Wednesday, July 1, 2009

......."I loaded up my little green volkswagen, at the end of January, 1967, with my piano accordion, little portable typewriter and other similar teaching aides and, following the route recommended by the NRMA map, set out for Maude.

On the Hay Plains, about 8 or so miles short of Hay, I ran out of petrol. It was getting to be late in the day." .........
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......."In about 1960 or 1961, I started going along with Bob Potter to the classes he ran in various small halls in other suburbs and soon he did not always come along and I ran these small classes. I remember small halls in Cronulla, Panania and Randwick.
By then I knew the routines by heart. I played the records in the same order and called out the steps, exactly like Bob.">>>>> READ ON
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....."Luckily, in Australia, after first being offered a job as a farm-hand in Carcoar, ( where he would be able to slaughter sheep to get free meat. Mind you, he used to carefully take spiders outside in match-boxes because he did not want to harm them!! ); rejecting that and being sent to Sydney, to hold a broom only, in the railway yards, in Chullora, he luckily, found an identical family-owned mirror factory, in Newtown,"..........
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...."“I left my neat, comfortable flat, in Gouda, for this?” my mother cried, when we entered the bare ex-army huts, in Bonegilla Migrant Hostel, in May, 1956.
In Bonegilla, my mother cried and I didn’t want to eat. In Scheyville the neighbours whipped their children. In Villawood we could hear EVERYTHING that the neighours were doing in their rooms, day or night,...."
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......."One afternoon, with seconds to spare, I rushed from the building next door into the building where the studios were and some children who had been part of the previous program came out of the lift, giggling. Sure enough, they had pressed all the buttons and the old lift stopped at every floor before I could race into the studio; well after the program had started with recorded music and announcements. "
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........"Think of my uncle as someone like, Eric Morecambe (of the British T.V. Shows, Moreambe and Wise). A real character, who brought along a video camera on a one-legged tripod, with which he stopped in the middle of Pitt Street and aimed at the office buildings above, making passers-by all look up there as well. "
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......."To sing both the Australian AND the Dutch national anthems in full voice and great pride and emotion, at the conclusion of the great good-fun evenings, just before popping a tulip, flown from the Netherlands by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, in the ladies’ hand bags, to take home." ........
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......"Suddenly there was a loud bang and the front doors burst open. Machinery flew through the building and my father and the young man climbed up on the roof.
They crossed to the roof of the house next door and found a crying woman there, holding a baby. They convinced her to flee. As they did." .....
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......"Became a school teacher and went and told my role model, back in Gouda, in 1969, that, in Australia I had copied everything he had done when I was in his class from 3rd to 6th grade.
He had given me two or three lessons on my new little piano-accordion JUST before we migrated.
Here in Sydney, Maude via Hay and Bourke, for 37 years my pupils often started the days, having a READ ON

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