A daughter writes about the mystery of her elderly mother’s travel trunk and why, after more than sixty years, it sits in a garden shed in suburban Melbourne, untouched.
My mother Agapi owns a travel trunk that has crossed oceans and time. It is dark brown in colour and heavy as an anchor. Scrawled across the elegantly domed lid in handwritten, white paint are the words: ‘Strati, Melbourne, Australia, 1961’. My mother’s maiden name and her far-flung destination.
This trunk, carefully arranged for a new life on foreign soil, has never been properly unpacked. The trunk has shifted from a two-storey terrace house next to the train station bridge on Punt Road, Richmond, to a graceful timber home with wrought iron verandah in Fairfield, to a take-away shop in the middle of Footscray, to a milk bar in truck-happy Yarraville, to a small weatherboard house on that same busy road, two doors up.
And there it remains, buried under bits ‘n bobs, in the corner of an old tin shed in my mother’s backyard, this precious chest, full of hope and anticipation. A young bride’s prayer for better days. Yet, after almost 61 years in Melbourne, the trunk sits undisturbed; its lid firmly clasped shut.
Australia was a country that appealed to my mother in the late 1950s. It was as far away from the poverty of post-war Greece as she could get. She yearned to leave the daily hunger behind, the dust and grime, the memories of a war in which her 13-year-old brother Iakovos was shot dead by a German soldier for trying to steal a potato (or was it a loaf of bread?). They were all so hungry.
It was far enough away from the Lilliputian, one-bedroom home crammed with six brothers and sisters and her parents, and far, far away from the filthy cigarette factory where my mother worked for seven years, stuffing cigarette after cigarette into packets, particles of tobacco collecting under her fingernails, in her nostrils and in her hair.
Years later, I remember my mother telling me that our family GP had asked her whether she used to smoke. My mother bristled at the suggestion—so uncouth!—but a chest x-ray for something unrelated showed signs of tobacco ingestion in her lungs. The tobacco factory’s muck had followed my mother all the way from the south of Europe to the South Pacific.
“Australia was a country that appealed to my mother in the late 1950s. It was as far away from the poverty of post-war Greece as she could get.”
A week before migrating to Australia, my mother married my father, Panagos (Peter). My father was born in a spec of a village in the mountains of the Peloponnese. After the nuptials, my mother boarded the Patris liner with two of my father’s cousins, all bound for ‘Afstralia’. She was to be joined by my father in Melbourne almost a year and a half later, in the late summer of 1963.
Some years ago, one of my brothers discovered a video from a collection of 16mm and 35mm films by Greek immigrant and filmmaker Tony Agapitos. Agapitos videoed and photographed arrivals and migrant life in Melbourne from the 1950s to the 1970s.
I am stunned to learn that I can watch silent black and white footage of the arrival of the Patris at Station Pier in Port Melbourne on November 6, 1961, the exact ship my mother was on, on YouTube.
The ship is bigger than I imagined—a behemoth. The day looks cloudy but warm. The men are wearing crisp white shirts, dark suits and hats. The women wear knitted cardigans over their pretty, pressed dresses and full skirts. Men, women and children cram against the ship balustrades, smiling, waving handkerchiefs, shading their eyes from the bright Australian light. Friends and family wait below with giddy anticipation; hollering, gesturing, faces lit up.
A massive Greek flag hoisted on the ship’s top deck flaps wildly in the wind. Hundreds of suitcases and trunks pile up on the pier’s timber decks. A troupe of five young boys walk gingerly down the ship stairs, holding hands, followed closely by their mother. I wonder where those five brothers are now; about the life they’ve lead in the land of the kangaroo. A baby with a dark thatch of hair stares wide-eyed from its bassinet. A young girl with a sweet French bob cradles a baby doll in one arm and a wicker basket in the other. My eyes search for Agapi, but she is nowhere to be seen.
My mother says she wept almost every day she was on that ship. What it must have felt like as a new bride to leave behind her new husband, mother, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, neighbours. She waved off her home and childhood, a landscape that may have been poor and ravaged by war but that was heaving with memories and shared histories. She was excited about the new, but the enormity of the undertaking pressed heavily on her heart.
I had an inkling of this loss as a 17-year-old when I lived in Athens for a year. I remember the initial exhilaration when I stepped off the plane into a rackety city made of concrete, a cacophony of mopeds and small European cars in surround sound, tooting and honking, shards of bouncing sunlight, the different smelling air, the mighty rush of the new.
My time in Athens allowed me to leave behind a bewildering couple of years following my father’s sudden death back in Melbourne. One morning he left home to attend an appointment at the Royal Dental Hospital on the city’s fringe and never returned. An asthmatic reaction to anesthetic precipitated a heart attack. Trauma and sadness demanded a change of scenery.
With Zoom, Skype and email non-existent then, my Australian friendships reduced to sporadic letters and postcards. Connection with family was the occasional phone call over static, at yawn-inducing hours of the day and night. It was not long before my life in Australia felt distant and imagined. Faces and places started to fade and blur around the edges. Memories became muddled. Home had, it seemed, become a myth.
“She waved off her home and childhood, a landscape that may have been poor and ravaged by war but that that was heaving with memories and shared histories.”
One particularly homesick day sunning myself on a Greek island beach in the South Aegean, I closed my eyes with my face to the sun and took myself on a tour of the suburban streets surrounding my home back in Melbourne. There was the op shop in the old hall next to St Paul’s church, the destination of many a Saturday morning visit with my mother for a rake and rummage through the cast offs and debris of someone else’s life.
There was the milk bar run by a rival Greek family across the road from our own milk bar, our shop windows both plastered with colourful Streets and Paul’s ice cream signs. There was the graceful red brick of Kingsville Primary School, the backdrop of my early school years, those scorching hot summers, the dizzying smell of freshly baked bread from the Tip Top factory across the road, the heady sugar rush of an icy-cold Sunnyboy, the pyramid-shaped frozen treat that cooled you down from inside out. We would sit sat cross-legged in the tree shadows after the lunchtime canteen run, pressing Sunnyboys against our foreheads in between crunchy ice bites.
There was the quaint period homes snuggled side-by-side, cheek by jowl, until you reached the edge of Cruickshank Park, with its curved stretch of green, the walk bridge hanging over a thin trickling creek, the trees dense with leaves that smelt like home.
When I opened my eyes, they were cloudy with tears. The Greek island beach looked just like the postcards I sent back to Australia (golden sand, the sky a milky brushstroke in deep blue), but I craved the shapes and sounds of my own patch of land—its ordinariness the thing I missed most.
I was being summoned by the Eucalyptus trees, by the quadrangles and ovals of my adolescence, by the rattling Melbourne trams and suburban trains, by the arch and curves of the West Gate Bridge, by my own ‘village’ and its homespun tales. The streetscape of our youth populates our story; it fills the pages with sentences only we can write.
I have often imagined my mother standing motionless in the flat, still streets of Melbourne in the 1960s, slowly scanning the silent horizon, wondering where all the people are. Where was the exciting life she packed for, the life she imagined?
“The streetscape of our youth populates our story; it fills the pages with sentences only we can write.”
The experience of my own coming home after my year in Greece is as vivid now as it was then, more than 30 years ago. Melbourne’s early morning chill pressed firmly against the aeroplane glass window. As the plane descended, I stared at Tullamarine Airport’s surrounds, gobsmacked. Field upon field of clipped grass in emerald green. Had Melbourne always been this green? The grey lines and sharp angles of Athens had rewired my brain.
Stumbling out into the fizz and fluster of Arrivals, I almost walked past my younger brother. Three years my junior, he had undergone a massive growth spurt the year I was away. His long limbs stretched towards me, in wonder too I suppose.
When I got home, the house behind the milk bar felt different: quieter, darker, more bruised. The rooms and shadows seemed curated like a play on stage, a sort of trickery. And, although she was still adjusting to the unexpected loss of my father, my mother seemed lighter in spirit than when I had left her. I spoke fluent Greek to her and she smiled widely.
For the next few weeks, the streets felt hushed. Gone was the bustle and horn-thumping of Athens, gone was the chitter-chatter from balconies, up high, across the way and down below, gone were the daily afternoon strolls to local squares and parks, gone was the living of life mostly outdoors and, always, with others.
Life back in Melbourne was just as I remembered it: unembellished and uneventful.
Although it followed her dutifully from house to house, I never saw my mother lovingly unpack her travel trunk or put anything away. Perhaps the contents did not fit the shape of her new life in Australia. Perhaps the things she packed would remind her of a past well out of reach.
Or perhaps my mother simply thought that one day she would return to her life in the warm bosom of the motherland, back to her battered Athenian view, back to the bustle and the different smelling air, and that she would unpack then—when she was home.
Dimitra Cromdos is a freelance writer based in Melbourne.
Photo caption: The author’s mother, Agapi, on the deck of the ‘Patris’ (Greek for ‘homeland’), which ferried thousands of immigrants from Greece to Australia between 1959 and 1975.
