sobbing uncontrollably. Murray and I side step our way through the bedlam and meet up with the rescue crew, who are crouched over a man’s body while administering CPR. He is lying between two huge Mack trucks. It’s immediately obvious that the poor bloke is dead. His skull is disfigured, his face, purple and swollen; cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) is oozing from both ears.
We’re told this is a family transport business and the father and son were working on the trucks. One was parked directly behind the other. The father had stuck his head between the front of one truck and the rear of the other and yelled to the son, who was in the cab:
‘Okay, start her up!’
The son turned the key, not realising the vehicle was in gear. The huge Mack truck lunged forward and crushed the father’s head between the two vehicles. The son quickly shoved it in reverse but it was too late. His father dropped to the ground and died where he fell. The neighbour tells us that the poor old bugger has just come out of hospital after surviving a major heart attack. This was his first day back on the job.
The mother grabs me from behind, screaming:
‘Is he dead? Is he dead?’
I have no idea what I said to the poor woman. What could I say? I was never trained to counsel grieving family members at an accident scene. None of us were
CHAPTER THREE
Tin Huts
Norman Nissen was a World War I British Army Engineer who will always be remembered for one thing. A semicircular corrugated iron hut that was bitterly cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer: the Nissen hut.
The cheap prefabricated buildings were first used as army barracks and ancillary military buildings but, by the time my family had moved to Australia, they had become the standard temporary homes built for the huge influx of migrants landing on Australian shores. One such hut, erected on the hardened clay and ants’ nests of South Western Sydney, was to become my home for the next three years.
The bus trip from the docks in Sydney to our new home, East Hills Migrant Hostel, seemed to take forever. I’m not sure if I was just eager to get there and explore my new surroundings or I was finally getting a little travel weary. We had been on the move for nearly seven weeks and I think we were all starting to fray at the edges. We were knackered and just wanted a place to call home, if only for a few months. Little did I know that the months would turn into years.
East Hills Hostel was situated in bushland just outside of Liverpool, south-west of Sydney. It was administered by Commonwealth Hostels Ltd, and housed migrants from all over the world, although at that time, it was mainly families from England, Ireland and Scotland that filled the huts. The hostel was built on the opposite side of the Georges River from the small village of East Hills. For those using the train system to get to work, the quickest way to the railway station was to walk up a narrow potholed road that cut through a scrubby forest of eucalyptus, bottle brush and melaleuca trees towards the river, passing a few rustic homes along the way, then cross a rickety old timber footbridge to access the last stop on the South West Rail line – East Hills. It wasn't the end of the earth - but you could see it from there. The footbridge still stands today although it has been upgraded many times. If you didn’t want to walk and you were lucky enough to have a car, then it was a forty five-minute trip by road to East Hills train station. Liverpool station was closer.
Less than one kilometre away, there was a smaller neighbouring estate, Heathcote Hostel and, along with East Hills Hostel, both were bounded by the suburbs of Moorebank and Hammondville to the north-west. To the south-west was the Holsworthy Military Base, firing ranges and army accommodation. The nearest school was Hammondville Public, where both my sister and I attended.
The running of the hostel was overseen by a manager who would allocate a hut to each family on arrival. If you were considered a small family, as we were, then you would share with another. There was a dividing wall that separated the two but as you can imagine, the thin, flimsy construction didn’t allow for much privacy.
Our arrival debriefing by the hostel manager and staff was, for the most part, gibberish to me, but a few sentences did spark my interest. I’m not sure if it was an official part of the speech or just a resident chatting to my parents, but I recall listening to stories about the abundance of red-bellied black snakes, funnel-web and red-back spiders, and a detailed description of the pain a bull ant can cause if you’re unlucky enough to be bitten on the bum by one of the nasty little critters.
‘Don’t sit on the ground without checking first. The little bastards pack a huge wallop that’ll bring tears to yer eyes,’ one old bloke said.
Our new home did accommodate all sorts of weird, wonderful and sometimes dangerous creatures – and that included the residents.
Mum and Dad didn’t appear to be too fazed but I’m sure others were thinking, where on Earth are we? the jungles of Africa or some Antipodean hell ? Also, we were lucky, our distant relatives, Rosemary and Dave Binnie and their two children, Grant and Heather were already residing on the hostel. Having family nearby certainly helped us settle into our new way of life.
For my parents, living in the huts came with a whole new set of challenges. The semicircular design of the hut walls became the enemy of anything square and symmetrical. Not that we had much in the way of furniture; a green, sticky vinyl lounge which doubled as Mum and Dad’s bed, a tiny table and two smaller beds for Jenny and me. It seemed impossible to locate anything square against the curved walls and so the tiny interior of the huts was reduced even further by their poor design. I know it annoyed Mum and Dad, but Jenny and I couldn’t care less as we spent most of our days playing outside.
I have horrible memories of trying to sleep during our first few Australian summers. Like a billy can on an open fire, the wretched huts would spend all day absorbing heat from the summer sun, then at nightfall would mock us with creaks and groans as we lay on our boiling beds, sunburnt, feverish and swimming in sweat. It was also my first introduction to the most annoying creature on Earth...the Aussie mozzie. Like blood sucking satellites, the maddening mosquitoes would circle our heads, taunting us for hours while we desperately tried to grab some sleep sleep. The incessant buzzing only stopped once the tiny pests landed on any piece of exposed skin, where they anchored down and feasted until fat and bloated on Bruce blood. As if that wasn't irritating enough, every now and then Dad would burst into our room armed with a bazooka loaded with liquid insect repellent. Pump, pump, swish, swish! and suddenly, along with my eyes, nose and mouth, our tiny bedroom was filled with a toxic mist strong enough to instantly kill every critter in it. Heaven knows what effect it had on myself and Jenny. We would simply, hold our breath, pull the sheet over our heads and wait for the fog to settle.
My sister and I had very few toys but we were never bored. It was easy to fill your day by poking broken twigs down trapdoor spider holes, watching ants devour dead snakes or simply playing with any of the hundred or so children scattered throughout the hostel. The migrant camp didn’t offer much in the way of recreation facilities but it didn’t seem to matter. We were surrounded by bushland, Williams Creek and the Georges River so it was easy to dream up some sort of adventure. As the hostel was once used by the military, It wasn't unusual to find old rusty bayonets, machetes or the odd belt of spent bullet cartridges, lost or discarded after previous army manoeuvres. Close to our home, on a barren patch of red clay, were two huge piles of broken concrete blocks left over from earlier building demolitions. The local kids had nicknamed them ‘The Rocks’. It was a haven for the resident snakes and other reptiles yet I and other hostel kids would spend hours clambering all over them, crawling through tunnels and crevices
