From the Baltic states, young men begin their new lives in Australia at Bonegilla migrant reception centre, as Karlis Friemanis from Latvia did following World War II. He had been forced to fight for the Germans, and resettled in Goulburn with a new name. Photo: NSW Library.
So much nonsense is circulating these days about immigrants, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, I’ll tell you a story about an immigrant who came to Australia after World War II and settled in Goulburn.
His name was Karlis Friemanis, or similar. He was 16 when Nazi Germany occupied his native Latvia and took him prisoner. They forced him to join a German U-boat crew. Torpedo attacks tossed him into icy seas twice, the second time almost drowning him before a huge Estonian man aboard a rescue vessel wrenched him from the water to safety.
At war’s end, abandoned in Germany and thieving to keep himself alive, Karlis was caught with a sack full of telephones, and lined up against a wall to be shot for looting. A last-minute reprieve enabled him to emigrate to Australia.
He kept a photo of his time cutting cane in Queensland when he was a slim, muscular and tanned young man with blond hair.
Early in his adopted country, Karlis changed his name to Charlie Freeman.
Charlie headed south, sleeping under bridges until he found work swinging a pick in a gang of railway labourers near Goulburn. It was hard work, and at knock-off time the men would head to the nearest pub. Except Charlie.
In the tent he shared with other workers, he studied English grammar until he was proficient enough to pass an exam that enabled him to work as a nurse at Kenmore Hospital.
A retired nurse at Kenmore, David Graham, remembers meeting Charlie, years after he had become second-in-charge in one of the wards.
“I still have a silent laugh remembering me as the most junior in the ward [pantry nurse] and I just started to mop the dining room floor when out of the office he came and took the mop off me,” David said.
“He mopped the entire room and it was a ward of 93 patients, so you can imagine the size of the room, while I sat on the serving table.
“When he finished, he came back to me, handed me the mop and said, ‘That’s how you do it, son’.”
Charlie was on night shift when David prepared for his wedding day.
“I met him about 6 am and we went to Ward 5 garden where he picked me a huge range of blooms to decorate the church and then got more flowers from his home garden,” he said.
Years later, Charlie’s daughter, a first-year trainee, worked on night shift with David when he was a senior registered nurse. Charlie gave him a bottle of wine for looking after his daughter.
In his retirement, Charlie called me one afternoon at the Goulburn Post. Having read my story about fishing without luck at Pejar Dam, he invited me to his home and gave me a rainbow trout stowed in his freezer.
In the months following, he taught me how to catch trout, first in the streams around Crookwell and Gunning, which he had mapped, then one unforgettable spring morning at Pejar Dam, when swallows dived and dipped into a glass surface and newborn lambs bleated for their mothers across the steep hills of Jeff Prell’s property.
Every 30 minutes or so, one of our rods would suddenly bend over as another hungry trout tugged on our loose lines.
In between catching and cleaning the fish, we ate Charlie’s crunchy, golden delicious apples picked the previous autumn from a tree on which he had grafted at least three varieties.
Each time he delivered me home from fishing, he would take a handful of chocolate Fantales from the console of his car and tip them into my hand, saying: “For ze littlies.” Our three children will never forget his generosity.
Charlie’s resourcefulness was striking. He had an entire new Colorbond fence stored in his shed, packets of seeds and an arsenal of pruning equipment and chemicals for his veggies and fruit trees. His experience managing wards at Kenmore was evident in his shed: tools and materials were tagged with the date of their purchase and price.
Each November, he would return from Araluen with a boot full of juicy peaches from Wisbey’s orchard and distribute them among friends.
I could not imagine Australia without Charlie Freeman and his ilk. Regardless of whether they are from Europe, Asia or the Middle East, to shut the door on any of them would be an unnecessary disservice to our country.
