Hungary Three - Text
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED CONVERSATION
I arrived in Australia in nineteen fifty-seven on the Fair Sea which was a beautiful ship. And we docked in Melbourne. And we found it quite strange. It was not anything that we were used to see before. And then a bus came and we were told that we're going to Bonegilla, which was the Commonwealth Immigration Centre. We were in very high spirits because finally we reached our destination and we were really happy. We came from Hungary, which was war-torn and revolution-torn, and we felt we really had made it and we are free and so we were very happy. So the bus took us on our merry way, to Bonegilla, and halfway somewhere along the road we stopped. And the place we went to was a military centre and they had all sorts of equipments and a huge room. We thought it was a room, it probably was a conference room, which was full with something that we couldn't really identify. We went into this room and we were hungry. And then later it turned out to be that they were pies. Pies we had never seen before and the smell put us off, so unfortunately we couldn't eat it. And we arived to Bonegilla as hungry as little wolves. But it was wonderful.
Transcribed August 31, 2007 by Kevin Flynn, Associate Editor for Transcriptions
The speaker is female and was born in Hungary in 1936. She migrated to Australia as a young adult after the war and has lived in Melbourne for over 40 years. Although her accent still has a distinctively European tonal quality, she has the characteristics of an Australian accent particularly in some of her vowel sounds. For example, her diphthongs tend to have a nasality and there is not much lip rounding of her back vowel sounds.
Recorded by Geraldine Cook August 15, 2002, and edited by Paul Meier on December 15, 2003. Running time 00:03:54.