There would be another family lunch… then 16 years passed

When Barbara Burgess sat down with breakfast one morning and switched on Sunrise, she had no idea she was about to set something in motion that her family had been unable to achieve for 16 years.

She saw Saroo Brierley talking about Tahbilk Estate’s Long Lost Lunch, a national search to reunite an Australian family separated by distance, health and circumstance.

Barbara didn’t hesitate.

“I just knew I had to enter it,” she told Starts at 60.

For the retired paediatric nurse from near Toowoomba, Queensland, the opportunity went much deeper than winning a competition. It was a chance to bring together a family with an extraordinary history, and honour the parents she and her brother lost when they were children.

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A childhood changed forever

Barbara was eight and her brother Peter was 10 when their parents died in a plane crash on September 5, 1970.

Their father, Janos, known as John, had fled Communist Hungary in 1951 and started again in Australia. He worked as a miner at Radium Hill in South Australia, where he met Barbara’s mother Connie, who had left her family’s dairy farm near Toowoomba to work as a nurse with the Australian Inland Mission.

John later headed to Andamooka to search for opal, hand-digging holes and sleeping in the back of his ute before eventually becoming an opal dealer and exporter.

He was determined to embrace his adopted country.

Barbara says her father wouldn’t teach his children Hungarian because he considered himself Australian and instead, he taught himself English with the help of Reader’s Digest.

On the day he died, Barbara says her father had been flying north to buy opal and planned to return to take his children to the Adelaide Show.

After their parents’ deaths, Barbara and Peter were taken in by their 70-year-old grandmother at the family dairy farm outside Toowoomba. Their aunt Gwen, then 32 and single, became their legal guardian.

“She was basically our second mother,” Barbara said.

Gwen died from bowel cancer at 42, when Barbara was 18.

Despite those losses, Barbara remembers growing up surrounded by love. Cousins became more like brothers and sisters, and family remained central to her life.

The big brother with a V8 Monaro

Through it all, Peter has been one of the constants in Barbara’s life.

The siblings became particularly close after losing their parents, and Barbara says she has always looked up to her big brother. He even taught her to drive in his V8 Monaro.

“Needless to say, I have a heavy foot and like fast cars,” Barbara told Starts at 60.

These days, brother and sister both drive Kia Stingers.

Barbara’s childhood memories are filled with similar flashes of family life.

There were birthday parties in Andamooka with Hungarian friends, party hats, laughter and plenty of food. After the family moved to Adelaide, Guy Fawkes night became an event because her dad would buy what she remembers as an “excessive amount” of fireworks and set them off from the front patio overlooking the city.

At the supermarket, if something was on special, Barbara remembers him deciding he’d better buy 50 of them.

The last time they were all together

The last time that particular wider group of Barbara’s family gathered was for her Uncle Victor’s 80th birthday in 2010.

There were Coffin Bay oysters, homemade Hungarian food, pool and table tennis, along with an attempt by Barbara’s cousins to teach her enough Hungarian to wish Victor a happy 80th birthday.

It took her all afternoon.

The other Hungarian expression she remembers from the gathering isn’t quite as suitable for publication. Her cousins taught her a swear word after she missed a pool shot.

Nobody expected it would be another 16 years before that wider group had the opportunity to gather again.

That wasn’t for lack of trying.

In September 2020, Barbara and Peter organised a memorial to mark 50 years since their parents’ deaths. There was a meal, a slideshow of family photographs, trees planted in their memory and a Scotch raised to their father. Relatives from their mother’s side came, but nobody from their father’s side was able to attend. Another chance to bring the wider family together had slipped away.

Distance, illness and financial pressures have made getting everyone in one place difficult and the family is now scattered across Queensland, South Australia and Canada.

Barbara has seen some family members during those years, but not that wider group together. Phone calls, Facebook and Christmas messages have helped bridge the distance.

They can’t replace sitting around a table.

“I think it’s being there together, being able to have lots of laughter and lots of chatting, and just enjoy everybody’s company,” Barbara said.

Food has always been part of that connection, particularly through the family’s Hungarian heritage.

Her Uncle Victor had a favourite saying whenever he thought Barbara wasn’t eating enough.

“You don’t have to be hungry to eat.”

She has never forgotten it.

‘I just knew I had to enter’

Barbara’s entry into the Long Lost Lunch was spontaneous. She was watching Sunrise over breakfast when she saw Brierley discussing his collaboration with the Purbrick family at Tahbilk.

“I just knew I had to enter it,” she said. “The bottom line was that I knew my family had always had a remarkable history, both sides, one that should actually be told.”

Barbara had even thought about writing a book about the family one day.

More than anything, she saw the Long Lost Lunch as a tribute to her parents and “their memory, their love, their strength, their resilience”.

“Both my parents were amazing people,” she points out.

‘I was just floored’

When organisers later asked Barbara to join a Teams meeting, she assumed they wanted to ask more questions before choosing the winning family.

Technology wasn’t Barbara’s strong suit, so she headed to her neighbour Georgia’s house for help getting connected.

Then came the news.

“I was just floored,” she said. “I was so very excited, and it felt a bit surreal, really.”

Georgia was the first person she told and Barbara then headed home to tell her husband.

One table after all these years

This month, members of Barbara’s family will travel to Tahbilk Estate in Victoria’s Nagambie Lakes region for the Long Lost Lunch with Brierley, whose journey to find his birth family inspired the film Lion.

Not everyone can make it. Barbara’s cousin John and his wife Kerry already have another family reunion on the Gold Coast that day, but Peter and his wife will be there, along with Barbara’s children, cousins and members of another generation of the extended family.

For a family in which sharing food has always been part of being together, the significance of gathering around one table again isn’t lost on Barbara.

And after everything that has happened since that lunch 16 years ago, she has a message for families who keep assuming there will always be another Christmas, another birthday or another opportunity to get everyone together.

“I do think that as we get older, we need to take every opportunity we can, because life is finite,” she said.

“We need to take the opportunities, stay together, and catch up with people when we can, and remember what’s important. At the end of the day, family and friends are the most important things you have, along with your health.”