I have been reading Flight from the Brothers Grimm: A European-Australian memoir by Valerie Murray, published in 1916 by Books Unleashed. Valerie is the widow of the Australian poet, Les Murray, who died in April last year and of whom a fellow Australian poet, Clive James, wrote in tribute - with typical Jamesian stylistic flourish - “A million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was there to watch when Les Murray erupted into the Australian literary scene.”
Valerie Murray’s memoir reminds one what the word “immigrant” can mean in practice as it affected one particular family which immigrated to Australia from Switzerland after the War, in flight from the post-war aftermath of the dark fairy tale that had been the Third Reich. Born in 1941, she, her parents and her younger brother left for Sydney in 1950. Readers today, in which children have to be watched over at all times in case of danger, will be astonished at the amount of freedom Valerie and her brother experienced in their childhood, often of necessity left at home alone while both their parents worked long hours to establish themselves in their new country.
