Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Station Pier (photo: Simon Sellars). There used to be a sign here saying ‘Melbourne Welcomes You’, the first thing we saw when we got off the boat, I imagine.

I was asked to contribute some thoughts about my family’s immigration story to the second book in Jim Hammerton’s ‘Ten-Pound Poms’ series. Ours is a strange tale, in that when we emigrated to Australia from England in 1970, on the Greek ship RHMS Ellinis, we left my brother and sister behind — they were old enough to do what they wanted and so they stayed put. I didn’t see them again for 20 years. This was clearly the most painful decision my parents ever had to make, but the context is that the grimy, economically depressed England of the time held limited prospects for working-class people like them.

Postcard depicting the RHMS Ellinis.

Although I was three years old when we came over, I used to have a recurring dream about the voyage when I was about 10. In the dream I was flying through the air, above the Ellinis, with all the passengers below, pointing up at me and gasping. The wind was very strong and everyone seemed afraid that I would be carried away, although I can remember thinking, “What’s the problem? I know what I’m doing.” Like crows do, I was able to manipulate the wind, soaring and sinking according to the thermal currents. My mum tried to reassure everyone. “Don’t worry” she’d announce. “He’s just playing on the humps of air.” That’s what she said — “humps”. This odd, out-of-place terminology has remained with me to this day. The dream is as vivid now as it was then.

This head has seconds to live (photo: Mary Sellars).

In real life, not in the dreamworld, there was a dress-up party on the boat and someone had made a papier-mache head, which was thrown overboard. I have a photo of the head bobbing in the water far, far away. Even as a kid, this image touched me in ways that I am only just beginning to understand — as a symbol of something lost, something out of reach, on the edge of reality.

The Ellinis landed at Melbourne’s Station Pier and I remember visiting the pier a few years back, staring at the Melbourne Welcomes You sign. When I was growing up I couldn’t help but think we were like colonists on Mars – that we’d left Earth to live on a different, harsher planet. Today, looking back over the water, towards the horizon, imagining the Ellinis powering into view, is like looking into the Martian sky, seeing Earth as a pinprick of light. Another memory I have is of the family being housed in corrugated-iron barracks in Nunawading, like we were in some kind of prisoner-of-war camp. I also recall searchlights in the sky over the barracks, which only added to the martial atmosphere.

Three cheers for the vague blur! (the speck in the water to the left is the papier-mache head; photo Stan Sellars).

Australia seemed lawless to my young mind — we lived in the suburb of Upwey at one stage and I remember thinking “how can this place be so close to the city”? It was like the bush – with mountains, huge spiders, strange birds, redneck neighbours…one time my dad got into a fight with some guy who came speeding over the hill in a car, almost knocking me off my bike. I remember thinking England couldn’t possibly be like this, because all I knew of it was from comedies like On the Buses and Benny Hill, which I loved. Anything British from the 70s I just lapped up, so desperate was I to imagine this far-off place where my brother and sister lived, siblings that I never knew and had never met.

The street that almost killed me: Upwey today (photo: Simon Sellars).

The ‘10-pound pom’ scheme was designed to boost Australia’s workforce with British immigrants, who would be given a one-way ticket to the former colonies for 10 pounds and set up with employment at the other end. After a brief period of working in factories, my parents were given jobs in social welfare, as “cottage parents”. This means we lived with up to 10 homeless and delinquent kids at a time, in one of many cottages at the former Tally Ho Boys’ Village in Burwood. These guys were older than me, in their teens, and many were sharpies, into AC/DC and the Sweet. They were cool and they stuck up for me — effectively, I had a gang of 10 tough brothers. Their stories were sad, though — depressingly typical tales of beatings and abuse that led them into trouble. I remember a Spanish guy called Martin who was really cool and funny — last I heard of him, he’d apparently died in a prison shootout. Another ‘brother’ became a minister.

After submitting my thoughts to Jim, I visited the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, which has an exhibition about the history of Station Pier and the wave of British migrants landing there that we were a part of. It was a strange, though uplifting experience. There is a wonderful feature whereby visitors can submit their own personal histories via a computer database — and some have the bitter-sweet tinge that ours does.

My favourite exhibit was the Super 8 film that a family took, recording their adventure from England to Melbourne via stops in Egypt and South Africa. The parties on the boat; the parents on the sundecks; the kids playing in the onboard pools…it was like someone had reached into my skull and ripped my memories from my brain, so closely did this match the photos my parents took of our trip — right down to the colour and grain of the film.

My parents have also agreed to talk to Jim for his book, and I am very curious to learn more about their motivations in attempting this momentous journey. To this day I get really envious of close-knit families. It’s too much for me. I wanted that more than anything. I wasn’t an only child, but I felt like one. It was bizarre – I knew I had siblings, but I had no way of reaching out to them: I was too young and there was no Internet. As I told Jim, I think that for us, the migration experience has been both a wonderful experience and a terrible burden. There are still psychic scars and some haven’t completely healed.