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Days before\nwe were due to depart on 9th<\/sup> May 1951, there was an outbreak of the\ndeadly Small Pox disease in my Dutch homeland. I was eleven years old and was\npromptly dispatched to a general practitioner in the town for a vaccination. It\nwas a booster and the only ill effect I recall was a sore arm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An aunt who\nlived in Tilburg in the same province of North Brabant, where the viral outbreak\nhad begun, could only bid us farewell by telephone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once we were on board the ship the MS Sibajak <\/em>in Rotterdam passengers were advised that vaccination was compulsory for all, and this included my older sister Gonny who had initially been spared the needle due to the possibility of a severe reaction. It left her very ill for a time which was of grave concern to our mother, but she recovered. I recall seeing many red swollen arms among the passengers on deck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For me, on\nthe other hand, the weeks of motion sickness were more unsettling as we\ntravelled ever eastwards via the English Channel, the stormy Bay of Biscay and\nthe Straits of Gibraltar where I photographed the Rock with my new Box Brownie\ncamera, the Suez Canal, the sweltering Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Great\nAustralian Bight. Our ports of call were Port Said (with a welcome on-land side\ntrip to Cairo), Aden, Colombo, Fremantle and finally Melbourne. <\/p>\n\n\n\n At the\nequator we watched the arrival on board of King Neptune and the unceremonious covering with what looked to me like\nsoft green soap of some who were crossing for the first time. It was an\nentertaining distraction and so was, at other times, the occasional sighting of\nflying fish above the surface of the water. On 1st<\/sup> June an Asian\ncrew member went missing overboard. His sandals were found by the railings in\nthe morning. The ship retraced its course in a futile search and eventually\nleft behind a life buoy with a bright white light before moving on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had rarely\neaten more than the occasional bread roll by the time we were met by our Dad at\nthe Melbourne Docks nearly five weeks later on 14th<\/sup> June and, being\nsomewhat poorly, I was spared a further road journey of 500km to the South East\nof South Australia to experience my first air trip, which was of course with\nAnsett Airways. Our destination was Mount Gambier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An\ninteresting souvenir of our sea voyage is a printed journal which chronicles\nthe daily bulletins that had been broadcast through loudspeakers on deck by The<\/em> Nautical\nInformation Service. <\/em>I recall that each broadcast was preceded by Stars and Stripes Forever \u2013 <\/em>a tune that\nwould be permanently imprinted in my memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The journal was\nmade available to passengers on arrival in Australia. It was only a few years after World War II and\nthe proceeds were to aid the widows and orphaned families of the thousands of\nDutchmen who had lost their lives at sea whilst serving in the Dutch Merchant\nNavy. The 24-year-old Sibajak<\/em> itself\nhad also been a war ship and its company, Rotterdamsche Lloyd, alone had lost\n400 personnel among its seafarers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was many\nyears later that I actually read this journal with its reminders quite early in\nour voyage of those terrible war years. The minefields in the English Channel\nhad not then been cleared; the sighting of Normandy brought back memories of\nthe D Day invasion of 6th<\/sup> June 1944 and there was mention of the\ntragic sinking, only a month before our voyage, of the British submarine the Affray<\/em>. Attention was also drawn to\nBritish war ships off Gibraltar and to Malta\u2019s capital La Valetta, rising from\nits war ruins. Off Greece the Gulf of Nauplia was the resting place of the ship\nSlamat,<\/em> a pre-war sister ship of the Sibajak<\/em> that had been sunk in 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The sea voyage\nwas one that many migrants made in the years following the War. But like\nBarbara I vowed not to make such journey again, realising that sea travel was\nnot for me. Yet in fact I did so about twelve years later in order to revisit\nmy old homeland and travel the Continent and the UK. It was just something one\nhad to do and it was to be sometime before air travel became the norm. <\/p>\n\n\n\n NOTE: I have\nread that on 8th<\/sup> May 1980, the 33rd<\/sup> World Health Assembly\nofficially declared the world to be free of smallpox and that the eradication\nwas considered at that time to be the biggest achievement in international\npublic health.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More migration stories here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you have stories or memories of long sea voyages to or from Australia or other stories associated with migration ? <\/p>\n\n\n\n