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outbursts of intolerance they encountered were often merely ceremonial. What they had not considered—or if they had, they dismissed the thought—was that they would find that there were certain aspects of this world to which they would never adjust. Australia, while offering us personal and political freedom, failed to fulfil a much deeper desire, a longing which gave birth to the fantasies we had fashioned out of a few scraps of knowledge and a great deal of wishful thinking.
    We were woefully ignorant about conditions of life in a land that was not merely remote but had been isolated from Europe by the long years of the war and by primitive methods of communication. Most Europeans who made their way to Australia in the late forties were almost as ill-informed about the country where they intended to settle as were those who had embarked on such a journey in the nineteenth century. A few months before leaving Budapest we went to a cinema which, someone had told us, was showing a film about Australia. It turned out to be an item in an ancient newsreel. I cannot recall its subject matter. All I remember are three classical, cliched images: a flock of sheep in a cloud of dust, a koala, and the Harbour Bridge. The koala was something new. With the addition of the kangaroo—and everyone knew about kangaroos—these images accounted for the sum of our knowledge of Australia. For the rest, we invented a paradise, a promised land, an El Dorado patched together from the dreams and fantasies of people living in a landlocked country of ice and snow.
    My parents saw Australia as a balmy, tropical place beside an emerald-green sea. They imagined Sydney as a graceful Mediterranean pleasure-city (their model was no doubt picture-postcard views of Monte Carlo, Cannes or Nice) with palm-lined boulevards sweeping the curve of an ample bay. They saw white sand and, in the evenings, elegant, Latin-looking ladies and gentlemen sitting in the open-air cafes of these maritime boulevards. They saw sleek automobiles and many neon lights; they saw nightclubs with liveried doormen, and opulent restaurants. Somewhere, not far from this magical shoreline, they would find the opera house—for every large city had, it went without saying, its opera house. This would be, no doubt, like La Scala, the Met and the opera house in Budapest, but probably more splendid than any of those.
    What does one wear to the opera in a tropical climate? they wondered—for air-conditioning had never entered into their scheme of things. Miraculously, my father still had some lightweight black material among his cache of prewar cloth, enough to make several dinner-jackets—he had wondered whether tails would have been more appropriate. My mother had a harder time: material for ladies’ clothes was very difficult to come by. Fortunately someone knew someone else who had an American parachute for sale, and this provided enough silk, which could be dyed various colours, for three or four evening garments. My mother spent many hours with her dressmaker, a lady of alarming and probably phoney French accent, discussing what, precisely, should be made out of this marvellous cloth which had, so to speak, fallen out of the sky. Details of other clothes for Australia and for the last leg of our journey—first class from San Francisco on the Matson Line, we were assured—were worked out with equal care. Appropriate luggage had also to be ordered: light enough for the journey by air from Vienna to New York, but sturdy enough for use during the vacations we would no doubt be taking once we had established ourselves in Australia.
    Then there was the matter of furniture. We assumed that we would be living in an apartment in a ‘skyscraper’: to an inhabitant of Budapest this meant a building of more than eight storeys. It would, of course, have a fine view of the bay, of the palm-fringed promenades with their cafes and elegant shops, and of the