Endrius Jankus, known as Andrew in Australia, was born on 7 July 1929 in Draverna, a village near the Lithuanian coastal town of Klaipėda in the south of the country. He died in Hobart, Tasmania, on 23 July 2014. He was a grandson of the 'Patriarch of Lithuania Minor', Martynas Jankus, a printer, publisher and social activist. Endrius' memories of his first four months in Australia were written in 2012 but based on a diary he had kept in 1947-48. You may see something of his grandfather's social activism in his views. I would not be surprised if the Commandant of the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, Major Alton Kershaw, had seen a brash 18-year-old who needed to be trained to obey. Read on...
7 December 1947
We arrived in Melbourne on the dirty old tub, Kanimbla. It was like a hell ship out of some fantasy. Dingy quarters, grime-ingrained bunks with food to match. It was a big letdown after the General Stuart Heintzelman.*
At 2.30 pm, the then Minister for Immigration, Mr Calwell, arrived with his retinue on the main deck and welcomed us to Australia. With newsreel cameras whizzing and camera flashes just about blinding everyone, the whole ceremony was over within the hour.
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| Estonian Lucia Maksim thanks the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, (centre, in light suit) on the Kanimbla at anchor in Port Melbourne, 7 December 1947. Source: Private collection** |
I had volunteered to help load baggage onto the train. There were not that many pieces. While we were loading, a chap approached us and introduced himself as the First Officer of the Danish ship Java berthed on the other side of the pier.
Since I could speak English, he told me what a terrible country this was. The exact conversation escapes me after 65 years.
It would be better if I joined his crew as they were leaving for Europe in the morning. That was a great temptation as I always wanted to go to sea.
He showed me a newspaper called the Tribune. This Australian Stalinist rag had a cartoon of people getting off a ship with swastikas and SS armbands. The caption was, "These people will make good Australians".
But my first reaction to the proposal was no desire to return to Europe, since we had just arrived in Australia. Secondly, we travelled on international refugee papers and were still regarded as stateless persons. We did not belong to any country, since our country had been swallowed up by the criminal Soviet Union. ”Thanks” to the idiotic US President Roosevelt who sold us out and three-quarters of Europe to the Stalinist butchers.
I had heard stories of stateless persons on ships travelling the seas who were not allowed to step ashore on any land due to lack of a passport or identification. That thought made me decline the offer.
It was the days when the White Australia policy was strongly defended. We were lily white but not English, which was unacceptable to the population. Most of them had some black blood cruising through their veins but that was ignored.
That was why we were discriminated against for many years to come.
Some groups, particularly in Tasmania, of the isolated, inbred, black-brushed population and the Stalinist unionists made our life a misery. We faced strikes on our arrival organised by the Communist-dominated unions and fights in the pubs.
This antipathy is still alive today in 2012. It’s more gentle because of laws prohibiting discrimination, but it is still being practised by some idiotic clerks in government departments and in businesses and workplaces.
Under our breath, we used to call them Anglo-Saxon Nazis and Australia a country built on bullshit. You never struck that many conmen, crooks and criminals in any country as you did in Australia.
Just like going through the medical in Germany. They looked at our teeth, like the old horse traders did, to make certain that they were healthy. On arrival in Australia, we found out that most people had no teeth at all but had prostheses.
8 December 1947
This morning we boarded trains and our journey began towards Bonegilla. We were divided into two groups, one per train. I was in the first one with all our girls.
This sparsely occupied land already had sunburned yellow grass as far as the eye could see. It was almost the middle of December, in the summer.
The train stopped for lunch at Benalla. Some Red Cross Ladies provided us with a meal.
After about one and a half hours, we were told to board the train again and proceeded.
In the rolling northern hills of Victoria, with no signs of life, the train stopped. Had we arrived?
The girls, some 120 of them, alighted on the dirt ramp which was level with the floor of the train. The rest of us jumped out into the belly-high grass.
There was deathly silence interrupted only every now and again by the locomotives snorting.
Someone suggested that we had arrived at our execution spot. I countered that they would not have sent us halfway round the world to execute us. The suggestion hadn’t been that far-fetched. Those sorts of isolated places were normally used for mass murder in Europe.
Suddenly, we could hear the noise of revving motors. Khaki green trucks were slowly working towards us. Only a slight wisp of dust rising from the ground indicated the Army trucks’ position as they laboured to reach us. There was no road, just a miserable track between the high grass and a fence.
The girls got preferential treatment and went first to the trucks.
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| Three of the Lithuanian women, with Viltis Salyte on the left seated on one of the Army trucks at the Bonegilla railway stop Source: Border Morning Mail via Trove |
We followed some time later and got a bumpy ride across some paddocks to the main highway. Once we reached the highway, our vision of the countryside improved. We could see Lake Hume and a large conglomeration of barracks on its foreshore. The Hall, a massive barn, stood out amongst the corrugated iron huts, our accommodation.
Our group from the Flensburg Camp (close to the Danish border) and a few friends had stuck together throughout the journey and now were allocated accommodation on the outskirts of the camp in Block 18, Barrack 33.
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| Endrius Jankus as a sea scout in Flensburg, 10 September 1947, just 3 months before his arrival at the Bonegilla camp Source: Europeana |
The corrugated iron huts were stinking hot like a sauna. The beds were tubular, folding iron and fencing mesh constructions made up with white sheets. Twenty-two of us took up our accommodation, threw our few belongings under the beds and bolted outside.
It was cooler there. A group of kangaroos watched us in dumb silence from the High Hill, keeping a respectable distance.
At 5 pm a loudspeaker blared out that it was teatime and all should proceed to the mess hall. What we ate, I didn’t record in my diary, only that it was sufficient and tasted bland. That seemed to be the norm in this country. We always maintained that the good food was spoiled because of the lack of tasty ingredients.
9 December 1947
We were shown a film about the Australian environment. After that we had to hand in our International Refugee Organisations documents. We were told that we had to be photographed for new documents, which never materialised.*** This left us only a red card for identification.
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| This is likely to be the photograph of Endrius taken in the Bonegilla camp on 9 December 1947, for use with his 'Bonegilla card' Source: National Archives of Australia |
10 December 1947
Everyone had to have an x-ray of their lungs. The strict medicals that we went through in Germany were partially checked again.
There seemed a suspicion that somehow people had escaped health scrutiny.
It made the camp authorities and Immigration Department scratch their heads when they found almost 30 people with lung damage, mainly injuries from bullets.
We knew about some of our fellows who we had helped smuggle into the country. They arrived here with someone else’s lungs. How it was done shall remain a mystery.
Several had only one good eye, but they too were discovered.
Actually out of 839 passengers this wasn’t such a great number of fraudulent immigrants.
We had expected that all of them would be deported back to Germany and discussed what action we could take to prevent this or at least convey our displeasure.
A few days later, they all were rounded up and sent to Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital. They returned to camp about a week or so later and the whole affair was “swept under the carpet”. They all stayed here.
In the meantime we just rested, went for walks to the kangaroo vantage points, the hills, and discovered the multitudes of rabbits — black, brown and brindle. The hills seemed alive with rabbits. Someone in our group had a camera and we photographed ourselves on the walks to the hills and the Hume Weir. What happened to these photos, I am unsure.
11 December 1947
We were called to the camp office and asked what sort of work we wanted to do. This was a strange question as in Germany we had been told that unless we signed up as labourers, we would not be accepted for the interviews. Just like the medical where they scrutinised the status of our teeth. And on arrival here we found that most Australians did not have any but chewed on their falsies.
This was payday for us. The unemployment benefit at this time was one pound and five shillings. The camp kept the one pound for our keep and handed us the five shillings as spending money. We had to sign that we had received it.
I spent three shillings at the shop down the road a bit on tobacco, cigarette papers and a box of matches, plus an ice cream. I had one shilling left.
These days, the anti-tobacco or anti-smoking campaigns amuse me. I began to smoke at 14 years of age. I found out, like millions of others, that smoking calmed you down and suppressed your hunger pangs.
In four years of warfare, I can well remember being hungry day after day. It was just like a rat gnawing at your empty stomach. It may be dangerous to your health, but no little Hitler should have the power to ram his ideas down other people’s throat. In my book, they are the “perverts of democracy”. Besides, I stopped smoking 30 years ago.
To be continued.
Footnotes
* Endrius was not alone in this recollection. Several of the women have told me too that they regarded the Kanimbla as filthy, and not just in comparison with the General Stuart Heintzelman. The captains (Army and Navy) of the Heintzelman had figured out, probably through the experience of other troop transports of the same class built before her, that the best way to keep their soldier passengers out of mischief on the high seas was to give them work to do. Much of it has to do with keeping the ship clean, but there were other tasks as well, such as helping in the kitchen and bakery or the ship's library. Australia's first post-WWII refugees on the Heintzelman had been subject to the same regimen, but benefited from a clean and orderly voyage.
** There are so many copies of this image in public and private collections that I think it was taken by one of the Heintzelman passengers with their own camera. These photographers could run something of a business, selling or bartering their prints to cover their costs, and probably make a small profit as well.
*** The new documents were quite likely to have been the 'Bonegilla cards', National Archives of Australia series A2571. They were for the use of the administration, not the Centre residents.
