Personal Experiences Since Coming to Australia
By Joe Schembri
My name is Joe Schembri and my wife's name is Jessie. Both of us were born in Malta. We met each other on 8 December 1951, got engaged in 1954 and got married on a very hot day on 31 July 1955 in the peak of the northern summer. Three months after we got married we left Malta for Melbourne on Monday 15 October 1955 and arrived in Melbourne on 17 October 1955.
I didn't need to leave Malta as I had a good job with the Public Service. My father who was a building contractor gave us a place where to live. But I wanted to leave Malta.
As it happened my wife had an uncle who had settled in Melbourne with all his family. I also had a maternal uncle living in Melbourne who arranged accommodation for us.
We raised four children - a son and three girls. The girls all got married and today we have six beautiful grandchildren - three boys and three girls. Their ages ranging from 11 years old to just sixteen months.
Last year was our fiftieth wedding anniversary and our anniversary was spent and celebrated in Malta. My brother-in- law and sister-in-law who both live in Malta arranged for a renewal Mass in a cute little seaside church in St. Paul's Bay. Incidentally St. Paul's Bay is the place where St. Paul got shipwrecked when he was being taken by the Romans to face execution in Rome.
When we came to leave Malta it was an experience in itself because the day before we left - it was a Sunday - I was with my family when I tripped on a chain path and I fell and broke my right elbow. That Sunday night I spent it in agony and on Monday -the day that we were leaving Malta - my father took me to our doctor who put my arm in plaster. At three p.m. that day we boarded our ship in the Grand Harbour in Malta.
Our ship was called "SKAUGUM" sister ship to the "SKAUBRYN". Both ships belonged to a Norwegian line and were being used to ferry migrants on the way out to Australia and to ferry French troops from the war the French were conducting in Indochina.
Conditions on the ship were poor. People slept in dormitories on bunks on top of each other and males were segregated from their women folk. My bunk was a top one and because my right arm was in plaster I could not get to my bunk. Because of this I was afforded a cabin on the main deck.
We arrived in Melbourne at Station Pier on the evening of 17 October 1955 where thousands were on the pier looking for and greeting their friends and relatives on the boat. It was a bleak, cold and wet evening - our first taste of Melbourne weather.
My uncle and his wife were on at Station Pier to greet us, as were also all of my wife's aunt family. From the pier we were taken to my uncle's residence in Brunswick. Actually it was not my uncle's residence. He was boarding in the premises sharing the place with the owner and we were to be staying in the same place as well.
This place was not the intended place of our residence. The accommodation for us was made to another place. This place was a unit just for ourselves.
The room was not welcoming at all. The linoleum on the floor was all cracked and torn. The walls were filthy. The double bed that we found in the room and that we were supposed to lie on was no bed at all. It was only two coaches placed together to serve as a double bed. There was no bed head attached to the supposed bed, so that our heads touched directly with the dirty wall behind.
When we queried the accommodation and with my uncle, that this was not the place that we had on the accommodation papers that the reply was that, that place was taken by somebody else. Further we were informed that we were lucky to have this accommodation because there was another family living in the same room until twelve o'clock that day.
Needless to say we did not stay there too long. Lucky for us, my wife had her aunt living also in Melbourne close by in Northcote.
In the room we also had a big box which contained all the personal belongings. The room was in such a condition that we had company as well - mice. One day my wife went to get something from the box when a mouse jumped right out of the box.
When we arrived in Melbourne my arm was still in plaster and therefore I could not get work. The plaster stayed on for a further month and when at last it was taken off I still could not do any work for some more time. Furthermore it was near Christmas time and at that time of year it was very hard to find work as most factories close for the Christmas and New Year period. My wife who found work at Ringrip in Collingwood was the sole breadwinner from whose wages we had to pay rent, buy groceries and other requirements. We had very little money. What we had was mostly the money that was given to us at our wedding plus some savings that we managed from my work before we left Malta.
Sometime after we arrived in Melbourne we found out that my wife was expecting our first child. One day she was sick and we had to call in the doctor, who tripped in the broken linoleum and he nearly crashed out of the only window in the room.
Needless to say we did not stay long in that place. Her aunt one time came to visit and was amazed at the conditions we were in. She lived in a double storey house in Northcote with her husband, three sons and a young daughter. She told us that she had a spare room and that if we wanted we could go and stay with her but we had to buy our own bedroom suite. This we did and soon after we moved with them. We enjoyed our stay with them, the proximity to the shops, entertainment places everything was close at hand.
By this time my arm healed well and I found employment first at Holeproof in Brunswick on the knitting machines, then the Victoria Railways stores as a stores clerk in Spotswood, later at Swallows biscuits in Port Melbourne where I worked first on Invoicing and later on market research.
While we were staying with her aunt in Northcote our first child was born - a boy - in July 1956. Unfortunately our stay in Northcote did not last as my wife's aunt sold the place and moved to a smaller place in East Bentleigh and we had to move to stay in a bungalow in the backyard of one of her aunt's daughters in Mentone.
Mentone was not our last accommodation. After Mentone we went back to East Bentleigh boarding with my wife's cousin because she also decided to sell her place in Mentone to move closer to her mother. Then we moved and boarded with another family in Brunswick as we wanted to move closer to our work in Collingwood for my wife and Port Melbourne for me.
Amongst all this shifting we started looking to buy our own place. In November 1958 we bought our first home - a three bedroom weather board home - in East Oakleigh.
A year after we moved to our home our second child was born in October 1959. Our son was by then three years old. Things were pretty tight at that time and we hardly had any furnishings. The only furniture we had was the bedroom suite that we bought when we lived with her aunt in Northcote and a Laminex kitchen setting i.e. a laminex table and four chairs that went along with it. In the lounge room I used to play with my son as we had nothing in the lounge room.
Furniture and furnishings came later buying things along according to what we could afford. But things improved gradually. I kept changing jobs thus improving my position. My wife left her job in Collingwood and started working at Brockhoff's biscuits where she stayed for the next thirty years in between having another two children - two girls one January 1968 and the youngest one in October 1972.
Midway through 1972 we sold our place in East Oakleigh and moved to our current residence in Wheelers Hill. We have been at this place thirty four years now. Our children are all grown up. Our son is single and the three girls are all married.
The eldest one is married to an Australian, the middle girl married to an Australian of Italian extraction. The youngest daughter's marriage is somewhat romantic. After she finished her accounting studies she wanted to go for a holiday overseas on one of the KON-TIKI tours. After touring Europe for 28 days she decided to spend the rest of her three month holiday in Malta. While there she met this boy. When she came back this boy followed here and today they are married and have two lovely boys one three and a half and the other seventeen months.
We have now six grandchildren three boys and three girls. The eldest daughter has a boy aged almost eleven and a girl who is seven years old. The middle daughter has two girls one is six years old and the other is four years old.
And so our life is almost complete. W e are busier than usual though. We are done with bringing up our children. But we are helping bringing up our kids' children - our grandchildren. That is the joy of it all.
Updated: 16 October 2006
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