CONCLUSION
One could quite
easily argue that life for Wyalkatchem’s post-war migrants
was difficult, with some perhaps even claiming that it was
arduous. All the evidence for such a case, on first inspection,
is there to be presented.Wyalkatchem was
situated well inland from Perth, capital of a state that was then
and long afterwards considered to be Australia's Cinderella
State, meaning it was the poorest and the one that most needed a
degree of supplementary central government funding. Although
Wyalkatchem’s township residents had electricity those
living in the camp did not. Camp dwellers relied on candles and
kerosene lamps. No one as far as I can recall had a refrigerator,
only one of those ingenious Western Australian inventions, the
“Coolgardie Safe”. People lived, in the main, under
canvas, not beneath tiles or corrugated iron. And there were
encounters with all the others things that made one immediately
realize one was in Australia; snakes, red-back spiders, goannas,
lots of bush or field mice, and hot, very hot, summers, which
lasted between early November and mid-March. Wyalkatchem was
certainly not noted for relief from an early evening breeze like
the “Fremantle Doctor”.
One could go on.
And why not? For the migrants the English language was not only a
strange one, but a damn difficult one to learn. Germans, Dutch
and even Scandinavians found English less difficult to master.
But for Slavs, its irregular grammar, syntax and the definite
article were completely unfamiliar and proved to be extremely
difficult to grasp and master. Notwithstanding this all the
adults watched their children rapidly mastering English, to the
point where some of the offspring eventually ceased using their
mother tongue, even in the home.
One could
continue even further. And, again, why not? All the migrants
earned only what was then called the basic wage, whereas farmers
at the time, especially during the early 1950s, were
experiencing, for the first time in their farming careers it
should be added, big and growing incomes. Farming families
generally had summer holidays away from the town, at the coast,
at Mandurah, Rockingham or another such resort, whereas migrant
families remained in the town over summer months. Farmers’
problems were rather how to minimise income tax over these years
because of the wool boom that had been sparked by the unexpected
outbreak of the Korean War, the western world’s first
post-war military encounter with Soviet Bolshevism via proxies,
which most of Wylkatchem’s migrants had, if not actually
fled, then at least chosen not to experience by refusing, when in
Germany or East Africa after 1945, to return to
Poland.
And it was this
decision, which is the invisible crux of the migrants’
lives in Wyalkatchem during the early 1950s, when being a migrant
was certainly tough, if not arduous. All, and their
children, were, if nothing else, free. A quick scan of
the wartime experiences highlighted above of those hailing from
pre-war Poland shows that they departed that country either
because they were ethnically cleansed, that is, forcibly expelled
from their homes, by Soviet NKVD or German SS units – most
especially Helena Kozlowska and Helena Poprzeczna respectively -
or else had been press-ganged into working somewhere in
the Reich
if
not as slave labourers then as lowly-paid rural workers for up to
five years. The refusal by all of these Wyalkatchem newcomers to
return to their homeland after 1945, was due to Poland being
Sovietized, the Yalta Settlement between Marshall Stalin,
President Franklin D Roosevelt or Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, which agreed to giving Moscow such a great sway over
their homeland. Poland, if not actually and formally occupied and
integrated into the Stalinist Empire was in fact a colony of
Moscow. No less so than say Perth and Western Australia were of
London until 1890. That big power territorial settlement meant
that pre-war Eastern Poland, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania,
was incorporated into the Soviet Union with the remainder of
Poland becoming a Soviet client or colonial state, like East
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, and,
initially, at least, the Josip Tito-led multi-ethnic Yugoslavia,
the land of the southern Slavs, which was fortunate in not
sharing a border with the USSR, if not its diverse ethnic
make-up. Although Poland had been able to avoid this fate in 1920
it was simply impossible to do so after World War II which had
been fought largely on its territory at such an enormous cost in
life and capital. The removal of Bolshevism had to therefore wait
until 1989 when the Solidarity Movement (Solidarnosc),
a purposive civic-minded force, mobilised virtually all of Polish
society to effect this historic change, this time by non-military
means, which, amongst other things, meant that the 200-men who
perished defending Zadwórze against the Soviet Red Army of
Workers and Peasants had, thankfully, not died in
vain.
(This account is, in part, based on Joseph
Poprzeczny’s memory of his family’s 20-years as
Wyalkatchem residents, as well as research of secondary and some
primary sources and oral inquiries with a number of present and
former Wyalkatchem residents and others. It does not claim to be
a definitive account of the migrant aspect of the town. Some of
the points made are based on peoples’ recollections over
half a century after the event so minor unintended inaccuracies
are very likely to have resulted. It has been particularly
difficult to establish the exact year that some people had
arrived and left Wyalkatchem since no readily available records
were cited. Notwithstanding all this, every effort has been made
to obtain and present information accurately with each family's
account checked with a family’s member whenever
possible.)
