Migrantweb.com Hostels Forum

[dvsineke]

My name is Kees Postma and my family arrived from the Netherlands to Australia in 1958. Then on to Bonegilla from station pier where once father arrived at Bonegilla father said, "here we will die" He was in near panick and within two day he was on the train back to Melbourne (that famous swinging of the lamp to stop the train to Wodonga from Ebden at the emplacement in the paddock at Bonegilla)

Anyway your father worked for a dutch painting company my father started and he was employed for a number of years. I hapen to have three photographs, one of your parent's featuring their twelve and a half marriage celebrations at their new home in Boronia.

At least in two of the photographs from the sixties you are pictured.

Kees, I would be happy to see the photos you have. Perhaps you could send them to me. My email address is [email protected]
I am also on Facebook as Ineke Veale.
_________________
Dutch Migrant 1957

[aussienomore]

[kate fletcher]

Glad to hear that you and Ineke have made contact. It must be enthralling to have memories in common, as well as half a century of news to exchange.

[aussienomore]

Take me back in time if I could.

Yes you wander what it was all about. Like the song..... "turn a
different corner and we would have never met".

My parents told me they would not have wanted to miss these ten years in Australia in their lives. They claimed it enriched them.

They were also glad to go home.

In Holmesglen as a little scared dutch migrant boy I turned ten. The adventure that my new country bought me those first years is what I remember most. It toughened me up while two years former schooling were lost.... I was to have to learn in other ways.

There were other dutch people in some of the nissen huts on power avenue and we befriended them. Mother said that whenever you used to heard the dutch lanquage spoken in Australia it attracted. Another countryman or woman and you would go over and have a chat even with people who, back home, you would not see standing.

Ineke was a four or five year old girl at the Holmesglen hostel at the time. Myself, as an adventurous ten year old took little notice of such a girl. It was because of my fathers painting and decorating business he was setting up in Melbourne, needing employees and thus for some years employing her father (he was a fellow dutch traveller and so much trusted) that a more permanent friendship developed.

From these times I have the photographs.

Today I'm 64 and "up above" as to "down under" to this best lucky country in the world. One Sunday afternoon, for want of better, I thought what had become of them all?

It's all so easy! as I typed in Holmesglen hostel and there, immediately, was the active little dutch girl again this time turned a fair dinkum true blue Aussie..... a pretty good sort of a sheila we used to say.

For me it was not a breeze. Little by little in this far away (white racist) land it brought me nearly to my knees. In the end, untill father made it clear it was time to leave, I was even prepared to fight, to risk my life, in her Australian sixties "patriotic" Asian war.

I don't dare call myself a aussie anymore, but then I came close. I had been there.

"Turn a different corner and we would have never met".

[Janet Williams]

Facebook group 3148 has people from the area.
https://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/groups/137864526385865

[robert barlow]

HI my wife irene and two childre david 3yrs tracey two yrs arrived at holmsglen in the early 70s we were the last people to leave when it closed down and went to springvale new hostle from there we went to a house we rented in george st dandenong then moved to jenkins st springvale before returning home in 1975 due to my wifes mum and dad returning we then felt home sick but loved every minute we were there leaving my brother brian who was sponserd by us as he was in the a royal airforce and married and still lives there