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buildings with red roof-tiles. Scattered here and there were stands of scrawny trees that looked for all the world like overgrown broccoli. Another hour, and we had disembarked into a dreary, unimaginably hot shed, an ugly utilitarian edifice—one of the finger wharves at Woolloomooloo—amidst a throng of sweating, excited people. Tearful war-brides, bursting out of their smart New Look clothes, many of them carrying infants in those curious shoulder-slung canvas carriers which vanished mysteriously after the early fifties, were greeted by their bemused relatives—those who had said farewell to them, not many months earlier, when these young women set out (often on the same ship) to join their American ‘husbands’. An important executive of Coca-Cola, whose family had occupied the only private cabin on board, while the rest of us were accommodated in dormitories of three-tier bunks, was surrounded by a gaggle of obsequious company officials. And scattered in this crowd, a handful of reffos, wogs, balts, DPs like us, in our strange clothes, with our equally curious gestures and demeanour, were being reunited with our embarrassed, thoroughly ‘Australian’ relatives—who were no doubt beginning to wonder whether it had been wise to sponsor these odd remnants of a discarded way of life.
    We had come to that finger wharf through a combination of folly and courage, of hard-headed realism and romantic self-indulgence. We followed the dictates of a seemingly impeccable logic which was nevertheless based on absolutely false assumptions. Family mythology always insisted that my parents had intended to emigrate to Australia in 1937. They saw what was coming. Their affluent and comfortable life—all the more precious because they were the first among both their families to enjoy such affluence and comfort—was threatened on all sides. The atmosphere of Hungarian political life was growing nastier each day. This was no place for a family whose surnames told all: Riemer, Neubauer, Weiss, Schillinger—not a decent Magyar name among them. In the world outside, the ambitions of National Socialism were apparent to all. But, the mythology continued, there was a child to be considered; was it safe to underake a journey of such hazards with an eighteen-month-old? An eminent paediatrician was consulted. His verdict was unambiguous: travelling was out of the question, my parents must postpone their plans for at least a year. By the following year the unthinkable had occurred: Austria had been reunited with her historic German heritage. To leave Hungary, that threatened, landlocked little country which had always reacted nervously to events in the world outside, became all but impossible. Or so the myth insisted.
    How much truth there was in all this I shall never know. It would have taken prescience of an extraordinary sort to foresee the state of affairs that was to exist by the spring of 1938. Yet many people had precisely such prescience. They got out. We stayed. The next seven years proved to my parents the extreme folly of their decision. They realised too, I think, that the paediatrician’s verdict may have been a convenient lifeline; they had clutched at it eagerly because it gave official sanction to their inertia. They must not be judged too harshly. It takes greater courage than most comfortable middle-class people possess to cut all ties in the firm conviction that a stable and familiar world will soon vanish. At any event, my parents stayed. The consequences of their miscalculation ultimately proved to them the error of their judgment. And so, when they came to find themselves among the relatively few survivors—everyone else in my father’s family had perished—they attempted to make good that folly. We were among the first to leave Budapest.
    Why did they choose Australia? There are three answers to that question, each of them highly significant in its individual way. The