AustLit

The common view of migrants assisted to move to Australia in the first decades after the Second World War is that they were factory fodder. They were labourers whose prosperity lay in improved life chances for their children. Such an assessment denies the life stories of individuals who were able to use their new circumstances and autonomy to develop lives of achievement for themselves. This paper focuses on two life stories of women from the 114 included in the first party of 843 Displaced Persons selected by the Australian Government for resettlement from Germany in 1947. Helgi Nirk was orphaned as a teenager in Estonia, gained legal control of her affairs from her uncles and installed share-farmers on the family farm while she studied agricultural science at Tartu University but was denied graduation by the 1944 Soviet invasion. In Australia, she developed a method of hybridisation between plants that would not cross-fertilise naturally. She developed many new tomato varieties during her working life, then retired to start a commercial plant nursery. Irina Vasins was able to graduate in theology and start work as a teacher before the 1944 invasion had her and her family fleeing to Germany. In Australia, she retrained as a nurse and rose to the position of Deputy Matron. More individual life histories of refugee women will reveal the nuances within any given mass movement of people in flight or those seeking a better economic life. [Author's abstract]