Butterflies and Demons. Eva Chapman

for their passages to Australia. They stared at their incomprehensible ‘Alien Registration Certificates’ in dread. All they knew was that must obey these certificates and not lose them. Any migrants who broke the contract were jailed and deported. God knew where to! Giant graveyards were all that was left of the countries they came from.

      While Ivan settled into his mind-numbing position on the assembly line at GM Holden, Tatiana was forced to work as a domestic. She hated it. She’d had enough of slave labour during the war. She soon fell out with Miss Bressler. Jeanette watched sadly as the trio trundled their cases past her window. They moved to a mansion in Springfield, from which Ivan cycled several miles to work on a bike rented from Super Elliots in town, and where Tatiana slaved as a domestic. But they soon moved again when Tatiana refused to wash off the excrement spread on the walls by the spoilt two-year-old of the household. Tatiana’s friend Katherina, whom she had met on the ship, was fortunate to land an office job at Charles Birks, a large department store in the city. When Tatiana voiced her envy, Katherina replied,

      ‘I tell you it’s no picnic. The boss makes me come in an hour earlier than the Australian employees. I have to clean the offices. Of course, I don’t get extra money for this. The rest of the time I’m a dogsbody, running around doing all the shit jobs that the Australians won’t do.’

      At the beginning of 1952 Svitochka turned five and went to school. She found this very unnerving, as she was the only child with a strange name. She envied the girls in their pretty pink angora jumpers, buckled shoes, and short bobbed hair. These contrasted painfully with her lace-up boots, heavy trousers, and long plaits, through which her mother wove brightly coloured ribbons. These ribboned braids, all the rage in some backwater village of the Soviet Union, at best attracted quizzical stares from these fluffy girls who sported easy hair styles. Their lunchboxes contained neat, white triangles of bread, encasing delicate slivers of Kraft cheese. They visibly moved away when Svitochka opened her lunchbox, liberating a pungent waft of garlic sausage bought from a new Polish stall in the market.

      On the first morning, the class stood up and sang God Save the King. Svitochka didn’t know who this king was. Two days later Adelaide was plunged into a deep gloom. When Tatiana took Svitochka into town to buy a straw hat, the stores were all draped in black. Pictures of George VI, resplendent with crown and sceptre, replaced the usual window displays. Flags hung at half mast. People shuffled about sadly, not raising their eyes from beneath the brims of their hats. Tatiana and Svitochka were puzzled. On the next schoolday, Svitochka discovered that the king was dead. In the big quadrangle, wearing her new straw hat with red cherries, she now had to sing God Save the Queen. This did not fill her with a lot of confidence in God.

      She wasn’t long at this school before the family moved again. On the first day at her next school, the headmistress asked to see her stomach. Australia was very strange, thought Svitochka, not really wanting to show this stranger her belly. Reluctantly she pulled up her jumper. ‘Go home immediately,’ the headmistress pronounced. ‘You have chicken pox!’

      The chairs in the Returned Servicemen’s League Hall on Tapleys Hill Road waited in neat rows for the afternoon Good Neighbour Council meeting. Miss Lynette Taplow, buck-toothed and squinting behind goggle glasses, sat at the front table. Her canary-yellow cardigan hung proudly from the back of her chair. She had just retrieved it from lay-by at Harris Scarfe in Rundle Street, having paid one shilling for several weeks from her scanty wage as a draper’s assistant. Now she was annoyed that it was too hot to wear it. It was Wednesday half-closing day, and she was here for an important meeting of how local residents must handle the aliens who were filtering like germs into the area. She had already seen said aliens walk tentatively past the draper’s shop, looking curiously at the materials and embroidery threads in the window. She held her breath and was enormously relieved when they walked on. Her shop was situated further along Tapley’s Hill Road, dangerously close to the new Philips factory, where floods of aliens were being sent to work.

      An imperceptible flush spread beneath Lynette’s powder. She lightly swung the canary yellow cardie over her hot shoulders. Barry Guthrie had walked in, his brown shorts and gartered socks adorning his freckled legs.

      ‘Good afternoon, Miss Taplow. Blimey it’s hot today!’ He immediately dismissed the uncharitable thought that her cardigan matched the colour of her teeth. His knees bulged out from in between his shorts and socks like awkward cauliflowers. His red flap ears sprang free as he took off his hat and liberated his sweaty head. Lynette didn’t care – he was her last hope as she sat on the dusty shelf of spinsterhood.

      Recently widowed, Guthrie was a returned serviceman from World War One. He never tired of reminding people that 60,000 Australians were killed in that war, twice the number as in World War Two. He knew that soldiers suffered terribly in both wars, but he liked to think it was much harder for him. As a youngster, he had survived being blown apart by Turks at Gallipoli, been bombarded by Fritz in France, and endured having to watch his mates die in rat-infested trenches behind an elusive Western Front. He felt that this RSL Hall, built in dedication to servicemen returning from the Great War, was his stomping ground, and resented the new swathe of cocky soldiers who swashbuckled in from the recent war. The Government was bending over backwards to reward them with homes, work and education: much better than he’d had, when he returned from his war and was stuck out on a rocky barren farm.

      The Second World War soldiers had been helped with payouts, water schemes, and bags of nutrients. Their farms were flourishing. Barry felt overlooked. An injury, courtesy of Fritz, had prevented him from enlisting again but he had worked bloody hard for the war effort. As supervisor at the Hendon Munitions factory he turned out guns and bullets galore, so those cocky whippersnappers could thrash the Japs. After the war, he felt as useless as the abandoned Hendon plant. But life moved on. A Dutchman bought the site at a bargain price, reincarnated it as the Philips factory, and Premier Playford bestowed his blessing with an official opening in 1947. Barry secured an important job supervising a growing migrant workforce. He was also in charge of the newly established local Good Neighbour Council. Today was the first meeting.

      Displaced persons were trickling into the area. Fed up with being squeezed into hot iron huts, and travelling from far off immigration centres, many were setting up asbestos shacks in Royal Park, a suburb near the new factory on the other side of Tapley’s Hill Road. The distinctly regal name belied the flat, uninviting, treeless wasteland that had once been the marshy reedbeds of the Port River, and was now scented by sewerage works. This alien invasion was not popular. Barry’s job today at this Good Neighbour Council meeting was to help the good people of Hendon deal with the influx. The Labour Party under Prime Minister Chifley, which had been instrumental in bringing out these Displaced People, faced huge opposition. A 1947 countrywide poll showed that 83% of Australians were against accepting refugees from the Holocaust, and the government was accused of diluting the ethnic Anglo-Saxon balance. The immigration minister Arthur Calwell sought to pacify this opposition by dictating clearly,

      ‘Our aim is to Australianise all our migrants … in as short a time as possible … only the local Australian people … can bring about the ultimate assimilation of any group of migrants in their midst.’

      Barry braced himself with a glass of Woodies lemonade supplied by Lynette, and waited for the hall to fill. This particular section of ‘local Australian people’ grumbled fiercely at the impending destruction of their Anglo-Saxon way of life.

      Barry sighed as he saw the biggest grumbler of all walk in and hand Lynette a tray of lamingtons for afternoon tea. It was Mildred Taplow, Lynette’s sister-in-law. She was as large and imperious as the floral dress that draped over her expansive middle. The voluminous garment fell incongruously short, just below her stout knees, in the jauntier post-war style. Even though it was stiflingly hot she was determined to uphold British values and wore hat, gloves and shoes to match. As she took off her hat and waved the flies away, she exposed her hairstyle, a direct copy of her heroine Elizabeth, the wife of King George VI; as short and incongruous as her skirt.

      Mildred had snapped up Albert Taplow, a diminutive, shy man, quite late in life, and to everyone’s surprise produced Trevor, who trailed behind her.

      ‘Say hello to Aunty Lynette,’ she ordered the small