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BIO

Trip to New Zealand

René

“And so they sailed from Denmark’s shore

Birgith Bent René and Mor

Their journey took them really far

To re-unite with guess who?.....Far

So read on mates, there’s more much Mor”

Far was a workaholic. The Nordic winter’s short days, snow and ice
made it impossible for him to lay bricks.

Pacing like a caged beast one freezing night, he remembered some

documents friends had left months earlier. They had played with the
idea of immigrating to New Zealand but dropped it under pressure
from family. The previous summer Far had laughed off the idea as
foolish but that cold night he changed his mind.

New Zealand offered a sunny, warm climate where he could work

year round. The very far away part was tempting too. It would put
distance between him and the reminders of the two wars he had
endured. Denmark and New Zealand are about as far apart as it’s
possible to get without leaving Planet Earth. Having never travelled
outside Denmark’s borders, that vast distance is something he did not
comprehend.

New Zealand and its larger neighboring continent Australia in the

South Pacific are sometimes referred to as “Down Under”. In the vast
universe, who can say what is up and what is down? Could it be that
Australia and New Zealand are in fact Up Over?
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That is not the way white Europeans see it. It was the Europeans
who drew the first maps. So, according to the standard classroom
globe, New Zealand and Australia are nestled at the “bottom” of the
planet. New Zealand’s southernmost island is in not far from the
Antarctic. In contrast Denmark sits near the “top” of the planet icily
close to the Arctic Circle.

Far’s ship pulled away from the docks in Copenhagen headed for
New Zealand on the first day of 1950 just four years after V Day. The
Night before, New Year’s Eve of 1949, Far attended a prayer meeting
at his church.

His voyage began more than three hundred years after Dutch
explorer Abel Tasman’s. Tasman ran into New Zealand by mistake;
the first European to visit there. Tasman sailed as the proud captain
of a corporate owned ship pursuing potential future company profits.
Far was but a humble passenger on a voyage to a strange and
distant land where the sun would shine year round on this bricklayer.
But there were similarities between the two men and their
adventures.

Like Tasman, Far’s venture required substantial courage. For Far to

travel half way around the world taking leave of his wife and children,
and his father, brothers and sisters and his beloved church was a
permanent life changing event. Tasman would soon return to
Holland. Far’s trip was one way.

Far’s trip was not as dangerous as was Tasman’s. His ship was
made of metal driven by a combustion engine whereas Tasman’s
ship was made of wood and propelled by a capricious wind. No one
died aboard Far’s ship whereas a high percentage of the crew died
aboard Tasman’s. Amongst other tragedies, they died from vitamin C
deficiency since Tasman’s voyage was prior to the discovery that
citrus fruit prevented scurvy. The British were the first to figure that
out during their later voyages; so to this day Brits are still referred to
as Limeys. It was the British not the Dutch who imposed their
language Down Under so it was the limey language we would learn to
speak there.
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When Far landed in this distant Pacific country his cultural shock may
not have been greater than was Tasman’s. In his early forties Far
had to learn a new language and adapt to an odd mix of Polynesian
and British colonial culture. Far was undereducated in the Danish
language. Now at a stage in life where learning a new language
challenges the brain, his Red Danish English dictionary became as
worn as his bible.

Still a guy can put up with a lot when he has friends. And he was
welcome in this new land as were other Danish immigrants.
When Far’s passenger ship the Manchuria docked in Auckland’s
Waitemata harbor, New Zealand had a welcome mat rolled out for
British and European immigrants.

After the war there was, Down Under, a grave shortage of potential
soldiers with round eyes and white skin. If this sounds racist, it was.
But perhaps there was some excuse for it in the case of WW II in the
Pacific. The Japanese military had a well earned reputation as rapists
and torture fiends. Towards the latter part of the war they appeared
to be headed towards a conquest of Australia and New Zealand.

On the second of May, 1943, the Japanese bombed the City of

Darwin’s harbor in Northern Australia. To Australians the “Japs”
appeared poised to pour tens of thousands of well-equipped soldiers
from occupied New Guinea into Northern Australia and then advance
towards the southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne. The Kiwis
feared the “Japs” would then sail from there to conquer and torture
the population of New Zealand while Kiwi solders were in Europe
fighting Churchill’s war.

It didn’t happen that way. The war in the Pacific came to an end in
part because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When Far arrived in February of 1950 many New Zealanders still

feared possible future invasions from Asia. As happens to people
who are frightened, the mind generalizes. In the minds of most
Aussies and Kiwis all yellow skinned people were associated with the
reputation of Japanese soldiers. In reaction to such fears male
offspring of European immigrants were viewed as future defenders
against Asian attacks.
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Oblivious to most of this history, Mor and her three children were in
1950 in Denmark, living in cramped quarters in Mor’s parents’ little
apartment in the City of Århus. By that time Mor had sold our house
in the suburbs in preparation for our trip to join Far.

There during a dark and snowy Danish winter we had sweet dreams
about warm beaches and palm trees in a far off land. We received
letters from Far. In one he wrote that he was working at the foot of
Mount Wellington. This sparked more exotic images in our dreams.
There are no mountains in Denmark, only rare hills rising ever so
slightly over what is part of the great plains of Northern Europe.

Birgith was twelve, Bent eight and René was six when this cramped
cold stay in the city was over. The sun shone as Mor and her brood
watched uncle Peter and his friend Borge heave our big wooden car
crate containing all our belongings onto the top of Borge’s 1930s
Volvo. Our bags were crammed into its boot. We in turn were
crammed into the back seat and we were off on our way to join Far.

My heart pounded so much I thought it could be heard by the adults.

It was hard for me to breathe; all pure joy as we drove to Grenå, in
the northern part of Jylland. There a car ferry sailed for Hundested in
Sweden.

Not long into the crossing to Sweden, René and I noticed generous
piles of vomit all over the decks as the car-ferry heaved from side to
side. We were not in the least sick. We had a great time laughing
out loud as we skipped between the piles of puke glistening in the
moonlight.

After the ferry arrived in Sweden, we drove from Grenå to where our
ship was waiting. Gothenburg is the second largest City in Sweden.
It was once a Viking harbor and is now Sweden’s largest port.

Birgith wrote the following in Danish at the time it happened. She

later translated her twelve year old Danish to English:

”10/10/1950.
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It was very windy on the ferry to Hundested, so nearly everybody was

seasick. I was on the verge of throwing up, but was given a
seasickness tablet and that helped.

“On the way from Hundestæd to Helsingør we nearly ran over an old
man. He was blinded by the light of our headlamps and fell in front of
the car. Fortunately, he didn’t hurt himself but he was in shock.
From then on I slept and I didn’t wake up till the toll man on the
Hlsingnør ferry had to check us over. From Helsingør, we drove
North to Goteborg. We slept sitting in the car through the remainder
of the night.

“Early the next morning, we drove to pastor Hagelunds home where

we were his guests until our boat sailed.

“After we had eaten a nice breakfast, my uncle Peter and his friend
Børge left to do some shopping in the city. At four o’clock they
returned and drove us to Sunte, the town that had slipped into the
Gotoelven River. The houses were collapsed like upset toys. One
house had been torn in half and the two halves lay several meters
apart. Windows were smashed and one house had the roof rammed
into the basement. Only a few houses were intact and there was
mud everywhere. It was a sad sight.”

At Gothenburg on the South West Coast of Sweden at the site of

ancient Viking docks, was berthed the small cargo ship that would,
we hoped, transport us to New Zealand.

The day after our arrival in Goteborg we tasted our first ever banana.
It was “delicious!” Then we drove to the harbor and turned the car
crate and other baggage over to the crew of the Temnaren and
climbed the gangplank. We were to be the only passengers on board
and we would occupy the Second Mate’s cabin. It was a fine cabin
with varnished furniture, bunk beds and portholes. Only two such
cabins existed on the Temnaren. The other was the Captain’s.

We stood on deck and watched Goteborg harbor slide slowly into the
ocean. The sky was a battleship grey with touches of red as the sun
set. Gulls cried and dove for scraps as the engine grumbled to life.
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The old ship shook and its metal sidings groaned. The freezing water
churned at the rear as we stood on the deck trembling from the
numbing Arctic cold. As the dusk faded to black, that was the last
any of us would see of Europe for almost two decades.

It was warm inside our cabin. So was the dining room where the
Captain treated us as special guests. He was a proud man who held
his tall frame erect and spoke with an air of authority. He had a full
white beard and thick silver hair. He took his position and
responsibilities seriously and treated us with old world formality. This
included seating us all at his table and making conversation about the
weather and the food, along with stories about previous trips and the
unpredictable moods of the Atlantic Ocean.

The captain and crew spoke only Swedish. Swedish is akin to

Danish as Italian is to Spanish. Still it can be hard to understand for a
Dane. It has a singsong lilt compared to more staccato Danish. At
first it was completely foreign to me, and I never got to speak it well.
But we somehow managed to converse adequately with the captain
and crew nevertheless.

The Temnaren sailed south towards the open Kattegat then headed
for the English Channel towards the North Atlantic. Over the next few
weeks we sailed out of sight of any land, but parallel to the coast of
Spain and later the coast of North and Central and South Africa. We
knew none of this geography except for the little we picked up from
the Captain’s occasional tour-guide lecture at the dinner table, some
of which we understood. Being well out from the North African shore,
we saw little of the land he described, only sea and more sea.

There was one exception. We saw land one time during the entire trip
until reaching the south western coast of Australia. That view was a
half hour sighting of a small section of the coastline of a small African
country called Gabon on the West Coast of Northern Africa. We
could see land in the distance sporting palm trees and clean white
beaches. And then there it was: a canoe with several young black
men aboard. They waved and smiled, white teeth gleaming from
their pitch black faces. In Denmark we had never seen any black
people. But here right before our eyes were several black men in a
canoe. We were not in Denmark anymore!
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Then, for the next four weeks we saw nothing but water.

Apples taste strange after a couple of weeks in a ship’s refrigerator.

And we discovered that the Ry-King cracker breads were infested
with tiny black insects. The crew did their best to get them out by
banging them against the sink top in the kitchen. The tiny black
creatures that were shaken loose by the dozen scrambled from the
crackers across the sink top for the safety of whatever cracks they
could find. Sometimes one or two remained making us eat with great
care so as not to bite into their bitter tasting little bodies.

There was no alternative to these crackers. No fresh bread was

baked on board and there was no corner bakery to visit like the ones
we had been spoiled with in Denmark. One morning Birgith bit into
one of the little critters and made an awful face. “Uuugh!” she howled
and then spat. Birgith has always been shy and proper. Still she
spat.

Somewhere off the West Coast of Central Africa a major storm hit.
The plates that had been set for the next meal were thrown through
the air, smashing against the walls as Temnaren pitched sharply.

René and I enjoyed this spectacle. And, as the evening wore on, the
adventure got more dramatic. The sound of the wind was deafening.
Not allowed outside, we could see enough through a porthole in our
cabin. We found ourselves in awe of the raw power of the Atlantic
Ocean.

There was a teenage Swedish sailor who had fallen for my beautiful
sister. René and I hung around the kitchen, relieving the boredom by
watching this young cook at work. We told him about our sister’s
pending 13th birthday. A few days later he let us in on a secret. He
was going to bake a birthday cake for her with thick creamy icing and
a happy birthday greeting on it in Danish.

The morning of Birgith’s birthday the ship was swaying steadily. The
birthday girl was looking a little green around the gills when the sailor
knocked and entered our cabin with a generous smile on his flushed
face. He had in his hands a silver tray with the cake that he had put
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the finishing touches on early that morning. He managed the Danish

René and I had taught him: “Til lykke med fødselsdagen!”.

Birgith was delighted… for a second or two. Then the thrill faded as
the ship heaved. Her face became greener and all she could say
was a clipped, “tak” and “unskyl!” (“Thank you… I’m sorry!”) as she
leaped out of bed diving for the bathroom. There were sounds of
serious vomiting.

The poor fellow’s smile changed to horror. He blurted out an apology

and rushed from our cabin.

It was a big deal when we crossed the equator. We received

certificates with Neptune sketched on them and our names imprinted
over a genuine wax seal. The weather was balmy. The hot breezes
were a brand new feast for our senses. There had been nothing
remotely like that in Denmark even during the warmest summers that
Nordic country could muster.

We were now in the Southern Hemisphere of our little blue planet.

The warm waters of the South Atlantic dished up new adventures.
We saw whales and flying fish and dolphins at play as we churned
south. At night the heavens featured a splash of stars unlike any we
had seen before.

We were now near the islands with the world’s highest albatross
population. The South Atlantic Albatrosses nest amongst rocks on
high cliffs of isolated islands of the mid Atlantic such as Tristan de
Cunha Island.

As happens sometimes to ships passing through there, an albatross

landed on the deck of the Temnaren. An albatross has a wingspan of
up to twelve feet, the largest of any existing bird species. They can fly
large distances and regularly circle the globe.

Experienced with such albatross visits, our Captain had the ship turn
so that the wind was blowing hard towards the aft. Then he picked it
up and held its body high above his head, waited for a strong gust of
wind and then he heaved it as high as he could out over the churning
water. The bird’s great wings worked as hard as she was capable
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but still she descended towards the waves. Her next desperate effort
held her body just above the spume of the waves. She lifted a few
feet, and then sank a few. Her body lifted again and sank, her belly
almost skimming the water, and the tips of her wings touched the
spray. Then ever so slowly she lifted a little higher than the time
before and dipped a little less, her wings a little more effective with
each subsequent swoosh. René and I jumped up and down
screaming with joy as we watched the great bird slowly lifting higher
and higher.

It was approaching mid summer in the Southern Hemisphere when

theTemnaren finally docked in the harbor of Melbourne Australia. As
the ropes were tied to the moorings the rolling swell of Temnaren’s
decks, to which we had become accustomed over the six weeks at
sea, finally stopped. We said our goodbyes to the captain and the
crew we’d come to know well by then, and walked down the
gangplank onto Australian soil. Each step was now a knee-crunching
experience. Our sea legs – the adjustment the brain and legs make
which enables one to walk on a constantly rolling deck – were now a
liability. It took some forty-eight hours for our brains to adjust to the
fact that the soil of Australia did not move… terra firma. By that time
Mor and her brood had checked into a boarding house.

“Good Morning!” said an Australian middle-aged bloke with a cheery,

round, sunburned face. The language was English. This was a new
challenge just as we had begun to become comfortable with a little
basic Swedish. Since the Jutes and Vikings had occupied England
for hundreds of years, there is some similarity between several
common English words and the Danish equivalents. One example is
“Good morning”: the Danish being “God morgen”. So that gave us
some confidence that we might learn the language quickly. It wasn’t
going to be as easy for Mor and Far: English contains as much Latin
and Greek as it does the Nordic languages.

We woke up in a large blue bedroom, in a huge old Victorian house,

typical of older Down Under homes. It was the middle of summer and
delightfully hot and dry as far as we boys were concerned. There had
been no palm trees in Denmark so they fascinated us as did the
banana trees, orange trees and the constant sunshine and deep blue
sky.
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There was a parrot at the boarding house that talked up a storm. Not
that we could understand parrot English with an Aussie brogue. But
the Aussie bloke with the round, red face certainly had no problem
understanding the bird. He chatted away and the parrot answered
nice as you please. The parrot was just one bird in a large aviary in
the garden. Australia is full of birds and animals not seen anywhere
else in the world. It has a huge variety of poisonous snakes, deadly
crocodiles, poisonous spiders, a jellyfish that inflicts such pain that
people who encounter it scream and gurgle with horrific sounds and
usually die from the encounter. We knew nothing of this… perhaps a
blessing.

We flew for the first time. We were awestruck. A propeller plane with
perhaps twenty people took off from Melbourne Airport for Sydney.
There we were transferred by bus to the beautiful Sydney harbor.
Unlike today there was no bridge over the harbor, nor was there the
now-famous Sydney Opera House on its shore. That would be built
beginning a few years later, following the plans of a Danish architect,
Jorn Utzon, who won the architectural competition initiated by
Australia’s parliament. He submitted the unique design that today
graces the harbor and has become the symbol of Australia for people
the world over.

It was from this harbor in Sydney that we boarded an amphibian

plane for Auckland, New Zealand. Before renaming it Air New
Zealand, the company labeled itself Tasman Empire Airways Limited
(T.E.A.L). The long dead Dutch explorer’s name was still hanging
around centuries after his visit here.

As we waited to board this flying boat René and I were so excited that
we held onto a metal pole and then began running around and
around it holding onto it with our hands until they blistered. Birgith
finally put an end to this by grabbing us firmly by the shoulders and
sternly ordering us to be still. On board the wait was long. Finally the
engines roared into action. As the great bird sped across the surface
of Sydney harbor salt water beat against the windows until we lifted
off the water. The take off was painfully slow and tentative. I thought
of the Albatross slowly lifting above the waves weeks earlier. Just like
that beautiful bird, the plane’s huge hulk eased above the water and
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finally took flight headed across the Tasman Sea towards New
Zealand.