In 1954 Maria Agnes Scholte (known as Ria) became the 50,000 Dutch person to migrate to Australia. Scholte was born in Amsterdam in the early 1930s and worked as a hairdresser prior to emigrating. She was twenty years old when she left the Netherlands for Australia.
Emigration
Scholte departed from Rotterdam in early June 1954. Sailing on the MS Sibayak, it took Scholte only five weeks to arrive in Melbourne, where her fiancé, Frank Zindler, was waiting for her. An architect, Zindler had migrated to Melbourne in 1953.
In Rotterdam Ria Scholte had been sent off by an official party of Dutch and Australian delegates, who leveraged her status as the 50,000th migrant to promote the migration scheme between the two countries. A similar welcoming committee consisting of Dutch officials and Harold Holt (then minister for immigration and later Prime Minister of Australia) awaited Scholte in Melbourne.
Her arrival was well-documented in Australian newspapers at the time, many of which remarked on the symbolic exchange of gifts between Scholte and Holt. Ria Scholte presented Holt with a pair of Delft blue plates and in turn received an Australian woollen rug. According to one source, she had accidentally packed the plates in her luggage and a taxi had to be specially called to retrieve the plates before an official welcome dinner onboard the Sibayak.
Settling into Melbourne
After her arrival Maria toured Melbourne with fiancé Frank as part of an organised media tour that aimed to promote Dutch migration to Australia. The tour stopped at a furnishings store and housing developments, among other sites. The Australian press followed along and photographs of Maria admiring Australian household furniture and decor items were published in Australian newspapers. An academic analysis of these photographs (which are now held at the National Archives of Australia) concluded that the photographs and their captions emphasised “the positive prospects of Australia” as a migration destination, and deliberately positioned Maria as rapidly assimilating into Australian culture.
Five days after she arrived in Australia, Ria married Frank in Carlton on 10 July 1954. Their marriage was reported in the newspapers of the time.
In 1958, four years after Ria Scholte’s arrival, Adriana Zevenbergen became the 100,000th Dutch migrant to Australia.
Selected sources
- ‘50,000 Dutch Migrants’, The Townsville Daily Bulletin, 22 June 1954, p.7 via TROVE
- ‘Maria is the 50,000th Dutch migrant’, The Daily News, Perth, 29 June 1954, p.2, via TROVE
- ‘Interest in Dutch Migrant’, The Age, 3 July 1954, p.8 via TROVE
- ‘Rode, witte en blauwe hyacinthen voor 50.000e immigrante’, De Typhoon, 5 July 1954 via Archieven.nl
- ‘Busy Days for Maria’, The Beaudesert Times, 10 September 1954, p.8 via TROVE
- ‘50,000th Migrant Married’, The Northern Miner, 26 August 1954, p.2 via TROVE
- ‘New Australians are Good Citizens’, PIX, vol. 35 no.13 (1954), pp.57-59 via TROVE
- Miljana Manasijević, ‘Selling Images from Both Sides: Visual and Textual Representation of Migration and Negotiation of Identities of Dutch Migrants from 1945 until 1965’, Masters thesis, Erasmus University (2016)
