By Andrew Bolt, social and political commentator, writer and TV producer.
I was born in Adelaide and always felt some contact with Holland. We got parcels every few months from my mother’s parents or sisters of zoute drop, stophoest and editions of Panorama. I read (or just looked at) cartoon strips of Lucky Luke and Asterix, in Dutch, and studied racy pictures in Panorama that seemed a bit shocking in our part of the Australian bush.
My mother’s youngest brother came to Australia to live and we would see him every few years. My father’s second brother lived in Sydney but we saw him rarely. We lived mostly in Darwin and country and desert South Australia, and didn’t have much money for travel.
In primary school, my mother’s father and mother came on their only visit to us in Darwin, but I didn’t have much Dutch and they had less English. Opa had to leave school at 13 and did well to become head of transport at the bloemenveiling in Aalsmeer, but didn’t have much chance to learn languages. I never saw them again, and never met my father’s parents.
In my second year of high school we were visited by my mother’s two glamorous youngest sisters, and they have since become lifelong friends, but more intense. Family, you know.
My mother’s eldest sister came when I was in my last year of high school and dreaming of going to Europe – somewhere that seemed both more exotic yet also more like home, and certainly more vivid than the country struggle-towns we’d been moving between, as dad was posted from school to school as a headmaster.
I remember Tante Annie saying to my mother: “Laat hem maar komen!”
At 17 I took my first ever plane ride and flew to Paris, on the money I’d saved pumping petrol, picking fruit, delivering newspapers and playing drums in a dance band, and six weeks later I was in Nederland. Aalsmeer, on a cold yet sunny spring day.
The next six or seven months were some of the happiest of my life. I lived with Annie, and worked first in an uncle’s paint factory and then in the bloemenveiling. I insisted on speaking in Dutch from the start, even when it was primitive, so that I could learn fast. I felt so connected, with such loving relatives. Loved it all: Robert Long, Koot en Bie, André van Duin. Rembrandt, tulpen, kroketten and the smell of the bloemenveiling at 5am, bursting with flowers.
At 24, convinced my journalism career was going nowhere, I went back to Holland and worked again at the bloemenveiling and lived with another beloved aunt. (Annie had died.)
I have since visited Holland around six or seven times, three times in the past three years to keep up with family, and especially with two who are not well. I’ve also visited cousins and an uncle, now alas dead, from my father’s side, over in Hengelo and Arnhem. I’ve visited cities from Groningen to Rotterdam, Groet (ok, not a city) to Limburg. I go on Van Gogh pilgrimages, to places where he painted and the two great museums of his art – in Amsterdam, of course, and the Hoge Veluwe.
Mum and dad flew here from Schiphol in 1958 as assisted immigrants. They thought Australia had more opportunities, but they were also leaving behind some disappointments. Dad worked as a bus conductor and in a factory before going back to teaching. He had an accent, but at least knew maths and rules of grammar – and there was such a shortage of teachers back then. Still seems to be a shortage of those with dad’s skills.
For some odd reason they chose to go first to Adelaide. Maybe it was because a Dutch church agreed to help them settle in, although they quit churchgoing seven years later when we went to Darwin. It might have been earlier, but they waited until they got to Darwin to declare it. That said, they kept some friends from church to the end.
Odd, though. My dad’s father had been a koster at his church in Halfweg, and dad was kind of proud of that. Maybe wagging the finger at people is in the Bolt blood. And aren’t the Dutch famed for insisting de spijker op z’n kop te slaan? And to think I now get paid for it.
I applied for and got Dutch citizenship in my 20s and travelled on my Dutch passport. It was such a blow when I went to get it renewed at the Dutch consulate in Hong Kong (where we were living) and had it torn up. I was told by a Chinese woman with better Dutch than me I was no longer a citizen. A blow, but it at least forced me to commit more to Australia, which became a lot easier by having such a sweet Australian wife and lovely parents in law.
That said, my children have vowed to protect my reputation as an Australian conservative by never revealing who I barrack for when Holland plays, even when they play … oh, mustn’t say.
Isn’t it strange, the call of the blood? It is one reason I am such a sceptic of multiculturalism policies that encourage it. I know myself.
For more information on Andrew’s professional live see: https://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-bolt
