Journal Entries
Sydney Harbour, 11 November 1949
Posted Nov 11, 2011
The USS 'General R. M. Blatchford' entered Sydney Harbour on 11 November 1949 with a cargo of the dispossessed. Among the hundreds of 'displaced persons' – refugees – was a petite blonde woman who stood at the rail looking at this strange place that might come to be her home. She'd gladly boarded the ship in Naples, knowing that there was nothing for her in Europe except more years in refugee camps. Her town had been shattered and her country had been swallowed by another. Now, on the other side of the world she was looking out at another country of which she knew absolutely nothing.
Her widowed mother was on board with her, and her widowed sister with her two surviving sons. Her daughter, just short of her seventh birthday, was beside her. Her father, her two brothers, her brother-in-law, her eldest nephew and her own son were all dead, all but her father and her son murdered. She chose to let people assume that she was herself a widow – it stopped awkward questions.
She had a tea chest which contained everything she owned. Her clothes, her daughter's clothes, a saucepan, a sewing kit, a few photos, documents gathered along the way in Tartu, Riga, Danzig, Dresden and eventually at the camp in Geislingen*. There was a doll and a pair of children's books, gifts from the Red Cross and the UNRRA.
In her pocket she had a 10-pfennig piece from an obsolete currency, and no other money.
She knew that she'd soon be leaving the ship and that she'd be sent by train to a place called Adelaide, but she didn't quite know where that was. Her daughter would have to start school, in a foreign language. She was trying to teach herself that language and wondered if she'd ever learn something with such illogical spelling.
Mostly, though, she stood at that rail thinking of everything that had happened, all the people who'd disappeared, all the places she'd never see again. She was at the end of the world with an unknown future and she felt herself to be an old woman. She was 31.
My grandmother told me all of this over the years and much more besides. She made a living as a seamstress, then married and became an Australian citizen in 1958, a 'stateless person' no longer. My mother became a teacher, correcting the spelling of native speakers of English. Mum will have gone to lunch today in Adelaide with her cousin, the other surviving member of the family group on that voyage.
I found the tea chest in my grandmother's shed after her death. Mum chose to dispose of it.
I have the 10-pfennig piece.
It's Remembrance Day.Ivan.
* Geislingen camp: http://www.eesti.ca/?op=article&articleid=21731
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Latest reply: Nov 11, 2011
One of our bogbrushes is missing
Posted Nov 10, 2011
Being good little bureaucrats, we have a committee for everything. We have committees to coordinate committees, a fact which occasionally makes me mutter casual comments about crying out loud under my breath. The committee which looms the largest in the collective consciousness is the one dedicated to purely internal matters of staff wellbeing and facilities management. 
The arguments about the coffee machine have passed me by. I have been asked for my opinion on carparks (I don't drive), childcare facilities (I'm an evolutionary cul-de-sac) and the role of the social club in this, that and the other (meh).
Today, though, we broke new ground for absurdity. The committee has established that the lavatorial requisites in one of the gentlemen's lavatories have gone walkies. Yes, that's right - one of our bogbrushes is missing! 
Even more alarming, to my way of thinking, is that this has happened once before. 
I'm now horribly perplexed by the thought that one of my colleagues might collect such objects. I find myself contemplating apects of people's personalities that I never wanted to consider at all. But above all there's the question - why?
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Latest reply: Nov 10, 2011
The waiting game starts here
Posted Nov 9, 2011
I'm just back from the pub. My colleague and friend K had the news that her father was being moved from the hospital to a specialist care unit in another part of town, so of course we went to the pub. It's the great Australian tradition of avoidance.
We drank and talked and drank and talked. No subject was off-limits, apart from the reason we were there. K's partner joined us, then a series of other people, and the talk continued. Holiday plans, dinner plans, the idea that we might go to the pub later this week just for something different. Everything except the real reason we were there.
Then K mentioned her father, how awful it was that he was so ill, and how she thought they might take him from the specialist unit back to the hospital for treatment as needed.
The specialist unit is a hospice for the dying.
K's partner was thinking what I was thinking - that somehow, quite soon, he'll have to say 'Sweetheart, he probably won't be coming home'.
Ivan.
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Latest reply: Nov 9, 2011
Typing my fingers to the bone
Posted Nov 8, 2011
Today was one of those days. On top of all the usual stuff, which of course I can't tell you about in any detail - a fact for which you should be grateful, 'cos it's boring - I had an urgent request for a full and comprehensive report on a particular issue. There was a list of questions to be answered, and it all had to be done immediately if not sooner.
So I sat down and typed and typed. The particular issue is one of my personal hobby-horses so I knew all the details and I could put something together. In fact, I put eight pages together answering all of the highly specific questions I'd been given. Typed, proofread, formatted and submitted in record time.
Then came the obvious response - 'Sorry, we didn't realise it was all that complex, but can you edit it down into a single page?'
So I did that and produced a page which answered none of the questions.
This was received with many thanks and a chocolate frog from the charity chocolate box, which I suspect means that the people asking the questions didn't understand the questions.
I am sick of typing. Sick of it. So I don't think I can manage to do a journal today.
Oh, hang on...Ivan.
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Latest reply: Nov 8, 2011
On missing the moment
Posted Nov 7, 2011
I went out yesterday afternoon to see my colleague L performing with her band at a local cafe. Somewhere between Latin and Gypsy in style, lyrics in five languages, L alternating between flute and vocals. When she performs she is completely within that space and so totally professional whether she's playing the flute or playing the sultry chanteuse.
It was a great gig. Most of the cafe patrons were there for the food not the music, so it was good to see them give more and more attention to the band as the session went on. I left convinced that I'd write today's journal about the show.
This is not that journal.
I should have written this yesterday when every detail was fresh in my mind. If I had, I'd have written something very different, something which caught the mood. It all sounded so good as I wrote it in my head on the way home.
Now, of course, I can't capture the mood. It's slipped past me. If I'd wanted to catch the moment and keep it like a fly in amber, I should have written it all down last night...
Let this be a lesson to me.Ivan.
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Latest reply: Nov 7, 2011
Ivan the Terribly Average
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