Offla's Children

First published 2020 by Helena Wilson, Liz Ban and Paul Ban

Produced by Independent Ink

independentink.com.au

Copyright © Helena Wilson, Liz Ban and Paul Ban 2020

The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. All enquiries should be made to the author.

Cover design by Daniela Catucci

Edited by Alison Arnold

Internal design by Independent Ink

Typeset in 12/17 pt Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

Cover image: supplied by Helena Wilson, Liz Ban and Paul Ban

ISBN 978-0-6489749-0-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-6489749-1-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-6489749-2-5 (kindle)

Disclaimer:

Every effort has been made to ensure this book is as accurate and complete as possible. However, there may be mistakes both typographical and in content. Therefore, this book should be used as a general guide and is not the ultimate source of information contained herein. The author and publisher shall not be liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.

Acknowledgements

Liz

I would like to give a special thanks to my wonderful supportive husband, Ed Hooper, who read multiple drafts of my story and for words of encouragement. Thank you to Jazzy and Austin for putting up with me telling you my childhood stories.

A big thanks to Helena for gathering the family files through freedom of information and painstakingly piecing the information in chronological order so we could make sense of it all. Also, thanks to Helena for initiating the writing of the Ban story many years ago on her own and then together with Paul and myself. Thank you to Paul for encouraging Helena to join your stories together and to Dorothy Scott for encouraging me to write my story. Also, thank you Dorothy for the many hours reading our stories and being so gracious and warm in your feedback, as well as asking Raimond Gaita to read them.

Thank you to my friends for your support and encouragement and to Clare Allridge for prompting me to expand on some sections of my story.

Finally, thank you Alison Arnold for your professional editing and making our story more coherent and suggesting we merge our parents stories with ours.

We can never know what life has in store for us, but we have to keep on trying and never give up. In the time since I started writing this book with my siblings, my husband, Ed, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His prognosis is poor. While it has been devastating news for us, I know that I will use my inner strength and resilience. And just as Offla did, in escaping during the war, I will take a leap of faith into the dark and unknown.

Helena

To the most patient, kind and loving husband I could have hoped for. Ray Wilson, you’ve been my rock during the many years of trying to make sense of my childhood, throughout tears and laughter. Always encouraging me to strive for my best work by reading and rereading each and every page. You understood twenty-eight years ago four pages wasn’t enough for me to write about my childhood. A condensed sixteen pages was handed to the social worker during our adoption course. The girl we hoped for didn’t eventuate so we continued on with life with our three beautiful sons. The spark was lit during that cathartic experience and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for supporting me in keeping it burning.

To my sons Ryan, Dane and Callum Wilson. Thank you for bringing pleasure into my life and joy into my heart. I’m so proud of the men you’ve become. I was relieved once each of you turned five years of age as I hoped you would be able to remember at least something of me should I die. I know you’ve found it difficult to read previous versions of my story as you haven’t wanted to strip the ‘nurturer’ label that comes with being your mother. Follow your heart and strip the labels away. I hope you love what you find.

To one of my main supporters, my brother Paul. Thank you for encouraging me to persevere and continue writing our story even though I sometimes questioned my reasoning. It made sense when you wrote your story to combine the two making it a stronger and more powerful tribute.

A gratitude of thanks to my sister Liz. Without you my childhood would have been empty. Without the letters our mother wrote to our uncle in Europe you sent me for safekeeping, the void in my heart would have remained. How blessed we were to discover our mother within her own words. Thank you for agreeing to add your story and for your never wavering love.

I thank all the parent figures who helped raise me, especially Lesley Fleming who remains a constant in my life. I could never forget my extended family for sharing and surviving a unique childhood including Ken and Peter Marshall, my brothers from another mother.

Many friends have read various versions of my story over the years. Thank you to Shelley McCready who has never wavered in her ability to encourage me to get the story published, even while she battled with her cancer diagnosis. Without a doubt she is the most positive person I know.

Thank you to Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain for your professional and personal interest in our story. And to Raimond Gaita, who was so moved after reading it, recommended his own editor take us on.

Finally, thanks to Alison Arnold. Your fine editing and professional input is what was needed. I appreciate the respect you’ve given our father, the main character. It cemented a bond and friendship I never expected.

Our father’s leap of faith is an inspiration to me. It has enabled me to have a never-give-up attitude and to keep on marching throughout life. Sometimes even skipping, as my sister would say. Offla’s greatest trait was resilience. He managed to cope in spite of setbacks, barriers and limited resources. He knew how much he wanted something and how much he was willing, and able, to overcome obstacles to get it.

Paul

My wife Helen, my daughter Lauren and my grandson Leo are my inspiration for me to write about my father’s life regarding what it was like for him to lose his family. They have and will appreciate, in the case of Leo, who is still a baby, the life my siblings and I experienced being raised in a children’s home and having to make sense of not being in a family environment. Helen has been an excellent sounding board for my thoughts and has helped me shape them into a text that I feel happy with.

My long-term friends Jerry and Marla Meehl have been very loyal and helpful during my thoughts and drafts stages and have offered suggestions that I have readily taken up.

Chris, Helena and Liz have been on the journey with me through Silky Oaks and into the adult world. I’m grateful for their company, now in the later stages of adulthood.

Thanks to George Hook for being the first to read my individual section apart from Helen and for telling me it was very interesting and worth pursuing.

And finally thanks to Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, long term friends and academics in social work and history who encouraged me to think that our story was worth telling and be of interest to a wide range of people.

The two anecdotes we wrote about in the epilogue have been inspirational to me in learning to cope with whatever situation life throws at you and to keep moving forward in a positive direction even though you don’t know what lies ahead. My brother Chris’s favourite saying, inspired by Offla, is ‘Keep on marching’.

In loving memory of our parents

Jean Trevaskis and Zoltan Ban (Offla)

You lived for your children and will live forever

through your children’s children.

‘But where are the snows of yester-year?’

— François Villon

Introduction

During the war, fighting for the Hungarian army, our father was held in two Russian prisoner of war camps. At the end of the war he was arrested by the Americans for illegal border crossing and incarcerated again. In one of those camps, he was dragged from his cell and marched to a shed near the latrines. A soldier with a rifle was waiting for him. On the ground were bullet casings. He was given his last rites, handed a blindfold and told to line up on the opposite wall.

He did so and waited to hear his final gunshot. However, after the shot was fired he realised he was still standing. The soldier had fired a blank. His blindfold was taken off and he was told he was free to go. New soldiers would be there soon, and ‘Lieutenant Ban, maybe they’ll take better aim.’

Our father, Zoltan Ban, or Zoli for short, later to become known as Offla, fled Europe and ended up in Australia, one of many post-war migrants whose stories are so important to this country. He came at a time when only 2 per cent of Australians spoke a language other than English and he came at a time when the mental illness he was to develop was barely understood.

Meanwhile, our mother, Jean Trevaskis, was making her way to Australia and to Hobart, where she would meet Zoli. She did not live long enough to tell us her stories, and we know little of her early life, only the names of her parents, our grandparents – Annie Elizabeth Trevaskis (nee Entwistle) and George Albert Trevaskis – and that she was born at home at 9 Ellaline Road, North West Fulham, England, on 23 October 1923. But we still feel her steady loving presence, and through her letters to one of our uncles, we know just how brave she was. Our mother died when she was thirty-nine, when our father’s illness was building, knowing she was leaving her four children to an uncertain future. We are glad that she could not know that we would be taken from our father sixteen months after she died and made wards of the state. That we would then grow up in a children’s home, all the while vaguely aware that our father was trying to regain custody of us.

This is the story of our family: four children growing up in state care, each of us experiencing it differently; and an eccentric, brave, unpredictable yet steadfast man who spent years trying to have us returned to him. It is a story of post-war Australia in the grip of anti-communist fervour, a story of mental illness, of the good and bad of institutional care. It is the story of family disruption and, ultimately, of resilience.

It has been pieced together from our father’s stories, our memories, and Helena’s painstaking research through our family’s files, held by the Commonwealth Department of Immigration and Queensland’s Children’s Services Department.

Our brother Chris did not want to be part of writing this book and we respect that. We can’t tell his story for him, but, of course, he pops up in ours.

Helena Wilson, Liz Ban, Paul Ban

Authors note

The Brisbane Special Hospital, the Brisbane Mental Hospital, and Wolston Park Hospital are the same hospital, renamed at various points. The complex is now called The Park Centre for Mental Health. Jean refers to the hospital as Goodna Mental Hospital.

The State Children Department later became the Children’s Services Department, and has had many name changes since. Child welfare officers were employed by this department.

The Department of Migration was a subset of the Department of Immigration.

PART 1

Taken

1964–1965

Paul

The Inala Civic Centre in south-west Brisbane was like any other cluster of shops in a low-income area – unremarkable and nondescript. There was a paved area outside where our father, Zoli, took us to rollerskate on the weekends, and a newly planted garden near the road. We were quite familiar with the unemployment bureau, the bank and the police station.

The police came on a Monday, sixteen months after our mother died.

It was 10 August 1964, another mild, blue-sky winter day. We’d been to the Commonwealth Bank with Daddy. He and the manager argued, their voices raised, and our father was agitated as we left.

On the way home, he stopped to make a call from the public phone box beyond the garden. We waited on the footpath, all four of us trying to ignore the anxiety in his voice.

He was still distressed when he stepped out of the phone box.

It didn’t seem to take long before a police car arrived. The bank manager had called them.

‘Zoltan Ban?’ the grey-uniformed officer said. ‘We’re going to take you to the police station for a chat.’

‘Run, kiddies!’ said our father.

But we didn’t get very far. We were no match for four Queensland coppers who meant business.

I can’t remember Daddy being caught, but I knew he had been down this road with the police before. We hadn’t. My brother and two sisters were put into the police car and out of the corner of my eye I saw Daddy being taken to another car that had just arrived.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked as I got in the car.

‘To the police station.’ The officer didn’t elaborate.

When we arrived at the station, my brother and sisters were told to wait in a room with a policeman while I was asked some details.

‘You’re Paul, nine years old, is that correct?’

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘And your brother Chris is eight? You’re very close in age, aren’t you? I have here that your sister Helena is six and the toddler Elizabeth is three?’

‘That’s right.’ I wanted to tell him that Chris was fourteen months younger than me but I thought he probably already knew that anyway.

After the questions were over we were fingerprinted and photographed before being told we were being ‘charged with neglect’.

I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. I knew our clothes were all second-hand, from the op shop. And maybe Daddy could have washed them occasionally. But I couldn’t understand the connection with what was happening to us. It all seemed like an adventure, or a dream.

Somehow, though, I knew it meant that I wasn’t going back to my normal life. While I had no idea what lay ahead, I told myself I wouldn’t cry and upset the others.

‘Would you like to look at the cells?’ beamed the friendly officer who was minding Chris, Helena and Bessie. ‘There’s no one in them.’

For half a second I thought he was going to put us in there, before realising he was just trying to entertain us.

Time both stood still and was rushing along. Were we in a movie? Was it Candid Camera? Would someone appear to reassure us it was all a joke? I liked the reaction on people’s faces on Candid Camera when they found out it was just a gag. The TV in our rundown house was an escape into a world where my sisters hadn’t scribbled on the walls and the grass wasn’t growing long outside. I could still remember being so excited when we’d moved in to our housing commission home three years earlier. It had more than two rooms, unlike our previous house, and it had a toilet that flushed and a laundry.

‘Righto, then, all into the car, you’re going to somewhere where you will be looked after for a while.’

My mind was racing. ‘What about our stuff at home? Can we stop and collect things?’

‘Sorry, we have orders to take you straight there. Maybe you can get them later.’

Our house was full of toys and clothes from what Daddy called the ‘junk shop’. None of them meant as much to me as our pets. We had guinea pigs and white mice that needed feeding, as well as kittens whose mother had abandoned them.

We got into the car and were driven through the streets of Brisbane. The driver told us we were going to a place where ‘rescued’ children go to be ‘assessed’. I didn’t know what assessed meant, but I had a pretty good idea of what he meant by rescued.

I don’t remember being scared. Confused, maybe, and uncertain as to what was going on. But somehow, I had known that something like this was going to happen.

‘Pretend this is still an adventure,’ I thought, ‘and the others will think that everything is okay.’

Helena

The police car drove away leaving us with strangers. At the top of a steep staircase lay the entrance to the Diamantina Receiving Home, an interim assessment centre for children awaiting their fate. Its name had changed a couple of years earlier from the Diamantina Receiving Depot and Infants’ Home although it remained shortened to ‘the Depot’.

We were separated almost immediately. Bessie was taken to the infants section, which was lined with rows of cots. I was placed in the girls dormitory to one side of the dining room.

There seemed to be children everywhere munching on sweets from sample bags. I discovered they’d just returned from an outing to the Brisbane Exhibition. They whispered excitedly about their day while I was allocated a bed in the centre row: a set of crisp white sheets, an unfamiliar pillow and a grey blanket dressed the iron-framed bed. When the light was switched off that evening, I worried about whether Bessie had managed to settle down and get to sleep without me. We had always shared a bedroom. Where were my brothers? Were they together? None of the girls in the beds beside me asked who I was or why I was there. I had come to accept my mummy was never coming back from the place the van took her away to. I didn’t know where my daddy was. Why hadn’t he come to take us home? My heart ached for him. It ached for my mummy, for my baby sister and my brothers. I quietly sobbed myself to sleep.

The following morning we were reunited in the supply room and the boys told us they’d been put in a dormitory on the other side of the dining room. We were given a suitcase, several items of clothing and shoes. A list containing our supplies was taped inside the suitcase. The clothes we arrived in were taken from us. The excitement of receiving new clothes masked the wonderment and confusion of the previous day.

Two days later, the dress and tattered cardigan I’d been wearing when we arrived were laid out on my bed to wear. They hadn’t been washed. I was told to wait at the front entrance where I met Bessie and the boys. They were dressed in their old clothes too. We didn’t speak to each other as we got in the car.

At the children’s court we were led into the courtroom. Our names were read out, followed by the charge: ‘You are a Neglected Child in that you are under the guardianship of Zoltan Ban, a person unfit to have such guardianship.’

The evidence was read by the arresting officer who said he knew the defendant children before the court.

The children were in a filthy condition with uncombed hair, generally untidy and dirty. I then had a conversation with Mr Zoltan Ban and as a result of this conversation I was of the opinion that he was mentally ill. The defendant children have no relatives in Australia as far as can be ascertained. The father is of Hungarian nationality. I maintain that the four defendant children are neglected children in that the father is mentally ill. They have no other guardian.

After hearing the statement and seeing us huddled together in dirty clothes, the magistrate was satisfied that we were neglected. No one asked us any questions.

And so it was that on 13 August 1964, a half-page statement sealed our fate. We were committed to the care of the State Children Department until we each turned eighteen.

Paul

The Depot was to be our home while we waited. But no one told us what we were waiting for and the longer we stayed there the more settled I became.

I was in Grade 5 and was sent to the local primary school the day after we arrived. Wooloowin State Primary School happened to share a fence with the Depot. That day all the students in the class I was to be in were away on an excursion and the only person in the classroom was the teacher, who was busy with marking. He eyed me up and down when I came in and spoke to me in a friendly manner. He must have been told I was one of the Depot kids and I think he felt sorry for me. After some small talk, he shifted into teacher mode and started firing multiplication questions at me. To his evident surprise and pleasure I answered every one correctly. But my cockiness was taken down a peg when he launched into a series of division problems – my previous rapid-fire responses turned to hesitant ones, before finally getting the answer right.

Chris and I slept in a long row of beds in the boys dormitory. Chris’s bed was a couple down from mine, as there was someone between us in age. After the children’s court, the staff took away the clothes we had arrived in and we received a different set of freshly laundered clothes every Tuesday and Saturday. As it was only a temporary place, the clothes we received were only roughly our size, and they were only ours for the duration of the wear. Once they went into the wash, there was a good chance the next time you saw your favourite shirt that someone else would be wearing it. I didn’t mind that so much. It was just nice to have clean clothes. When we lived in Inala with our father, we had worn our clothes until they became so dirty it was a relief to part with them.

I was old enough to do jobs around the property. One was wheeling an empty wheelbarrow to the nursery to collect wet nappies in the mornings. The nursery was filled with rows of babies in cots. Their smelly nappies were piled in a room waiting for delivery to the industrial laundry. I had to hold my nose as I loaded them into the wheelbarrow – and because they were saturated, the wheelbarrow was pretty heavy on the long journey to the laundry.

As time went on, with no apparent end to the waiting period, this life began to be a new normal. We walked in pairs to the local picture theatre on a Saturday afternoon to see whatever film was playing at the time. It was a good routine and one that I looked forward to. I found myself becoming Nurse King’s pet. She must have liked something about me because she was always talking to me and bringing me things the other children didn’t get.

After a while, I started to notice the regular movement of children through the facility, as a series of different boys occupied the bed beside me. Sometimes I would lie awake at night and imagine my father climbing through the window to collect Chris and me, before getting the girls and returning to our old house. I imagined holding the guinea pigs and the white mice again and seeing how much the kittens had grown.

Then one day, when we’d been at the Depot for two months, the matron called us into her office to announce the good news. We were soon to be leaving for our new home. I realised she definitely wasn’t talking about our house in Inala. When I asked where this new place was, Matron replied, ‘It’s beside the sea and it begins with S.’ That was all the information she gave us. ‘Is it Southport?’ I asked. I had some idea about the Gold Coast and knew there was a place there called Southport.

The Depot had a special area where children who were about to move to their designated children’s home (mine began with S!) were outfitted with sets of new clothes that were meant to last until we grew out of them. Finally, I was getting my own new clothes – the first time I could remember such an event. The nurse in the fitting rooms measured me and Chris up for size before giving us our allocated shirts (with collars!), t-shirts, good white shirts, play shorts, walk shorts, good shorts, long white socks, singlets, underpants, a pair of good black shiny shoes, a tie, a suit jacket and suit shorts. The suit was made from a heavy grey woollen material and became known as the ‘Statey-issue blanket suit’. The blanket suit was the outfit of choice for the transfer to our mystery destination beside the sea. I felt we were a bit overdressed – as well as our suits, Chris and I had on our white shirts and ties with our shiny black shoes, capped off with a heavy application of hair oil. I don’t remember what the girls wore, but I was glad they missed out on the hair oil.

Helena

At the Depot I played with Bessie as often as I could and rarely caught a glimpse of my brothers. I started at Wooloowin State School, where I was in Grade 1. We collected little lunch on our way through the back gate and returned to the home for big lunch.

When I’d started school earlier in the year, it had been a year since my mummy died, and Bessie had cried as I walked with Paul and Chris to the Inala State School, full of excitement.

Daddy had been giving me a bottle of warm milk on some evenings and weekends to help me settle. I lay on my bed comforted by suckling the teat and the warmth of the milk as it filled my belly. My brothers often teased me, leaving me a little embarrassed by their taunts. But I wasn’t prepared to sacrifice what was my only real comfort at the time. My mummy was taken away in a van and hadn’t returned. Even though I’d turned five and was learning to read and write, I yearned for all things maternal. I wanted my mother. What first began as an innocent theft of my baby sister’s bottle led to my father understanding his daughter’s need. It was just as easy to warm two bottles of milk as it was one.

I missed that bottle at the Depot. I missed my father.

Just as I was getting used to this new life I was uprooted again. This time, at least, I could say goodbye to my new friends, a luxury not afforded earlier when forced to leave behind school friends, neighbours, pets and my daddy.

In October, a stranger collected us and placed our newly fitted-out suitcases in her car.

Our new home had a sign at its grand entrance: Silky Oaks Children’s Haven. The driveway led us to the top of a hill where a majestic double-storey wooden house stood. It was the original home when the eight acres were purchased in 1946, and was now commonly referred to as the ‘old building’. There, we were met by the superintendents of Silky Oaks, a married couple, Mr Zander and Aunty Jean. Max and Jean Alexander. For the benefit of the young children, their surname was shortened. At the home, adults were known as ‘the workers’, with the men called ‘Mister’ and the women ‘Aunty’.

I was escorted around the premises by Aunty Jean’s daughter, Roslyn, who was my age. She was the youngest of their three