» Read the Spanish version of this story
Author: Andrew & Jonathan Paniagua
Storyteller: Our father's memories of migration.
Community Language School: Wollongong Spanish School
Main School: Smith Hills High School & Kanahooka High School
A comparison of life in Spain and Wollongong, Australia.
Life in Spain
My father and his family lived in the street La Rueca in the suburb of San Blas in Madrid. It was a new suburb in Madrid, with lots of blocks with gardens between them. Some blocks of apartments were five to 10 storeys high. My father lived in an apartment on the sixth floor.
He used to play soccer with his brothers and with other boys from the area and eventually they formed a team. They began competitions with teams from other apartments in the suburb.
The journey to Australia
The morning before my father and his family were going to leave Spain to embark on a journey to a new nation called Australia, my father wasn't thinking much about the plane trip. He was very sad because he was going to leave his grandparents whom he loved very much. Throughout that day my father and his family were busy packing all their things and saying goodbye to all of their family and friends.
When they were seated on the aeroplane my father felt very strange because he had never been on an aeroplane before and he didn't know what to expect. The plane took off at approximately eight o'clock in the night. When the plane began to take off my grandparents were very excited. My father remembered someone saying, "We are flying over The Vatican." All of the passengers tried to look through the windows but all they could see were the lights of the city at night.
During the flight, the plane made three stopovers. The first stop was at Bakharan, Iran, which is a military base. This stop was very short. The second stop was at Karachi. The temperature there was very high as it was in Singapore, which was the third stop. All of the stops left an unforgettable impression.
The possessions they brought from Spain
My father and his family came to Australia with half a dozen suitcases full of essential things to start a new life, but in their minds they brought a lot more.
The suitcases were full of necessary things like clothes, sheets, blankets and kitchen utensils. They also brought some games like "parchís", cards, chess and checkers. Other things they brought so they wouldn't forget Spain were a set of encyclopaedias and a portable stereo so they could listen to their favourite songs. They brought albums by "Los Tres Sudamericanos", "El Dúo Dinámico", "La Estudiantina", by Manolo Escobar and other popular songs.
My father brought many memories with him. Memories of where he lived, the suburb San Blas, in Madrid and memories of his relatives and friends with whom he went to school in Spain. He still remembers a lot of things from Spain like songs and other things.
One of the things that my father brought from Spain and he liked most were some little antique cars made of plastic that he had been given them as birthday presents. He had half a dozen of those little cars and they were his favourite things.
It is almost impossible to imagine a family starting a new life with only six suitcases. The song "La morena de mi copla" was my father's favourite when he lived in Spain.
Their arrival in Australia
It was the 23rd of November, the last days of spring, when my father and his family arrived in Sydney, Australia. It was early in the morning on a very nice day.A government car that was waiting at the airport drove them to Wollongong, to the hostel in Unanderra.
During the trip to Wollongong they looked at how different Australia was compared with Spain and this shocked them a little. My grandparents were full of hope that they would start a better life.
Life in the hostel
When my father and his family arrived at the hostel, they met their friends who had also emigrated from Spain two months before. It was a big relief, not only for my father but also for his family, to have found some friends that they knew.
In the hostel in Unanderra my father and his family got to know more families from Spain, England and Finland, but they found it difficult to adapt to the foods and the culture of Australia. But finally they got used to it.
My grandfather started working in an Australian iron and steel company which today is called BHP.
While my father and his brothers lived in the hostel, they went to primary school in Port Kembla. The first years of school they found more difficult because they didn't understand a word of English. The only way they could communicate was through the daughter of a Spanish family that went to the same school and lived in the hostel in Unanderra.
My father and his family spent Christmas in the hostel. In the hostel my father spent most of his time with his brothers in a lounge room which had games and fun things to do. Here they made many friendships with other children.
Their first apartment
In January of the following year my father and his family left the hostel and went to live in a rented apartment in Warrawong. My father didn't like the apartment very much because it was very small and the toilet was outside in the garden.
The biggest surprise for my father was that in the suburbs of Australia there was no sewerage system installed for the bathrooms in the private houses. Instead there was a toilet outside in the garden, which was in fact a bucket in a shack. The bucket was changed once a week by a truck that collected full buckets and left empty ones.
School
In the new year my father and his brothers went to a school which they liked a lot more. My father liked it because it had a special class for English and also because all the children were given a little bottle of milk every day because this was an Australian tradition.
Our first house
My father and his family then moved to another apartment for four months. He liked this one more than the other one because it was bigger and the owners were Spanish.
The next year my grandparents put in an application to the Department of Housing to get a house. They were offered a house in Koonawarra. They liked it very much and they moved in at Christmas. My father and his family lived in this house for a long time. In 1983 my father bought the house where we live now.
Differences in food
The food in Spain was good but my grandparents couldn't afford to buy the best quality food. The food in Spain is a lot different to the food here in Australia.
Although they liked the food very much, it was still very different for them. They also found that the ingredients to make traditional Spanish meals were not available even though there were lots of delicatessens. They didn't have much variety. They also found that there was more meat in Australia than in Spain and that it was much cheaper as well. In Spain, they ate toast for breakfast but when they arrived here they found there was more variety, such as cereals, eggs and pancakes.
At midday, in Spain, you eat a snack of tapas and later you come back to the house to eat lunch at two or three in the afternoon. Another thing they found different was that in Spain you don't eat dinner until nine or 10 at night, whereas in Australia dinner is eaten at around five or six in the afternoon. The hours that they ate changed dramatically when my father arrived here because they lived in a hostel and had to eat at Australian times.
Landscape differences
My father was used to living in a big city with tall blocks and gardens in between them, but the environment of Australia was very different. The houses were very spaced out and there was a lot of vegetation in between the cities. Also, the city where my father lived (and where I live today) is very close to the sea on one side and the mountains and bush on the other. This landscape was very different and very beautiful to my father because he had never seen the sea before in Spain. Also, in no time at all, you could be in the middle of the bush with lots of animals and plants, which was impossible in Spain.
The beauty of the nature and the fact that it was so close amazed my father. Another thing that he liked a lot was the numbeer of birds that flew over the gardens. He also found Australia cleaner and healthier, mainly because the houses are more spaced out and the environment is full of plants. Madrid is a city with buildings of cement and there is a lot of pollution.
The thing my father liked most was he could go to Calalla Bay and scuba dive, something he could never do in Spain.
Cultural differences
The culture in general, in Australia, was very different to the culture in Spain.
They found that the parties for Christmas and for other occasions were not the same. Here in Australia the children receive their presents on Christmas Day but in Spain it is on the 6th of January. In Spain everybody celebrates Christmas Eve whereas in Australia the 25th of December, Christmas Day, is celebrated. In Spain there is more happiness and life in the parties than in Australia.
My father found that there were other different traditions in Australia. For example, the children in Spain leave their shoes on the windowsill for the Three Wise Kings (Los Reyes Magos) to put presents in, whereas in Australia the tradition is for Santa Claus to leave the presents.
When they arrived in Australia they found that you could leave something lying around without the fear of it getting stolen.
My father found the new people he met were very strange. He got to know a lot of people of other nationalities and he learnt a lot about the cultures of these people. He had never known anyone of another nationality in Spain.
Another thing that surprised my father was the way in which people dressed. People walked down the main street barefoot, wearing shorts and a tee shirt. In Spain the people dress much better even when they go to the supermarket.
Today
Nowadays my father considers Australia home. He has been here for 33 years, he is established and thinks of Spain as a foreign country. He says that he doesn't want to go back to Spain to live. He only will go for work reasons. As my father is Spanish, he places a lot of importance on his family – a lot more than the parents of some of the students at my school. My father, mother, brother and I always used to go out for picnics together when I was younger.
My father and my grandmother can cook Spanish food that tastes so good you never get sick of it.Every Christmas Eve my grandmother cooks a feast for the whole family, an excellent example of the customs that they brought to this country.
