Andrij Derezyckyj

Story

Andrij Derezyckyj was born in the Eastern Ukraine, in a village known as Perevelovka, and came from a large family of 11 siblings including himself. He never saw family or relatives after the finish of the war, and went to the UK as a displaced person like so many of his generation from war-torn Europe. This is where he met my mother, in a small town in the Potteries in the Midlands. They were married in 1953, and I was born a year later in January 1954. Shortly after my birth the applied to migrate to Canada, but Andrij failed the medical. He had a nephew that he went side by side with throughout the war, who did manage to make it to Canada as well as a cousin that went to the USA.

In 1967 he made a decision for the family to migrate here to Australia, after seeing an add in a local paper seeking migrants and young families to come to Australia.

After some deliberation and the interview process with the Australian Department of Immigration, we became one of the Generation of migrants referred to as the Ten Pound Tourists – the assisted passage scheme run by the Australian Government at the time to encourage migrants to Australia. We left the shores of England in June 1968, Andrij, my mother Joyce, myself and younger brother.

The journey took about six weeks, aboard the Achille Lauro – an Italian registered ship. The Achille Lauro was made famous years later when it was hijacked at sea by middle eastern terrorists. The Suez canal was closed to shipping in 1968 so we came the long way round so to speak, calling in to the ports of Genoa , Naples and Messina in Italy and the small island of Malta. Then we stopped over at Cape Town in South Africa, at the time still under the rules of apartheid.

Then after Cape Town our next stop was Fremantle in Western Australia, our first step onto Australian soil before traversing the “Great Australian Bight’ round the coast of South Australia to land in Melbourne on the 11/7/1968. After we passed through immigration and went to the migrant hostel in Maribyrnong, we settled in and the spent a night at an old friend of Andrijj whom he met as a displaced person after WW2.

Mikhail sponsored our family to migrate to Australia, as he was brought to Melbourne back in 1957 by Richards Tiles a tile manufacturing company in the potteries in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire.

The day we arrived in ‘sunny’ Australia it was maybe 9-10 deg and pouring with rain, as we would learn this was normal for Melbourne. We spent 3 months on the hostel and Andrij who had no formal education, and been mainly a farmer in his homeland of origin took a job as a laborer in a metal foundry in Maidstone a short distance from the hostel.

Initial impressions were a little gloomy, until one day Andrij saw an add in the paper for homes for sale by a developer. Then a meeting was arranged for us to go and see a home on the other side of the city, a suburb called Mooroolbark in the outer east of Melbourne. Andrij and my mother fell in love with the house and we lived there until 1976 and Andrij (along with all of the family) moved out further in to the picturesque Yarra Valley. And that is where he lived until his passing on 2/1/1980. He died peacefully at home after a short illness, on his own piece of land that he called his own.

I made a pilgrimage to the Ukraine to Andrij’s birthplace in 2007, a journey home for Andrij as he was never able to make the journey himself. I am proud of my father and my Ukrainian heritage, and the move he decided to make 12,000 miles across the world. Andrij became a proud Australian citizen in 1973, and when I did the same in 2006 I felt as proud as my father did.

I understood what it meant to him to have a place to call home, after I paid that visit to his home of origin and spoke to the family I had never met or known. And as I was told the stories of the family in the village through the many years of occupation under firstly the Russian, and German occupying forces.

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