Dr EGON F. KUNZ

Story

PART ONE:

Egon Kunz was born into a prominent Budapest merchant family. Two devastating events marred his childhood: his parent\’s divorce and the collapse of the family business Jozsef Kunz & Company.

Egon completed his secondary studies in 1940. He was conscripted into the Hungarian army in 1943, serving in the relative tranquillity of a radar station. After the war he commenced tertiary studies.

His university years were marked by political turmoil and he was active in anti-communist student organisations. By the time he graduated in 1948 from the University of Budapest with a doctorate in literature and history, the Communist Party had seized control of the government. Three weeks after graduating, like many other Hungarians of middle class background, he fled his homeland.

As a refugee he was housed in an IRO (International Refugee Organisation) camp in Linz. He opted for Australia as his resettlement location, to be as far away from Europe and its chaos as possible. He was to become one of 170,000 ‘Displaced Persons\’ (DPs) from war-ravaged Europe, who would be transformed into ‘New Australians\’.

Dr Egon F Kunz arrived in Australia in July 1949 aboard the US Navy supply ship “General Stewart”, disembarking in Adelaide. Like nearly all DPs, his qualifications were ignored and he spent his obligatory two-year labour service in various jobs in Adelaide and Sydney. In 1951 he managed to obtain a position as a library assistant in the Mitchell Library, part of the State Library of New South Wales.

He went on to complete the diploma course in librarianship at the University of Sydney in 1954. His vision, organisation and determination impressed his superiors and he progressed to the position of Senior Librarian. He was entrusted with custodianship of some of Australia\’s greatest early treasures – precious colonial maps, pictorials, manuscripts and personal items of explorers. He introduced systematic reform, starting with his much-loved Maps and Manuscripts section and became the first person to lecture on map librarianship.

In 1953 he had married Australian Elsie Thompson, a fellow librarian who, over the decades to come, was his silent partner in authorship Ð typing and proof-reading his diverse range of works. She gave birth to twins Peter and Christopher in 1956, while Stephen arrived a year later.

Egon displayed his expansive general knowledge and mastery of English by becoming a champion on Bob and Dolly Dyer\’s BP Pick A Box, a popular TV Quiz show, where he won for his young family a washing machine, fridge and other items, only to be eventually eliminated when he failed to answer a question about a person he later described as a ‘total non-entity’.

His literary career was launched in 1953 when he wrote the introductory page to the English version of the Hungarian drama classic The Tragedy of Man. In 1955 he translated Hungarian poetry in a book of the same name and in 1959 he wrote An Annotated Bibliography of the Languages of the Gilbert Islands and Ellice Islands and Nauru.

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