When I think of Nana Knie I smell a German perfume called "4711" or "Kölnische Wasser" and I smell lavender. The smell of "4711" suffused her silky clothes and her lap ever-ready to hold me. I must have spent a lot of time there. In my first year of life my mother had an accident which left her a cripple for about three years. I had an abrupt weaning and passed largely into the care of my Nana Knie and her daughter, my father's sister Herzberg. The lavender smell was not just soap and sachets, but it was her garden at Pleasant Hills where she had fled with her beloved Max for refuge during World War 1, when their lives were under threat in Queanbeyan, New South Wales. This happened despite the fact that her grandparents had settled that area over sixty years before.

I recently came near to understanding the hatred they faced when I participated in a batch of correspondence on the subject of German-Australians and internment in World War 1 on the GENANZ-L mailing list on the internet. One writer in particular poured enormous venom into his mailings on a subject that is almost eighty-five years old! He could hardly have been very old if even alive in 1914. What must it have been like to have lived next door to that between 1914 and 1918! So watchmaker and optometrist Max Knie and his wife and three young children - my father the eldest was seven years old - fled to an area of German settlement further south near the Victorian border around a place now called Holbrook, but which was once known as Germantown. They settled in Pleasant Hills, where the original streets were re named in an effort to placate the anti-German feeling in the wider Riverina region (se my uncle Bob's account : "The Pepper Trees of Ryan Street".

The earth around that town is red. And it is a fertile soil. So it was in Nana's garden where I recall wending my way along the dirt paths lined with bricks around herb beds giving off perfume. The dryness and the heat of that fierce continental climate stays with me still. Scents hung heavy on that air in summer from the peppercorn trees and the eucalypts that lined the streets and shaded the schoolyard where we played in the dirt. I too learned to play marbles as my father had done there thirty years before.

I must have gone to stay often. Not only when Mum was ill during all those years but later each time she fell pregnant with my three siblings. We would travel by train from the big Albury railway station to Henty and change there to a small motor train to Pleasant Hills. My spirits were always high on this journey at the thought of seeing Nana and Auntie Herzie again, and they leapt at the sight of the cement wheat silos which stood beside the siding.

The house in Ryan Street was never a long walk away. It was built of pisé or rammed earth (see Uncle Bob's account) and was a warm, solid, ground-hugging dwelling that enveloped one with security. I think it was something to do with the thickness of the walls and their smooth but changing surface, like that on a human arm or leg.

I remember only three rooms, but it must have had several more. My clearest memory is the room where we would all sit to eat and where at night the grown-ups played cards - always by the light of a kerosene lamp. A photo exists of my mother sitting at the table with her face softly lit by the lamp in the centre.

In a side room at the front off this main room, Max as a baby was put to sleep in a large cot with wide wooden slab sides. It must have held all Nana's babies. Once again a photo has survived which shows him standing in the cot holding the sides and triumphantly awake.

At the front of the house was a room where I never went and which was a store-room in my childhood. It was called "The Shop" and I think that between 1916 and 1930 it had been grandfather's business room.

I don't recall the kitchen but in the back yard was a pump. It stood near a well and we were told to "Keep away from the well". Wells were dangerous places for youngsters.

All her children except Auntie Herzie had left home by 1937 when I arrived. At the time of mum's accident Nana was 53 and had been widowed since 1930, when Grandfather Max Knie was killed by his own car in a freak accident. Nana had been sitting in the front seat when he had cranked it, fell and been dragged to his death on a lonely section of the Lockhart road. Unable to drive she had sat helpless while he died beneath the moving vehicle.

This, her major life experience, left a bequest to all the women in her family - an imperative to learn to drive a car. I had my licence for over thirty years before I ever owned a car.

Nana left me another legacy too. She played the piano and her love of music has stayed with me all my life.

She could not have been a tall woman. To me at age eight she seemed just the right size for me to be enveloped by her when on her lap and I was never too big to sit in it. Her manner of talking and walking and moving was gentle and graceful.

Nana was always there for me, the eldest grandchild. I have often been told I was her "favourite" but this must have been something she confided to her daughters because I never sensed that she gave me any more love than the generous amount she gave us all: my cousins Hannerl and Bernhardine and my brothers Paul and Max. Even now as I recall her I feel the unspoken bond that always sprang into life when I saw her or when she looked at me. It was a fierce sweet feeling - quite inexpressible - and I knew it was reciprocated.

She was there for us when Paul died on 6 June 1944, aged nine months. I was six, nearly seven. He died we were told because "a dirty blowfly lit on his dummy". I have hated blowflies ever since. There were always plenty of them buzzing around in Albury when the weather warmed up. But he died in early winter. His death may or may not have been due to a blowfly. He died of dehydration and exhaustion brought on by gastro-enteritis. We know a lot more about treating this very common disease today than then. Within a few days of the diarrhea starting he was dead. "He was the best of the lot of you babies", Dad used to say. Looking at the bonny child in photos of him it is easy to believe that.

Nana was there to pick up the pieces that were left of me after his death. I was six, nearly seven. I remember the bewilderment and the grief that filled my days. Who knows how much of it went back to the time when I had been so abruptly "weaned" at the time of my mother's accident. This was another bereavement. He died suddenly. It must have been a bad time for my father and my mother with three kiddies under six years of age and my brother Max, three years younger, must have been left with very confused memories.

A year or so later Nana's face started to change. She became thinner and smaller and bonier but she still wore the soft silken clothes in which I used to bury my face.

I recall visiting her once in hospital where her heart illness eventually took her. Her lips were very blue as if she had been putting an "indelible" pencil in her mouth, I remember thinking. And that memory has certainly reinforced purple as a colour associated with death and mourning for me. Her weakness and lack of energy also puzzled me.

Then we heard one day that she had died. I do not remember the moment of the announcement. I just recall the darkness that fell and the grief that ate away at me for what seemed like a very long time indeed. This time no Nana Knie was there to comfort me.

One night I was lying on my bed at 344 Kiewa Street in Albury and my mother came to sit alongside me. She must have left the baby Bernadette to comfort me. I was crying uncontrollably. She was saying that I had to stop or I would make myself sick. And I couldn't stop the sobs which wracked me. I was exhausted.

"Will Nana ever come back?" I asked her. "Will Paul come back?"

"No," she said, trying to explain honestly. "That is what dying means". I repeated my questions again and again. I knew that magic could work miracles and repetition was part of that. I must have kept it up long enough for my poor mother to have said at last,

"Well, yes. They will come back". And this is all I wanted to hear. I was able to stop crying and start living again. She undoubtedly added that we will see everybody again when we die. I didn't hear that.

It was with some surprise over the next few years that I saw both Grandma Paull and great Uncle George Siebert (Nana's bachelor brother) die in our house. And had to learn the lesson all over again.

© 1998 Maria Brandl

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