QUEENSLAND'S GERMAN CONNECTIONS - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE

The adventures of Ilse Prechtel

On 1 October1949, she boarded the 11,600 ton Anna Salen – the former WW2 Royal Navy escort aircraft carrier HMS Archer , recently re-converted from a bulk coal freighter to emigrant passenger duties after her Swedish owners won an IRO transport contract.

Ilse Prechtel was born in Weiden in the Oberpfalz region of northeastern Bavaria, and lived in Brisbane for over 50 years, before her death there in 2010 at the age of 82. After a childhood in a semi-rural small town left mostly unscarred by the Second World War, her independent and self-reliant outlook led her to seek her own life experiences far from the urban and industrial ruin of post-war Germany. Barely 20 years old, she farewelled her sister and family on 26 August 1948, as her train pulled out of Schweinfurt bound for Innsbruck and the Brenner Pass.

Conditions aboard were tough. The mechanical problems of the ship’s earlier lives continued to trouble this, her third IRO voyage to Australia: refrigeration and other machinery broke down in the Red Sea, and Ilse, like others, slept on deck because it was too hot below. Many of the 1,500 passengers fell ill during the long voyage, and rumours of multiple sea burials did the rounds. Several families were taken to hospital when the ship made its first Australian landfall at Fremantle. Arriving in Melbourne on 1 November 1949, Ilse spent three weeks in the Bonegilla immigration camp, where she developed her English skills and mulled over what to do. The choice was to become domestic help (a cook earned £2/10/– a week) or take on clerical duties. Not fancying the former, she boldly lied that she could type, whereupon she was given some training as an accounting machine operator and sent to Darwin, where a job in the Commonwealth Public Works department was paying £8/13/–. The Anna Salen (background image this page) started life as HMS Archer – the first of 38 merchant vessels converted into so called ‘escort carriers’ by the USA for a wartime Britain in dire need of mid-ocean air cover for its Transatlantic convoys. In 1948 49, under Swedish ownership, she was reconverted to transport displaced passengers under contract to the International Refugee Organization (IRO). Ilse Prechtel was one of 1,503 passengers on the ship’s voyage to Australia in 1949, who sought a new life far from the strife and wreckage of Europe. Image courtesy of Peter Plowman collection & Rosenberg Publishing

Two days later she arrived at transit camp ‘Bagnoli’ outside Naples, where she was to spend the next 14 months awaiting processing by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

Top left: Ilse confronts her future in Weiden in 1944, and (above) has a last glimpse of her birthland as the train steams south into Austria. Left: the spartan architecture of Bagnoli tranist camp near Naples, where Ilse spent more than a year after war’s end. Images courstesy of family collection

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