** Fred and Mien Blom's Place **PO
Box 4072 Alice Springs |
Red Hot Soup
Alice Springs in the Seventies
Red Hot Soup is about urban pioneering in the seventies, Mien’s emigration from Holland straight to the hot dusty outback town of Alice Springs. With a husband and six young children, few words of English, and no hope of returning home, it mirrors the grit and desperate determination which so many outback women have used to beat the odds.
ISBN: 095816120-8
National Library of Australian CatalogueingPublished September 2002
Mien Blom, Author:
“Soup is never eaten as hot as it is served” my mother always said when we were in a stressful situation. Her advice was a great help for me, time and again, when we left Holland with six young children and settled in the middle of the Australian desert.R.G. (Dick) Kimber, Historian:
"It was my privilege to read Red Hot Soup. Mien has written with integrity, passion and humour about the Alice Springs in the 1970’s. She captures the essence of the migrant family as the frontier, yet in the midst of a burgeoning town."
Wabe Roskam, Editor Dutch Weekly Foreign correspondent Dutch Radio and Television:
"Having read with interest Red Hot Soup I concluded that yes, the Dutch assimilated very well in their new environment. Mien’s story also showed that deep inside, the connection with the old land is always there. Life was not always easy when you moved to a new country but you did not whinge or complain about it; you just kept going.Chapter 1 - Farewell – 3rd September 1971
It was close to midnight when I watched the lights on the coast of Holland slowly disappearing into the distance. My husband Fred’s arms were comforting around me. We hardly spoke as the realisation sank in that we might never see our families and friends again. I shivered. What have we done? We were on our way to England. There was no turning back. What if it was all a big mistake?
It had all happened so quickly. We didn’t get the chance to say good-bye properly, not even a hug for Mum but just a quick kiss through a hole in the wire fence as we hurried to the ferry. She had not cried at all. On the contrary, she was happy that we were going to join her two bachelor sons, Sam and Henk, in Australia. With me there too, she had a better chance to visit them, she said.
During the first couple of years my two brothers had worked and travelled together. After living in Alice Springs, a little town in the middle of the Australian desert for some time, Henk returned to Melbourne. He could no longer stand the heat and flies in Alice, he wrote. That’s where we were heading for now.
Sam left Holland in May 1961, more than ten years ago. I had already been married and left home for nearly four years when Henk left eight months later. Like Sam, he could hardly wait to finish his compulsory service in the army to leave for Australia. Henk was only twenty and Sam twenty-two when we said good-bye. I hardly knew either of them.
Sam promised to build a house for us, but in his last letter he said that there was no way he could do it before we arrived; he was still waiting for the plans to be drawn up.
“But that won’t matter,” he wrote. “Bring your tent; you love camping don’t you? The Aborigines here live happily in the dry river.”
I shivered again. Sam had always been the odd one out in our family, and we were about to invade the privacy of his single-man’s life with six lively children...
“Come, let’s go,” Fred said softly, leading me away from the railing. I had not noticed how cold it was. Everybody else had already gone inside.
We stepped carefully over the sleeping bodies on the main deck of the ferry. People of all ages hung in chairs or lay on benches filling every available space. Some were trying to read by the light of a torch. We wondered about all those hundreds of people who had come on board with cars, motorbikes and in buses. Most of them were on holiday and did not have a cabin for the overnight trip.
Grateful to have a proper bed after the long, emotional day I crawled into the narrow bunk bed in the tiny, eight-berth cabin. We had all been up since five o’clock that morning and I had not slept much the previous night. Our children, aged four to twelve went to bed before the ferry left the harbour and were asleep as soon as their heads had hit their pillows. But sleep did not come for me as the events of the last months kept flashing through my mind.Eight very stressful months had passed since we walked arm in arm through the snow on the evening of New-Years-Day 1971, to mail our letters to Henk and Sam, asking them to help us create a better future for ourselves and our children. It had not taken them long to reply. Unemployment was becoming a problem in Melbourne too, Henk wrote. Jobs were not as easy to come by as they used to be. He couldn’t do much for us as he and two other young men were boarding with a childless couple. He said that if we could stand the heat and the flies, it would be better for us to go to Sam in Alice Springs as there was lots of work there.
Sam’s letter was very optimistic. Oh, yes, there was plenty of work and heaps of space there. The prosperous little town could use people like Fred who were not afraid to get their hands dirty. Six months ago he had bought a block of land at an auction but he could not make up his mind whether to make a start on the house or go to Queensland ‘to play with the old dozer on his thirty-acre block for a while’. With us coming he had a reason to build the house first, he wrote. That was eight months ago, now there would be no house for us and we might have to live in the tent after all… Fred’s sister, Bep, blamed me for making her favourite brother leave his homeland where he had a good job and a comfortable house to face an uncertain future in a country he swore he never wanted to live in.
Fred had spent eighteen months, from October 1953 until April 1955, in Dutch New Guinea (now West Irian Jaya) with the Royal Dutch Navy. From there they made a trip to Australia for an overhaul of the engines of their landings-craft. After a dangerous journey in which one of the engines out of action, the Australian Navy had towed them into Cairns where the engine had been repaired temporarily. The engine later failed again in heavy seas near Mackay causing leaks in the fuel tanks and the engine room. Luckily, the Australian minesweeper ‘Wagga’ was in the area and towed them into Brisbane this time. Australians as well as fellow ‘Dutchies’ had given the sailors a fantastic time, inviting them to parties and into their homes.
“The homes of the Australians were very bare too,” Bep said, reminding us time and again how horrified Fred had been to see the poor living conditions of the immigrants. Although most of them had been in Australia for many years, they were still sitting on fruit crates and sleeping on mattresses on the bare floor because they could not afford to buy decent furniture.
The truth was that Fred had become very frustrated with his job, in charge of several troublesome, mentally handicapped young men in a small factory making machine-made furniture. He had worked there for the past six years and wanting to quit for quite some time but, because we lived in a house that went with the job, he had no option but to stay. There was little or no chance of finding other, suitable work as well as a house in Holland.
Ever since we married in April 1958, but especially during the last years, we talked off and on about emigrating. At first we were living with Fred’s father, a lovely man who was a diabetic and needed us to look after him. Plans were made again four years later after our fourth child was born and my father-in-law moved in with Fred’s eldest sister when she became a widow. But, being good Catholics, I got pregnant again and we had to forget about emigrating for a while. When we talked about leaving after our youngest child was born in May 1967, more seriously this time, Fred’s father cried saying that it would break his heart if we took his grandchildren away. At that time Fred’s boss offered him the much bigger house, closer to the job. So, instead we emigrated from the council home in Velp to the boss’s house - which tied him to the job - in Oosterbeek on the other side of Arnhem. When Fred’s father died in July 1968 we were free to go, but six months later I needed major surgery that put a stop to our plans yet again.
In the summer of 1970, we were forced to make a final decision as Lilian would be twelve the next spring and would be going to High School the following summer. We had heard how devastating it was for teenagers to leave their friends behind; some of them had run away, hidden until their family had gone. By that time I had recovered from my operation, my strength had returned and there was no risk of me having any more children. Fred would turn forty-one in November. If we wanted to leave, we had to do it soon or he would be too old to take such a big step.
We kept agonising about it until one day, shortly after his birthday, Fred came home from work at an unusual time, boiling over with anger. He’d had an argument with one of his older colleagues “who was as stubborn and selfish as the half-wits he had to work with all day” he fumed. Fred was an easy-going fellow most of the time; I had never seen him so worked up. The doctor said he needed a week’s rest and change of scene. That’s when we decided to write to Henk and Sam asking them about the possibilities for us in Australia.
A few weeks after we received my brothers’ letters, an informative evening about Canada, South Africa, New-Zealand and Australia was held by the Department of Emigration in Musis Sacrem in Arnhem. The big hall was packed. After a lengthy opening speech, films were shown about each of the different countries. Because of Fred’s experience in Australia, Canada had been our first choice. My mother’s two younger sisters went there in 1948 but when we realised how cold it was there in winter, it was no longer an option to either of us. Australia, the most popular country according to statistics, was last. In the film everybody worked happily together either in friendly, spacious offices, in clean factories or in the well-organised building industry, under a beautiful blue sky. Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth each city seemed even more prosperous than the other. At the end of their working day, people would go to their lovely big homes, pick up mother and the kids and head off to the fantastic beaches. Children splashed around in the clear blue water of the ocean until they were rounded up for a ‘barbie’, eaten under a canopy of millions of stars before they headed home again in their roomy station wagons. While the sounds of the last film ebbed away, the public was invited to ask questions. We sat bolt upright when a middle-aged man at the back of the hall stood up at the end of question time and said: “In the documentary about Australia, only the big cities are shown. My wife and I have recently returned from Alice Springs, in the heart of Australia where we have lived for a year. The opportunities there are excellent for young families; why is it that the inland has not been mentioned here?”
The two officials answered that not much was known about Alice Springs. They said that many places were being developed in central and other rural parts of Australia but, because there were no roads and no immigration centres in any of those places, it was too risky to send people there. The emigrants usually went to a Government hostel from where they made inquiries and moved into the country.
Fred and I looked at each other. “We must try to get to him!” Fred whispered. But when the program resumed with another documentary, the man stood up and left the hall.
That night I wrote to Sam about it. A week later he wrote back to say that the man’s name was Jurrian Guth. His younger brother Henk, a well-known artist in Alice Springs, had given Sam his address. Jurrian was on the phone; I would find his number in the book, Henk had said.
Not many people in Holland had a telephone in 1971 but our next door neighbours let us use theirs whenever we needed to. Along with thousands of other country folk, the ‘Floortjes’ had fled Indonesia when the former Dutch colony became independent in 1948. Floortje was very upset about us leaving.
“I should refuse to let you use the phone,” she said. “You have no idea what you are letting yourselves and your poor children in for!”
We met with Jurrian and his lovely wife Cor several times. They lived on the edge of the forest, not far from us, in a beautiful big farmhouse which they had rebuilt themselves after the war.
“Please call me Jurrian; there’s no need to call me meneer (Mr.),” the friendly smiling gentleman said when we met him for the first time. “This is my wife, Cor.”
“They don’t bother with those unnecessary formalities in Australia!” mevrouw (Mrs) Guth, a tall dignified lady, laughed as we shook hands. During our later visits Jurrian showed us lots of slides and they both told us enthusiastically about the people they had met and the many possibilities there were in Central Australia for people like us.
In the beginning the Department of Emigration worked quickly. Two weeks after we filled in the application forms we were invited for an interview and medical examinations at the Australian Embassy in The Hague in the first week of April. There was barely enough time to have our passport photos taken and for Fred to arrange a day off from work.
We were both very nervous about the interview, mainly because Fred did not have a ‘proper’ trade. He had wanted to become an artist when he grew up but that was only for rich people in those days. After he finished school at the age of fifteen, just after the war, he had worked in a leadlighting workshop, mainly repairing church windows. Most of the churches had been repaired and leadlight in peoples’ homes had gone out of fashion by the time he was twenty-one and had to go into one of the services. That’s why he had joined the navy for six years, hoping to learn another trade. Unfortunately, Radar operators were not needed in civilian life at that time.
It had been very difficult for him to find a job when he left the navy in 1956, four months after I met him. He worked in a men’s clothing shop for a year, bored out of his wits most of the time, studying business-management at evening classes for which he got a certificate. He later had a job in a paint and glass warehouse which was more in line with his artistic nature. About a year later Fred was asked to help make part of the paint shop into a pharmacy. Impressed with Fred’s woodwork skills, a colleague’s brother offered Fred a job as a foreman in his furniture factory in 1964.
There had been no need for us to worry about Fred’s lack of formal qualifications. Our concern about the health of our eldest son Raymond, who suffered from bronchial asthma proved also unfounded; the clear Australian air would take care of it, the doctor assured us.
After the interviews we had taken the children to the big sea-aquarium in Scheveningen. I had been to The Hague once before but it was the first time most of our children had seen the sea. Even though it was cold and windy they had a ball on the beach.
Two weeks after our visit to the Embassy there was a letter in the mail with the gold-embossed Australian emblem on it. With trembling fingers I opened the envelope, reading the news through my tears; we were accepted... we would soon be leaving our home and family for good. We were advised to engage a travel agent, get the compulsory injections against malaria and other tropical diseases as soon as possible and prepare ourselves for the long trip. We only had to pay two hundred guilders (fifty dollars) towards the cost of travelling and would be advised of our date of travel in the next couple of weeks. That was when the seemingly endless wait had started!
The travel agent gave us a list of items we could take with us: two cubic metres for Fred and me, and half a cube for each of the children. The crates had to be packed and ready to be collected for shipment ten days before we were travelling, as that was the time it took to take the containers via Rotterdam to Southampton in the south of England. We had to buy the wooden crates, which had to be made to order, and pay for the transport of those to the harbour in Rotterdam ourselves. The cost of that turned out to be the equivalent of four week’s wages, more than we got for the furniture we had to sell at the last minute.
Because we did not have a telephone, and the agent expected to have the final arrangements any day, he advised us to ring his office every Friday afternoon. Nothing happened for weeks. According to the agent the problem was that nobody had ever gone from Holland directly to the centre of Australia. It was a question of which country was footing the bill of the additional transport costs.
We grew increasingly anxious. We could not make any plans or pack or sell anything. If we had to pay those costs ourselves the whole idea would fall through. Fred felt very uncomfortable at work. His boss had hardly spoken to him since he told him that we were leaving. The people that lived in our house before we moved in three years earlier had also left for Australia and nobody had ever heard of them again. His colleagues and some of our friends said that we were crazy and irresponsible. Like our Indonesian neighbours they said that it was cruel to take our children away from their environment and friends but others admired us for our courage. Some envied us, saying that they would be off in a flash if only their spouses were willing. When our neighbours, a young couple with four small children heard that we had been accepted at the end of May, they immediately applied for emigration too. Their application went smoothly. If they had not postponed leaving for eight months, they would have left a month earlier than we did.
When the approval finally came at the end of July, we were booked on a boat that left England a mere ten days later! The travel agent was annoyed when I said that that was ridiculous. It would take that long to have the crates made! A few days later he phoned to say that he had managed to change our bookings to the Southern Cross, which gave us another three weeks. I don’t know how we managed to get all our belongings sorted and packed, the surplus sold, given away or taken to Saint Vincent and the house emptied and thoroughly cleaned, in such a short time. In our hurry we had sold our boys bikes that we had bought for them on their birthdays the previous year, only to find that there was ample space left in the allotted crates to take them. The little money we got for them proved not to be near enough to get them very plain bikes, in Alice Springs.
Another thing that broke my heart was the dozens of boxes of material. I had taken them to Saint Vincent knowing that they would end up in the rag-bin. Because I always made all our children’s clothes, people had given me their coats, suits and dresses, which I had carefully unpicked. I had washed and ironed the pieces and put them away to be used later. I had also pulled out and washed the wool of dozens of old jumpers. At least some of that may have been used even if it were only for craft work at school. To think of all that work I had done for nothing instead of reading a good book!I switched the light on and looked at my watch; two o’clock and sleep still would not come. Closing my eyes again I pictured the crowd on the quay in Rotterdam, waving and shouting their good-byes. Standing between the crowd my eldest brother Wout had entertained everybody on board the ferry as well as in the harbour, whistling well-known tunes on his fingers. Cheered on by the crowd on shore he was in fine form. When we were children Wout and I could not stand each other yet he cried the most when we said good-bye.
During the last three weeks our children had stayed with my mother at her boerderij (farmhouse) in Hooglanderveen, a small village in the centre of Holland where I was born, while Fred and I packed up the house in Oosterbeek. We spent the last three days with my family until we left for the harbour near Rotterdam on Wednesday the third of September 1971, shortly after lunch.
The trip from Hooglanderveen to the harbour was an absolute nightmare. The ferry to England was not leaving until seven at night, but we had to be there two hours before. We also wanted to be there early so that we could have a cup of coffee with the family before we boarded.
Fred and I and our two youngest children Richard and Regine, aged six and four went in the back of my younger brother Bart’s big station wagon. Mum and our two other girls, twelve-year-old Lilian and Simone who was eight crawled into Wout and his wife Tony’s little sedan, and my youngest brother Ties and our two eleven and ten year old sons, Raymond and Eugene went with Wim, my younger brother. My only sister, Jopie, did not come to see us off. She lived with her husband and two children in Arnhem, sixty kilometres from our village. We had said good-bye after the big party in the attic of Mum’s boerderij, the previous Saturday.
Because Bart had been to Rotterdam several times before he led the way. Fred squeezed my hand when we drove off. With a big lump stuck in my throat I waved to the neighbours who stood beside the road to see us off, looking back at the farm through a mist of tears. When we swung onto the highway leaving our village behind I wondered if I would ever see it again. The tall, pointed towers of our neighbouring villages sped past the windows of the car. The hundreds of black and white cows kept grazing peacefully in the lovely lush-green countryside, unaware of the turmoil in our hearts.
The sickening tension in my stomach increased again when we got trapped in a traffic jam. Bart decided to take a different route. It would take longer but at least we were moving. I became even more anxious when I caught the worried look on Bart’s wife Janny’s face in the rear-view mirror. She was expecting her first baby in a week’s time. Because my waters had broken before I had any other warning signs of the approaching birth several times (our two eldest sons were born three and four weeks early!) I was panicking.
Mum’s favourite saying “soup is never eaten as hot as it has been served”, calmed me down a bit. A first baby usually took its time...
Sometime later Bart had to admit that he was lost. Wout and Wim’s cars were nowhere to be seen.
“It can’t be far off,” he said when he stopped the car on the side of the road. After studying the map, he realised that he had gone too far at a busy detour. It took a while to turn on the busy road. Still scolding himself for being so stupid he drove back, taking no notice of the speed limits. When we finally got through the busy city and stopped in the huge carpark near the quay, we were met by an aunt and uncle who came from The Hague to see us off.
“You’d better hurry!” they said. “Your names have been called for immediate boarding; all the emigrants are already on board. What took you so long? Wout and Wim have already been here for an hour!”
Fred rushed us through the crowd into the office buildings where our children were anxiously waiting for us. It took quite a while to have our tickets and our hand luggage checked. When we finally came out on the other side of the building, I raced off to the rest of our family, standing behind a high wire fence. Hands grabbed mine and we kissed as well as we could through the holes in the fence, biting the wire when we missed.
None one of Fred’s family were there. We had said good-bye to them at the party the previous Saturday evening too. He was one of the youngest in his family of seven children. I had never met his mother who must have been a lovely lady. She had died in February 1956, three months before we met, when Fred was still in the navy. One of his four older brothers lived in an institution in the south of Holland since he was nine years old. A high fever brought on by mumps when he was three had caused severe brain damage. I had never met him and we had lost contact with Fred’s youngest brother who was at sea with the merchant navy. Fred’s two sisters were nine and ten years older than he was. They all lived in and around Arnhem, sixty kilometres further from the harbour than my family.
Everyone, except Fred’s youngest brother had been at the party. With the help of my brothers Wim, Bart and Ties, who were still living at home, we had cleared the big attic above the pigsties and the empty cow stables at the back of Mum’s new farmhouse. We moved a hundred bales of straw creating plenty space to dance in the middle of the wooden floor. Bart, who was a truck-driver for a feed and fodder supplier at the time, brought a huge sheet of canvas home, which we hung over the bales of straw. With long strips of yellow crepe paper and glue we made a picture of a big ocean steamer on the black canvas that made the reason for the party very clear.
Everyone had a great time dancing with and talking to aunts and uncles, neighbours and friends who had come from every direction to say good-bye and wish us well. Like most of our guests we had had a little too much to drink in the end that had softened the pain of our final good-byes. Fred did not want his favourite sister Bep to come to the harbour, as she would have been too upset to see him leave. Only his eldest brother Henk and his wife Gijsje had come all the way from Arnhem to see us off and Fred had not even been able to say good-bye to them.
Struggling with a heavy bag and his hands full of papers he yelled at the kids to stay together. I had to run to catch up with them.
“Come on! Hurry up!” he shouted impatiently.
By the time Fred stopped scolding me we had reached the ferry where a long queue of travellers was still waiting to be checked in. A young Belgian couple in front of us said they had been drinking coffee with their family when they realised that everyone had already left the restaurant. Another hour passed before our passports and tickets were checked again and we got through customs. Via steep stairs and endless passages we went to one of our cabins in the bottom of the ferry. After we stored our belongings in the lockers we hurried back onto the deck. We had not noticed that the anchors had already been pulled up and the ferry was moving. Dusk was slowly setting in. Cursing ourselves for leaving our binoculars on the bed in the cabin, we frantically searched for our family. We heard Wout whistle a popular tune on his fingers. Then we spotted them waving and shouting. When Wout started whistling a song about keeping up your spirits and doing away with sorrows and sadness, the people on the quay joined in singing. Their voices grew stronger with every line until they formed a big choir. The crowd cheered when the song ended. A well-known waltz brought tears to every emigrant’s eyes; “The stars will be shining wherever you are...”
The clear, sharp tones of Wout’s whistling trilled over the still water when he started whistling the tune of an English song that was made popular by Vera Lynn during the war. We stood motionless on the ferry, with tears streaming down our faces while our families and friends on the quay sang the words:
It’s time to say good-bye...
We will meet again...
Don’t know where…
Don’t know when...
But we’ll meet again... one sunny day…
Please feel free to