Petals

It was sad time for a lot of children from the UK and there have been quite a few docos on this and some of the children have relatives in the UK and the parents did not even know what happened to their children. There were stolen children too. Of course many of them are still alive and in their sixties now. We often see reunions in the news where people find their relatives after all these years. I remember too when I lived in Suffolk my parents used to take a child each summer holidays from London to stay with us this was in the fifties. My parents were very much into helping others. I was an only child then so we had plenty of room.

The good thing about back then it was all about "can you do the job" not about what piece of paper you have so in a way its harder now. The easy thing now is the communication and the planes. If we had had those back then it would have been great. Never had a problem getting a job, plenty of jobs around. Things have become far too complicated these days, you just fronted up for a rental and got one. Resumes were unheard of, there were agencies but they just set up interviews. Human Resources was only being discovered sometimes I think its the worst thing that happened to streamlining work. :emoticon-signxmas:

I first arrived in Sydney Australia in 1968 and worked in Pitt Street in the Royal Exchange Building and lived in Neutral Bay. Its interesting that the hostels were around for such a long time and you can see that because the people who lived in them tended to settled around the area they were in and in Melbourne we have the Vietnamese community at Springvale and in Sydney they are in Cabramatta. The English had moved on by the seventies. I am personally friends with a couple of Italian ladies who were also 10 pound migrants. There are a lot of them around as they came as children. We forget that so many of the migrants were Greek and Italian. Thank goodness for that they saved our cuisine from being bland.

Amazing Gollywobbler my uncle who is 88 and lives in Perth was also in Malaya at that time he was in the British Navy and stationed there with his family. He is still going strong as his wife is too. They moved here from Malaya. Also another Uncle and Aunt were also in Malaya but they have passed on now.

The articles are right a lot of older migrants still do not speak English, they have lived in their communities and had their own newspapers, clubs etc so for some reason they just did not learn the language. The migrants like this who are worse affected are the ones living in the country as in the cities there are facilities for these migrants. They are not unlike the English in Spain I saw a programme where they too become ill and lonely and do not speak the language and its very very difficult. I take the view that if I went to live in a country I would have to learn their language I am way too interested:wubclub: to be able to accept that I have no idea what is going on.:emoticon-signxmas:

It was very hard for migrants because there were no mobile phones, no internet only letters and airfares were very expensive so migrants had to rely on ships. In Rhodesia we had no television and I had to go to boarding school. We liked living there and it was a great life but we had to leave as things where hotting up even that long ago. My dad never wanted to return to the UK so we went to New Zealand and it was like stepping back in time. Model T fords there were heaps of them, no imports at all. However looking back on it now it was a good life, however my mum was very homesick and did not like it. She returned to the UK with my brother who was born in Rhodesia for a couple of years and then came back again, then they went to live in Perth and I went to live in Sydney. I arrived in Sydney in 1968 and lived with a couple of Kiwi friends in Neutral Bay. In those days you had to be a member of a club and you could not just pop along and sign in so we spent a lot of time at the Italian Club because they would let us in. We stayed in Sydney for a couple of years and then moved to Melbourne. I loved Melbourne and still do. Melbourne has always been cosmopolitan and varied, lots of lovely restaurants even thirty years ago, so many different cultures and they have all given to the city and made it what it is. No offence but Melbourne is completely different to every other city in Australia and has something for everyone. :wubclub:

I remember the 6 o'clock closing and I voted in the referendum to get 10 pm closing. Talking of the night cart, when we built this house 20years ago there were still houses on the Mornington Peninsula that had the night cart go round. We had a builders toilet and they used to collect that as well and that is how we found out that some houses still had no sewerage at all.