As some of you might know, I have a double citizenship. I am Danish/Australian. I have lived my whole life in Denmark, but have close ties to Australia, where I have a lot of family that I try to visit regularly. As a matter of fact, I am going to visit them in a few months.
My parents met each other while my father was living in Australia, mostly traveling from place to place, doing odd jobs. They met in Alice Springs, where my mother had arrived at, after leaving her parent’s home, and traveling around. My father’s travels where much more extensively and over a much longer time than my mother’s travels.
For some reason, I today thought about the fact that when my father first arrived, he had gone by ship. This lead me to wonder if I could find any record of what ship he had traveled to Australia on.
It turns out that the National Archive of Australia (NAA) has a passenger record search for passengers arriving up to 1972.
Searching my father name, turns up two records, both from 18 Mar 1965.
The first record shows that my father arrived on the ship GUGLIELMO, which upon closer inspection turns out to be Guglielmo Marconi of Lloyd Triestino. The record from the NAA contains the passenger manifest, which should my father is getting of at Melbourne.
The NAA also contains the disembarking papers of my father (the incoming passenger card)
Both the NAA record and the disembarking papers for my father, shows that he was going to stay at “ICEM, Bonegilla Camp VIC.”. This is the Bonegilla Migrant Reception and Training Centre, which mainly handled non-English immigrants. Since my father was from Denmark, he fell into this category.
I looked at the Bonegilla Migrant Experience website, and found out that it was possible to look up the id cards of the people who lived at the camp. As the website says:
Each person or family group at Bonegilla was registered with an identity card which recorded dates of arrival and departure, the ship or flight they came on, the block they lived in and more.
Using the lookup tool, I found the ID card for my father
It shows that he arrived on March 23rd 1965 and left just over two weeks later on April 7th 1965, where he was going to take up residence at the Maribyrnong Hostel in Melbourne. The Maribyrnong Hostel was a migrant hostel, originally named Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Center, and later renamed to Maribyrnong Migrant Hostel, and finally Maribyrnong Hostel. The buildings of the hostel seems to still exist, even though it seems that there has been a proposal to demolish them in recent years.
Unsurprisingly, there are no further clues about my father’s travels from there.- At least not for now.