 October, so those two weeks of her life must have been hectic indeed. They included a chest X-ray on 22 October, which detected no signs of tuberculosis (NAA: A11772, 784). Everything else about her health was fine, there was no record with security agencies, so she was ready to go! 

We have the declaration she made to a Customs official at the Graylands Army base in Perth, the day after her arrival in Australia. This says that her previous occupation was ‘saleswomen’ and her expected occupation in Australia was ‘domestic’. One page of her selection papers said that her ‘present occupation’ in Germany was a ‘domestic worker’, with two years of experience. Another page says that she had worked as a ‘sales clerk’ in Hanau for one year also. 

She also was ‘Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue’, as the popular American song of the 1920s put it, with blond hair as well. She brought no money at all to Australia. The blond hair and blue eyes caught the attention of newspaper photographers. On the very day of their arrival in Australia, the Perth Daily News had front page photographs of some of the passengers including Biruta.

The caption for this page 1 photo read, "These three Latvian domestics--J Zogorska (sic), B Pabranto (sic) and A. Marchilevics--are going to Canberra"
Source:  Perth Daily News, 28 November 1947

The arrival in Melbourne led to another newspaper photograph, at the top of page 1 of the Sun News-Pictorial of 9 December 1947. Biruta is sitting on the right, facing the camera. While her hair looks dark in the Daily News photograph, the Sun photographer caught the blond colouring better.

Biruta is on the right of this group, attracting some of the stares
Source:  Reinhold-Valter Põder collection, Estonian Archives in Australia

One passenger list on a National Archives file records that Biruta left the Bonegilla camp for her first job in Canberra on 14 December 1947, only five days after the train trip from Port Melbourne to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre (NAA: PP482/1, 82). This makes her one of the first group to be sent into the community to work. Her English must have been excellent to earn her inclusion, although rated only ‘fair’ in the selection papers. 

A list recording the distribution of Aliens Registration Certificates to the new arrivals in January 1948 shows that Biruta was resident at and working in the Mulwala House (NAA: A437/1, 1948/6/11; ArchivesACT (2019)). She received another Aliens Registration Certificate on 12 October 1951, when she was still living at Mulwala House (NAA: A437/1, 1948/6/469). Presumably she was working there still. 

She next appears in the public record on 7 March 1955. It was then a legal requirement that anyone applying for Australian citizenship had to publish a notice of their intention in two Australian newspapers. The Canberra Times, page 3, was one of her choices. Note that Biruta used the opportunity of applying for citizenship to drop the very Latvian ‘S’ from the end of her family name.

Biruta's notice of intention to apply for naturalisation
Source:  Canberra Times, 7 March 1955

There being no objections raised, Biruta became an Australian citizen on 21 June of that year. She took part in an ‘impressive, but largely informal ceremony’ according to the Canberra Times report of the following day. 

Newspaper report of Biruta's naturalisation ceremony
Source:  Canberra Times, 22 June 1955

Only six years since the commencement of Australian citizenship on Australia Day 1949, the ceremonies which still surround the grant of it were important enough for detailed journalism. This included foreshadowing Biruta’s participation in the Canberra Times of the preceding day.

The Canberra Times foreshadows Biruta's receipt of citizenship

as 'Miss Ruth Pabrant', 20 June 1955

True happiness at last? The Canberra Times’ social pages of 15 October 1958 reported the marriage of Biruta, using the name ‘Ruth Pabrant’, and Edward Finlay on the previous Monday, 13 October. A Monday wedding suggests that it was not celebrated in a church.

'Social Diary' record of Biruta's bridal shower and wedding

Canberra Times, 15 October 1958

The next public record for Biruta Pabrants is about her death, on or about 18th September 1965. 

The Canberra newspaper's death notice used Biruta's married name,
not the one she had assumed later,
and recorded her as still married to Edward Finlay
Canberra Times, 28 September 1965

It occurred in Sydney, only seven years later. By this time she was using the name ‘Ruth Veenendaal’ but was still known also as ‘Ruth Finlay’. The only marriage noted on her death certificate was that to Edward Finlay and there were no children, but this marriage cannot have lasted given the change of family name.

We know that this certificate is for our Biruta or Ruth because the father’s name is given as Karl Pabrant. While there is no date of birth, the place of birth is Riga and the length of residence in Australia, 18 years, tallies roughly with Biruta’s November 1947 arrival (‘Ruth Welta Veenendaal’, 1965). 

Some of those who knew her back in Canberra thought she had married a Dutchman and that the death was a suicide. They were wrong, but their ideas indicate that she was known to be unhappy. 

Women and men had suffered a great deal during those seven years of war and its aftermath. Today, we have counsellors at the ready after major disasters. We acknowledge that the Australian military, and civilians too, can suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. 

During and after World War I, “shell shock” was an acknowledged medical condition. In reality, it was a form of PTSD under another name. It seems that the mental health lessons of World War I were forgotten through World War II and subsequent conflicts, like the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency. 

It took the Vietnam War and its mental toll on those who survived fighting in it for psychiatry to recognise PTSD. This was twenty and more years too late for survivors of World War II. 

Biruta’s death certificate says that she died from ‘myocardial degeneration'. Wait a moment! These days, mainstream medicine acknowledges the existence of ‘broken heart syndrome’. According to America’s Mayo Clinic (n.d.), it’s ‘often brought on by stressful situations and extreme emotions’. 

Biruta’s myocardial degeneration occurred in the days when much less was known about treating heart disease. A relationship between extreme unhappiness and cause of death cannot be ruled out in Biruta’s case. 

She must have died alone, since the death certificate notes that she died ‘on or about 18 September’. No-one else was present to give an exact time or even date of her passing. Despite this lonely death, the cause was so evident to the examining doctor that an inquest was declared unnecessary by the Coroner at Sydney on 1 November 1965, as noted on the death certificate. 

Biruta died intestate, without a will. The New South Wales Public Trustee included her name and description (married woman, late of Point Piper, NSW) in a Government Gazette of 1 July 1966. 

The informant recorded on Biruta’s death certificate was Zenta Liepa, another Latvian woman who had come to Australia on the First Transport. Zenta lived in Canberra from the time she was sent there to work in December 1947. Since the date of presumed death is a Saturday, she may have gone to Sydney to visit Biruta/Ruth, but found no-one answering the door. The date of registration for Biruta’s death is a Sunday, so Zenta must have had an awful weekend dealing with her friend’s death. 

Biruta’s early death is one of four I can think of immediately, where the woman passenger from the First Transport passed away aged 50 or less — despite all the medical tests they had in Germany, on board the Heintzelman on Fremantle Roads, and in the Bonegilla camp. 

Zenta herself died at the early age of 60, from lung cancer caused by smoking in her case. I have recorded Zenta’s notable career in entomology elsewhere (Tündern-Smith, 2013b). 

Of the 37 women whose dates of death are known to me, the median age of death is a much healthier 81. Biruta, only 25 days past her 43rd birthday is the youngest, while another Latvian woman died at 43 years, 5 months and 16 days of age from then untreatable kidney failure. 

On the other hand, the oldest age at death of a woman was a hearty 98 for Regina Meinhold and I am aware of at least three women still alive aged 87 or in their 90s. One of the men lived past his 101st birthday. Many of the General Heintzelman passengers have proven to be at least as sturdy as their selectors hoped, if not more so.

REFERENCES 

ArchivesACT (February 2019) Mulwala House: 'Our house in the middle of the street', https://www.archives.act.gov.au/find_of_the_month/2019/february/previous-find-of-the-month-22019, accessed 29 June 2021.

Australian Broadcasting Commission Radio National (15 September 2014) ‘The history of forgetting, from shell shock to PTSD’, https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/hindsight/the-history-of-forgetting/5744242, accessed 10 July 2021.

Canberra Times (7 March 1955) Advertising, p 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article91194372, accessed 30 March 2021.

Canberra Times (15 October 1958) ‘Canberra Diary’, p 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/103123869, accessed 30 March 2021.

Daily News (28 November 1947) ‘Pretty Girl Migrants’, Perth, p 1 (CITY FINAL), accessed 29 Jun 2021, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article79814870, accessed 16 July 2021. 

Estonian Archives in Australia, Reinhold-Valter Põder collection.

Mayo Clinic (n.d.) Broken heart syndrome, https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/broken-heart-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20354617, accessed 29 June 2021. 

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A437/1, Correspondence files, class 6 (aliens registration), 01 Jan 1946 - 31 Dec 1950; 1948/6/469, Record of issues of Registration Certificates in the ACT. 

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A11772, Migrant Selection Documents for Displaced Persons who travelled to Australia per General Stuart Heintzelman departing Bremerhaven 30 October 1947, 1947 – 1947; 784, PABRANTS Biruta DOB 22 August 1922. 

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A12508, Personal Statement and Declaration by alien passengers entering Australia (Forms A42), 01 Jan 1937 - 31 Dec 1948; 35/358, PABRANTS Biruta born 22 August 1922; nationality Latvian; travelled per GENERAL HEINTZELMAN arriving in Fremantle on 29 November 1947. 

National Archives of Australia: Department of Immigration, Central Office; A2571, Name Index Cards, Migrants Registration [Bonegilla], 1947 - 1956; 201, Paabo, Albert to Palczewskyj, Borys. 

New South Wales Government 24 Jun 1966 'In the matter of the estates of the undermentioned deceased' (Ruth Welta Veenendaal), Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales, p 2593, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article220019032, accessed 14 Jul 2021. 

‘Ruth Welta Veenendaal’ (1965) Death certificate of Ruth Welta Veenendaal (also known as Ruth Finlay), 18 September 1965, (Registration no. 5092/1965) (certified copy), NSW Births, Deaths and Marriages, https://familyhistory.bdm.nsw.gov.au/lifelink/familyhistory/search?30. 

Sun News-Pictorial (9 December 1947) ‘Smiles Welcome Them To New Homeland’, Melbourne, in the Reinhold-Valter Põder collection, Estonian Archives in Australia, Sydney. 

Tündern-Smith, A (2013a) Koobakene, Salme (1919 - 1998), The Australian Women’s Register, http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE4860b.htm, accessed 16 July 2021. 

Tündern-Smith, A (2013b) Liepa, Zenta (1927 - 1987), The Australian Women’s Register, http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE4910b.htm, accessed 15 July 2021. 

Tündern-Smith, A (2020) First Baltic migrants for Canberra, 1947, Canberra Historical Journal, pp 34-43.

Helgi Nirk (1919-2005): Tomato breeder

Updated 23 May 2023.

 

ABC television’s Gardening Australia featured a packet of Burnley Bounty tomato seeds in its opening sequence until the end of its 2018 season. Renaissance Herbs still sells the Burnley Bounty in its salad seedling range. The Little Vegie Patch Co sells seeds of Burnley Surecrop tomatoes. Australian Seed sells Burnley Gem. This is the story of their breeder. 

Renaissance Herbs credit Helgi Nirk with
the breeding of Burnley Bounty on their Website.  Excellent!

Helgi Nirk had arrived in Australia in November 1947 with the first party of refugees from Europe after World War II. She was born a year after the end of the First World War, on 15 December 1919, in Sangaste, in the southern Estonian province of Valgamaa. 

Her father had been a schoolteacher at the local school. Then he had gone to the Caucasus, where oil had been discovered, to work as a bookkeeper. He had come back a wealthy man. 

He used his money to improve the farm near Sangaste which he had inherited from his father. He developed it into a model mixed farm. University and high school students used to visit the farm for classes on its operations.

Helgi’s father had died when she was only ten years old. He had been aged 56 when she was born, having followed an Estonian pattern of the man making his career and money before settling down with a wife.  Helgi's mother died seven years later, having been old for a first-time mother, 39, when Helgi was born.

Helgi disagreed with her uncles on how she should manage her inheritance. They asked a court to give her full responsibility for her own affairs. The court granted this right when Helgi was only 18. As in Australia, 21 was then the normal age of legal majority in Estonia. Hers would have been a rare case. It is an early demonstration of her strength of character. 

Helgi Nirk in 1959

Elderly tenants helped her by feeding the farm animals, cows and pigs. When she was 20, the Soviet Union invaded independent Estonia. She thought that her future would be that of an employee of a state farm, a prospect which did not appeal. She decided to alter that future by enrolling in agricultural science at Estonia’s centuries-old University of Tartu. She was able to recruit share-farmers to continue working the land for her. 

Tartu University's main building and surrounds, much as they would have looked
when Helgi Nirk studied there in the early 1940s.
Photo by Kaupo Kalda from EstonianWorld.com

She should not have been able to enrol at the University as the daughter of a kulak, a landowner from a peasant background. The helpful local authorities gave her an identity card which described her truthfully as a child from the country without parents. In Russia, the kulaks had opposed the collectivisation of land. Stalin had ordered their liquidation in 1929. In the countries occupied by the Soviet Army during World War II, the practice was to round up kulaks and their families for train trips in cattle wagons to the extremes of Siberia. 

Helgi was one of the girls who swapped their rooms with boys who thought that they were in danger. If they did that, the Soviet troops would see at once that the young men they had come to arrest were somewhere else. 

One year later, international allegiances changed when the Germans pushed through the Baltic States to lay siege to Stalingrad. Estonia was occupied by the Germans for three years. During this time, Helgi completed her agricultural science studies and was awaiting the grant of her degree. The citizens of Stalingrad resisted their siege, the Soviet Union regrouped and rearmed, and once more it invaded the Baltic States. 

Helgi left Estonia in September 1944 with the last of the German troops. She was riding under a tarpaulin in the back of a truck, on top of munitions. She knew what was in the truck, but had made the decision that being blown up with the German truck was a better end than imprisonment or exile in Siberia. 

Helgi and a friend left the convoy in Lithuania and found a train travelling towards Germany. There was no passenger carriage for them, only a wagon without sides, little more than an open platform on wheels. The train was travelling away from the Soviet Army. That was all that mattered. 

The train stopped in Danzig, then a Prussian port city in turmoil. Nobody they asked knew what was going on. 

Central Danzig in 1945, after destruction by bombs and artillery fire;
Unknown photographer, sourced through Wikipedia

All who reached Danzig on that train were told that, before they could move on, they had to dig anti-tank trenches to halt the Soviet Army. Helgi’s friend was willing to do as ordered, but Helgi had another idea. 

The other travellers were led behind a wire fence. Helgi and her friend lay on their stomachs on the wagon which had brought them to Danzig. When darkness fell, they grabbed their small suitcases and walked carefully around the railway station to its western entrance. This was the entrance nearest to their destination, so they no longer looked as if they were Baltic refugees. 

They demanded and received two train tickets for the far west of Germany, Mannheim on Rhine. They got as far as Berlin, which they found also to be in turmoil. There were masses of people among the ruins of bombed buildings. Helgi went looking for a train to the west, while her friend guarded their luggage. 

Berlin in ruins, August 1947:  photograph from George Kiddle,
one of the three-man team which selected First Transport passengers

A German in a decorated uniform, evidently an important officer, saw that she was distressed. He accompanied her back to the travellers’ aid office where her inquiries had already been rebuffed. Seeing the officer, the women behind the counter were now ready to assist. 

He discovered that Helgi and her friend had been three weeks on the road. He took them to the apartment of a female friend where, for the first time in nearly one month, they could wash and rest on beds. They were able to stay in Berlin for one week, which made it easy to find the station from which trains left to the west. 

Once they reached the west of Germany, Helgi and her friend were able to stop their flight. Helgi got work picking vegetables for the market on a small farm at Hockenheim. One day she found herself under Allied bombing attack. She threw herself to the ground at the sound of the approaching plane. As bombs hit the ground, she was covered with soil. When she scrabbled out from her covering of earth, she found that the cart nearby had been destroyed. The horse pulling the cart had been killed. Helgi was deaf for nearly one week. 

In Mannheim, she nearly found herself under arrest. Everyone was permitted to change 500 Occupation Deutschmarks into real Deutschmarks in one transaction, but no more. She had been changing her money in various towns across Germany, but she grew tired of the 500 Occupation DM limit. She asked a bank in Mannheim if she could change a few thousand in one transaction. “Please wait here”, she was told. She waited and waited, a friend for company. 

Suddenly she was confronted by a group of police and bank officials. “Where did you get this money? Who did you rob?” The money actually had come from the private sale of extra bacon and butter from her Estonian farm during the German occupation. That could be considered to be trading on the black market, so she told her interrogators that it came from the sale of her farm. This satisfied them. Fortunately, they did not know that selling anything in Estonia under the German occupation was also illegal. 

Under the American occupation, there was another incident when she almost lost her life. Word went out among the local refugees that an animal had been butchered and the meat was available for free. Helgi did not realise that the free meat offer was for refugees only. 

She told a German who had been kind to her about the offer. When a drunken American Army officer realised that there was a German in the butcher’s shop and Helgi had invited him there, he raised his pistol to shoot her. Another American pushed his hand so that the pistol fired out of harm’s way. 

While she was in a camp for displaced persons, she noted the UNRRA enthusiasm for DDT. Not only did they insist on dousing the inmates with liberal quantities to control insect infestations, they also tried to feed them spoonfuls. 

From Hockenheim, Helgi moved to Heidelberg, where she worked for the American Red Cross Club in a former museum. Her task was to organise concerts for the Americans. This was not taxing work. It supplied her with free food and accommodation. Downstairs the Americans had access to free coffee and doughnuts. Helgi had enough free doughnuts to last her the rest of her days. 

She moved to Stuttgart, where she studied genetics at the Hohenheim University, which has the oldest agricultural science faculty in the world. After completing this course, she was about to start on chemistry when she heard that the Australians wanted to send a ship of displaced persons to Australia. She got herself on the interview list by contacting a cousin who was working with UNRRA. 

This 1845 lithograph by JH Renz shows the main building of the
University of Hohenheim as it still is today,
so certainly as it was when Helgi studied there

A Canadian team had already interviewed her and declared her to be a suitable migrant, but Canada had not begun moving those they had selected. In comparison to the Canadians, the Australians had easy tests. Helgi did her best to make sure that she was on that first ship, because she was always hungry. 

Her trip on the General Stuart Heintzelman was very good, indeed lovely. She passed the time playing chess, reading and sunbaking. Her recollection of Fremantle and Perth is that they were beautiful and clean. Like some of the other Estonian women, she found the Kanimbla filthy. She remembers cockroaches in the soup on board this Australian Navy vessel. 

In Bonegilla she shared a room with another Estonian, Helvi Liiver. When they reached their allocated room, they found it smelly, so they put down their suitcases and started to clean with scrubbing brushes and sandsoap. They found that the seats had been smeared with fat and there were rat droppings as well. 

Helmi Liiver, left, Helgi Nirk, centre, and an unidentified woman arrive
at the Bongeilla railway stop on 8 December 1947
(from the Helgi Nirk collection, Estonian Archives in Australia)

Having cleaned the room to the best of their ability, the two young women went to have a shower. A large animal perching on a wooden beam in the shower facilities startled them. Despite its sharp claws, it turned out to be a relatively tame camp possum. 

The first job to which Helgi was sent was at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, to train as a nursing sister. After the privations of the War and post-War Germany, the displaced trainee nurses found that they were still expected to live in relative poverty. They had only £1/3/3 left after payments for their board and lodging were deducted. 

Helgi's own battered, yellowed copy of a newspaper report
on the start of her nursing career,
from the Melbourne Herald, 5 January 1948, page 5

In order to make some more money, Helgi actively looked for extra work, so that she could leave the hospital. She met an Estonian who had come to Australia before the Second World War, who was growing tuberoses for sale in his garden. Helgi and a friend turned up to help him, despite his reluctance. After seeing how they worked, he took them on as paid assistants. 

At the end of June 1952, Helgi started work with the Victorian Department of Agriculture as a laboratory assistant on even lower wages than before, but at least she was working in agriculture. For the next ten years, she had a second job as often as she could find one - gardening, cleaning, making buttonholes for children’s clothes. 

On one occasion, she found out that a two-storey building near where she was staying in Chapel Street, Prahran, needed painting. The owner could not find a tradesman to do the job, such was the shortage of building workers in the first years after the War. 

Helgi took on the task, single-handedly. The owner was able to arrange for scaffolding to be built. He moved it himself whenever Helgi had finished painting a section of the building. 

By 1955, less than eight years after she arrived in Australia, Helgi was able to buy a property in the Dandenong Ranges. The house had not been lived in for a decade or so. The land was overrun with tough plants like blackberries and ivy, and a tall privet hedge on the high side of the hill, along the road, cast its shade over the front garden. Again, mostly single-handedly, Helgi poisoned and removed the unwanted plants. 

She turned the soil into the production of flowering plants. The house was cleaned up so that Helgi could move there in 1956. She started to collect plants for her property. 

Helgi’s work focus became tomatoes for the commercial growers of Victoria. She developed two varieties, K7 and the very fleshy 7002, which became so popular with the growers trialling them that they never had the chance to be named properly before commercial release. 

Named varieties for which Helgi was responsible included not only Burnley Bounty, Burnley Surecrop and Burnley Gem but also Burnley Fortune, Burnley Metro, and Arcadia. 

The prestigious scientific journal Nature, in its issue of 5 December 1959, carried an article by Helgi on how to obtain fertile hybrids from two tomato species which did not cross-fertilise naturally. Her success was due to the use of both stock and graft materials which were just beyond the dicotyledon stage of development, when only the first two leaves show above the ground. 

The aim of the experiments was to produce commercial tomato varieties which had the disease resistance of a Peruvian parent as well as the yield and fruit quality of a conventional parent. The cell materials from the stock tended to merge with the materials from the scion because of the very early stage of development at which the grafting has been performed. 

When the plants grew older, it was possible to use their pollen for normal cross-fertilisation and the resulting plants had some of the characteristics of each parent. Examination under the microscope showed that the cells of the hybrid plants had chromosomes from both parents. 

The Nature article created interest around the world. Other plant breeders had success with the technique. For example, jute hybrids in India were obtained from two species which had not interbred previously. 

International visitors now made a point of meeting with Helgi. One delegation from the Soviet Union came specifically to study Helgi’s tomato breeding. When she took the Armenian geneticist and his interpreter to field trials, the geneticist assured her of a good job if she returned to the Soviet Union. Helgi reminded him that this offer was a risk too huge for her to take. 

Helgi also received offers of employment as a tomato breeder in Spain and California. She was already so happy on her property in the Dandenongs that she did not want to leave. It was her own piece of paradise. 

Despite the encouragement of the supervisor who told her that her work was unique and should be recorded for other researchers in Nature, Helgi found that her employer could not deal with her lack of formal qualifications. She lodged applications and appeals, but she received neither promotions nor pay increases beyond those awarded to compensate for the slowly rising cost of living. 

This passport enabled Helgi to go on a tour of tomato breeding institutions
during July-August 1972 on behalf of the Victorian Department of Agriculture
from the Helgi Nirk collection, Estonian Archives in Australia

Helgi did more research which may well have been as original as her work on the tomato hybrids, but she kept it to herself. English was a language in which she had been working for only ten years. Writing the Nature article had been a major effort. She did not feel the need to repeat the effort because she knew that she already had international recognition for her work. 

As the lack of recognition from those for whom she worked was upsetting, putting in the effort to write more articles for scientific journals would only have stirred up more enmity, she thought. 

The business which had developed around her house, Helgi’s Nursery, became a refuge. She resigned from the Department of Agriculture on the day that she became eligible to access her superannuation, her sixtieth birthday. 

Helgi had experienced other, more overt discrimination when she first lived in Melbourne. On one occasion, she and her friend were told by the operator to speak English on phone. “Why?” responded Helgi. “This is not wartime.” The operator cut them off. 

On a Melbourne tram, a fellow passenger told her and her friend to “speak Australian”. Helgi responded that she had not learnt an Aboriginal language yet. The other passengers were on the side of the Estonians. There was so much laughter that the man left the tram at the next stop. 

Estonia did not find its freedom while Helgi was still fit to travel, so she never returned. She undertook many trips in Europe, North America and Asia, visiting relatives, friends and fellow researchers. 

Helgi closed the nursery to customers in the mid-1990s. At its peak, she had hundreds of different plants growing on the site. Fuchsias, foxgloves, feverfew, honesty and hydrangeas, rhododendrons, azaleas and alstromerias flowered in profusion, each to its own season.  

When I met Helgi there, late in her life, she had to be very particular about what she could and could not eat. She thought that her digestive problems might have been caused by the liberal use of DDT in the German camp. Given what we know about DDT, including it causing cancer in humans if the doses are high enough, she might have had a case. 

She died in her former nursery, surrounded by the beautiful gardens of her own creation, on 29 August 2005. 

Then Helgi returned to Estonia at long last. Her ashes were buried beside her parents in the Sangaste cemetery. 

Sangaste Cemetery gate and boundary wall
Photograph by Ivar Leidus, from Wikimedia Commons

 

 

 

On 27 October 2006, the University of Tartu compensated for Helgi for her lack of formal qualifications by appointing her a Honorary Member.  The University's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology says, "It is a great honor for our institute that two persons, who have significantly contributed to the achievement of the statutory goal of the University of Tartu, among other things with significant financial support, have been appointed honorary members of the University of Tartu."

 

I would have thought that Helgi's undergraduate education at that University plus her career as a plant breeder should have been enough to earn her that honour.  However, it is likely that a donation of 3 million Estonian kroons, worth more than $300,000 in Australian currency and probably from her estate, to the Institute would have helped too.

I'm sure the Helgi would have been very pleased by the honour from her alma mater.

I thank Helgi Nirk for sharing her life story.  Her papers are held in the Sydney-based Estonian Archives in Australia.

REFERENCES

Australian Seed, 'Tomato Burnley Gem, Lycopersicon esculentum', https://www.australianseed.com/shop/item/tomato-burnley-gem/, accessed 5 July 2021. 

'Balt nurses start work', The Herald, Melbourne, 5 January 1948, p 5, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/243852526, accessed 6 July 2021.

Estonian World, 3 September 2020, 'The University of Tartu among the 300 best universities in the world', https://estonianworld.com/knowledge/the-university-of-tartu-among-the-300-best-universities-in-the-world/, accessed 6 July 2021.

Geni.com, 'Helgi Nirk', https://www.geni.com/people/Helgi-Nirk/6000000011967155258?through=6000000005439112272, accessed 6 July 2021.

Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of Tartu, 'Honorary Doctors, Professors and Associated Professors', https://tymri.ut.ee/en/content/honorary-doctors-professors-and-associated-professors, accessed 23 May 2023.

Nirk, Helgi, 1959, 'Interspecific hybrids of Lycopersicum', Nature 184 pp 1819-20.

Nirk, Helgi, 1972, 'Study tour of tomato breeding institutions', Melbourne, Victoria, Department of Agriculture.

Renaissance Herbs, 'Tomato Burnley Bounty', https://renaissanceherbs.com.au/product/tomato-burnley-bounty/, accessed 5 July 2021. 

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