On the final leg of her journey to the in 1950, 12-year-old Alla Nosiara, nee Huszcza, from Belarus thought she had ‘arrived in Paradise’.
Mrs Nosiara’s vision of Paradise came on a shaded railway platform as she travelled with her siblings and widowed mother to Bonegilla. When the train came to a halt, the family disembarked to be greeted by trestle tables loaded with cups of tea, cakes, scones, jam and cream.
It was heaven for the mother and children who had spent the post-war years in a concentration camp and a series of Allied refugee camps.
Their definition of Paradise took a dent when they arrived at Bonegilla, their first Australian home. It was late January and the newcomers were hit with their first taste of an Albury Wodonga summer.
“My first memory is that it was so hot and bright that I couldn’t keep my eyes open,” Mrs Nosiara said. “We got (sun) burned because we were not aware that that could happen in the sun because we’d never experienced it.”
The sparse shade of gum trees offered scant relief from the stifling heat inside the camp’s iron sheds, but the family soon settled into their new life.
There were opportunities to work and Mrs Nosiara remembers joining a group of women picking beans on a nearby property.
“I got paid three (shillings) and sixpence for my day’s work. It was a lot of money!” she said.
“Don’t ask what I spent it on but I know it was ice cream.”
Later, the family was sent to the Cowra Holding Centre in NSW where Mrs Nosiara’s mother worked as a cook. After two years there, they moved to Melbourne.
Young Alla excelled at school and wanted to be a doctor but due to family circumstances she instead became a book keeper at a business in Elizabeth St and when she turned 20, she was “blessed” to marry a young Ukrainian man who was her first boyfriend.
The couple had six children, now all adults, and Mrs Nosiara has 13 grandchildren.
In March this year she returned to Bonegilla for the first time in more than seven decades, and was flooded with memories when she entered the gates.
And a lifetime after that bright, hot introduction to her new home, she is forever grateful for the new beginning that Bonegilla and the
