Book Review – Brilliant historical novel celebrates our migrants

I love history, but I am first to acknowledge there are many who find it all ‘a bit boring.’ Sometimes, though, a book comes along that offers its story up to both parties, those who are interested in its historical significance and those who would not normally care one way or another.

The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls does just that. Victoria Purman has researched and written a delightful historical piece that will involve its readers from the first page to the last. It is a love story, but one that kept this now elderly male engaged throughout (from an historical perspective, of course). The book frequently took me back to childhood and to my teens, not that our family – now sixth-generation Australians – ever resided at Bonegilla, but I had an aunt who taught there. One of the characters reminds me, in some ways, of that aunt.

In the early post-WW2 years, an army camp on the shores of Lake Hume was repurposed for use as a short-term home for the influx of DPs (European people Australia agreed to accept, people who’d been displaced from their homes and even their home countries. Almost half their number entered through Bonegilla).

The camp then became a temporary home to a new wave of immigrants, also predominantly European. To survive in the new, fast-developing post-war world, Australia needed to boost its population and its workforce; the most immediate way to do this was by immigration. Many of those who helped us develop a more advanced industrial and manufacturing base, who laboured to create essential infrastructure – and who provided us a far wider understanding of a world about which the common Australian knew nothing – came from among these brave people, half a world from where they’d grown and lived.

At Bonegilla, and within this context, we meet four young women, all in their mid-teens, from four different backgrounds. It’s 1954. Frances, the camp director’s daughter, becomes friend and tutor to Vasisliki, from Greece, Elizabeta, from Germany (who is in reality Hungarian), and the urbane Iliana, from Italy. Despite their differences, a bond develops between them that is to last into the next century.

Everything is relatively simple while they are all at Bonegilla but as jobs are found for different ones among them, as parents gain work interstate, they must face inevitable separation. Vasiliki goes to Melbourne, no surprise as that city has the largest Greek population of any city outside Greece (even now about one person in 27), Elizabeta to Adelaide, Iliana to Cooma and Frances to teachers college in Sydney.

The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls devolves in part on the story of Victoria Purman’s Oma and Opa, Stefan and Maria, “…brave, simple people who… had their lives changed by war. They lost their (Hungarian) home, were deported to Germany and finally found their way to Australia.” She speaks of them with pride but wishes she had asked them more while they were still alive.

This book is written with empathy and understanding and will provide quite an appreciation to many about the different national, personal and moral standards that shape the girls’ lives: secret loves, arranged marriages, religious differences, cultural expectations, pregnancy outside marriage, and many other issues. Its great significance is in describing the bonds of friendship that establish between people despite – or, in this instance, due to? – their differences.

Perhaps if we’d had more books like this when we went to school, a greater number of us may have gained an interest in history. The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls is an enjoyable read and a great story.

The Last of the Bonegilla Girls, by Victoria Purman, (#mybonegillastory) published by HQ Fiction, is available in printed and digital editions.