My father had told me and my brothers and sisters the story of his life many times as we sat around the kitchen table in the evenings. What he didn’t remember or chose not to tell, his sister, Aunt Giscelia, told us when we stayed with her. Like Father she was a good storyteller and made the family’s trials and tribulations sound more like nightmarish fairytales. From these tales I thought I had learnt all there was to know about Father’s and Aunt Giscelia’s life in Germany, their journey to South Australia, and their life when they arrived.
But that night, after the first probe by Sister Kathleen, my peace of my mind was spoiled by having to think again about my family’s past. I lay awake reliving the events that befell my parents, my brothers and sisters, my grandparents and myself, pondering on the life of my father. From the time we were old enough to listen he told me and my brothers and sisters chilling tales of his early life in the Fatherland, intending them as a warning. He told us they were true stories that we should believe and learn from. But fact was twisted with fiction making it difficult for us to tell what was real and what was make-believe.
When Sister Kathleen next visited I was impatient to tell her about my father’s and his sister’s early life in Germany. ‘I know you said you wanted to hear my family’s story but I don’t know if you will believe me because it was so tragic. Are you sure you really want to hear all this?’
‘Of course I do, Mary.’
‘All right, but it is a long story and will take many days to tell.’
So I started to tell Sister Kathleen a story of events that happened long before I was born, so bizarre that it seemed not connected to me in any way.
Mathes – my father – and his sister were rescued from a bleak forestry life and adopted by their uncle and aunt when he was about ten. My grandmother and grandfather endured great hardship in their foresters’ life. According to the family legend, my grandparents had met at the annual Cottbus May Day fete. After catching the roving eye of the gypsy-like musician, Josef, who was travelling with a group of troubadours, Mascha had run away with him when they moved to the next town. They travelled as entertainers until Mascha fell ill shortly before her first baby was due and they settled near his parents’ homeland on the borders of Bohemia and Silesia. Josef became a forester and they lived in a hut on the edge of a dark medieval forest. They never found time for a wedding; snow, mud, rain and new babies seemed to delay all their good intentions. While my grandmother was in labour giving birth to Giscelia, her firstborn son, barely able to walk, tottered off into the forest and was lost. Only after the dramas of the birth did they miss him. Weeks later when they found his remains they deduced he was killed by a wolf. This tragedy put the young couple on their guard and made the long black nights fearful and menacing for their two surviving children, my Aunt Giscelia and Mathes, my father. They were forever wary of marauding wolves, creatures of the night and other threatening shadows of the forest.
When Mathes was just six, his mother, Mascha, barely survived a difficult birth during which her baby died. The complications so soon after an earlier pregnancy maimed and crippled her and she never recovered. She was confined to bed and became weaker each day until her death six months later. After Grandmother Mascha’s death, Grandfather Josef took to alcohol that made him wild and mad. He brewed almost pure spirit in the forest and sold some of it to those in the nearby village who knew of his still. But most of it he drank himself. Mascha and Josef had lovingly cared for and protected the young Mathes and Giscelia, but after Mascha’s death the children were neglected.
One day, several years after their mother’s death, their Aunt Katie-Lizzie and Uncle Herman paid an unexpected visit. News of Mascha had reached them from well-meaning family friends visiting the Zittau area in Upper Lusatia, centre of the Saxon linen trade. These family friends were passing through the district and had happened to stay at an inn in Zittau. Here dark and sinister tales about the nearby forest were told around dinner tables and winter firesides. Among these stories was the tragic but romanticised tale of the runaway girl from Cottbus who had lived on the edge of the forest with a wayward forester. After her death he went mad through grief, they said. Not only had the newborn infant died, but their eldest child was taken by a wolf. Although the event had taken place in the district four years earlier, the story was often spoken of as though it had only happened the day before.
Their friends’ ears pricked up when they heard that the young girl from Cottbus was called Mascha. They guessed she could be their friend Herman Schippan’s long-lost sister. My paternal grandmother’s family had spent ten years trying to find her, never knowing she had already been dead four years when their friends stumbled across her family.
Herman was excited yet wracked with guilt when he heard that his cherished sister had left two small children to be brought up by a half-crazed father. Herman and Katie-Lizzie were about to migrate to South Australia with their only child, Gretel, but Herman knew he could not leave Germany with a clear conscience without first seeing what he could do for his sister’s shattered family. They were kin after all. Herman and Katie-Lizzie immediately made the long journey from Cottbus to visit the family before their sea voyage to South Australia.
As they had never met Mascha’s lover, they stayed at an inn when they arrived in Zittau. After finding out where Josef and his two children lived, Herman and Katie-Lizzie were driven by the innkeeper several miles out of town to the edge of a dark forbidding forest where there was a small hut in a clearing. They intended to make themselves known to Josef and perhaps help him financially, but they were so alarmed at what they found that they decided that the best way of helping the family was to give them a chance in life by taking all three of them to South Australia with them, even if it meant delaying their voyage for some weeks.
Josef thought he had been saved from Hell when he met Mascha’s family and welcomed them with open arms. Mathes and Giscelia, who were never seen apart, clutched hands and cowered together when their aunt and uncle first set eyes upon them. But when they heard their aunt’s soft voice and her encircling arms pulled them to her ample warm bosom they felt soothed; the cold, the fear and the hunger disappeared. They began to cry, sobbing out all the woes of their short bleak lives.
Aunt Giscelia told her aunt and uncle that before her mother died she remembered her parents being happy despite their poverty. But after her mother’s death, the agonies of bereavement exacerbated by having to support two motherless children made life unbearable for Josef. The three-roomed hut was mean, with nothing worth salvaging even for the children’s sake except a children’s storybook bound in green leather that he gave to Giscelia for safekeeping. Giscelia was still deeply affected by the loss of her mother. Mathes, quiet and sullen, had taken on Grandfather Josef’s peculiar traits and habits. Come the night, they both became fearful and agitated.
In 1854, within a month of their blessed abduction, the new Schippan family migrated to South Australia from the port of Hamburg. Forgoing their original passage when they were to travel with their friends, Herman and Katie-Lizzie were able to secure a passage in the John Moller that plied the same route. And the green bound book of Grimms’ fairytales went too, secure in Giscelia’s care, all the children owned to remind them of their mother as they travelled to the far side of the earth.
Plucked from gloomy forests, bogs, snow, rain, howling wind and the immense cold, they were taken to a land of heat, dust, flies, drought and barren landscapes. Nothing prepared them for such extreme change. But although the landscape may have been strange and new, their old fears, prejudices and strange Wendish customs and folklore travelled with them.
Despite the best efforts made for the new life Josef and his two remaining children were to begin in a new land, tragedy struck on the long sea voyage to Australia. Josef had become fatigued from seasickness as the John Moller battled the great Southern Ocean. Perhaps he clambered onto the heaving deck that was continually awash with mountainous waves to purge his stomach to the elements. Whatever happened that night, the wind screamed through the rigging as it had done for many days, with Josef probably hanging onto the leeward railings as he retched over the side without thought for his safety. It was only with the pale dawn, when the children were unable to find their father, that the alarm was raised. The ship was travelling at too great a speed through big seas to turnabout and no one was sure when he went missing. The ship’s crew and passengers were saddened and alarmed. Some passengers tried to show extra sympathy to Josef’s two small children but they clung more tightly to Aunt Katie-Lizzie.
Although life was better in South Australia, Mathes remained a quiet surly child who hid the horrors of his early Wendish childhood deep within. Losing his father at sea, when it seemed a new and better life was so close at hand, made it appear there was a curse on them for trying to escape. He became obsessed and comforted by the stories in the green book that his sister and their Aunt Katie-Lizzie read to him; stories read each evening around the fire when it was cold, or out on the verandah during the warmer months. The family also carried with them a stock of Wendish folktales as frightening as the fairytales in the book.
Aunt Giscelia believed that life in Germany had been as brutal as the fairytales and that they should put the past behind them and make the best of their new South Australian home. Mathes, however, insisted she read him more stories from the book, or tell him Wendish tales they knew. Although clearly disturbed by the regular nightmares he suffered, he gained strange comfort from tales of the forests and creatures of the night such as wolves and bats, tales of changelings and heroes, kings, princes and princesses. Aunt would forbid the fairytales some mornings after his nightmares, but come the next night he would refuse to settle until told a story. And so each night Giscelia or Aunt Katie-Lizzie continued the storytelling.
I felt that by my telling the life of my father as he used to tell it, together with stories my Aunt Giscelia told me, Sister Kathleen would understand something about German–Wendish families living in a harsh and isolated South Australian environment. Sister Kathleen rarely interrupted. She sat quietly and took over my knitting so that I could give attention to storytelling. I told my stories as though reading them from a book, and Sister Kathleen listened to every word while the knitting needles clicked in time to the rhythm of my voice.
When I reached the point in my story when Father and Aunt Giscelia reached South Australia, Sister Kathleen was so relieved that she went off to find a jug of cold water. Pouring out a tumbler of water and then passing it to me she said, ‘My goodness, what a start to a new life in South Australia. I wondered who was actually going to be left alive to disembark from the ship. Are you sure you are telling me the truth, Mary?’
‘Well of course, Sister, his life gets better. But as you will hear, he still had difficulties to overcome during his schooldays. Aunt Giscelia and Katie-Lizzie – who we now referred to as our grandmother – told me the next part of Father’s life when I was a teenager. It will give you an understanding of what Father had to put up with being Wendish and this may help to explain why he was the way he was. But none of what I tell you will ever excuse the way he treated our family with such brutality.’
‘Oh, Mary, no one can be that brutal.’
‘You have no idea, Sister.’
‘You can tell me the next part of the story when I come by tomorrow afternoon. I have to go now as Matron is planning to give us a talk. I won’t be able to sleep tonight though. I’ll be having my own nightmares of wolves and being swept overboard. As you say, Mary, it is hard to believe. But like a frightening fairytale I can’t wait to hear what’s next.’