Gini Gale, Naracoorte Community News
Padthaway and Lochaber branches shared our guest speakers Kym and Hass Palka who are former residents of Naracoorte. They both came as school teachers to the area, staying for 20 years and leaving in 1998. Kym’s father, Wally, was Ukrainian born in a village near Lviv, in western Ukraine near the Polish border. During World War II, as a 15 year old, he was taken back to Germany by the retreating Nazis and made to work in labour camps.
After the war at the age of 19, he set out along with thousands of other Displaced Persons to Australia by ship. The funny thing was that when he landed in Melbourne, the first thing he was handed was a firefighting pack and sent with other DPs to help fight the fires that were raging. He was then sent to South Australia and along with other eastern Europeans DPs, found himself located in Clare in the Mid North where he worked for 2 years for the Railways in order to pay off the passage to Australia. Here he married his wife Mavis and build a family home.
We found out that after the war Ukrainians, for them to escape Soviet rule, were destined to different parts of the world. Many of Kym’s relatives settled in Cleveland, USA where a vast Ukrainian community developed keeping their traditions alive.
Kym took his father back to Ukraine in 1994, 2 years after the demise of the Soviet Union where he met his cousins and visiting his father’s birthplace. He couldn’t believe how run down the cities were. Kym mentioned that under Soviet rule the practicing of religious beliefs was discouraged and the Orthodox churches he saw were devoid of the traditional artefacts.
Upon noting this he was taken to a plain dilapidated shed in which were housed, under dirty canvas, the many gilded icons that had been secretly hidden away from Russian eyes awaiting a time, which had newly arrived, to be returned to their rightful place in their places of worship.
Kym noted on this trip that everywhere one looked in the cities there were statues and monuments lauding Soviet heroes and victories with the only Ukrainian monument of note was for a poet, Taras Shevchenko, the founder of modern Ukrainian literature. He mentioned that the Australian equivalent would be Banjo Patterson.
Kym’s father did not enjoy being back in Ukraine, as the country had suffered greatly under Soviet rule. Kym and his wife also visited the Cleveland relatives in USA and they celebrated a traditional Christmas where the oldest member of the family threw a bowl of cooked buckwheat onto the ceiling to see if the coming year’s crops would be plentiful. (Decided on the amount of buckwheat that stuck to the ceiling!). This took place before the Christmas meal with ample traditional foods such as borscht, a vegetable soup based around beetroot.
Kym brought with him an assortment of traditional Ukrainian weaving, embroideries and beautiful woodwork of all different types. He also had some traditional wooden Easter eggs called pysanka and spoke about the Ukrainian and eastern European custom of painting the eggs with intricate patterns with real eggs using layers of wax and dye. Also on display for our groups to peruse were wooden drinking cups, a painted wooden vase, baskets, handwoven blankets, traditional clothes and woodwork paintings of the above mentioned poet.
These were the few things that had been sent over the years from relatives or he has purchased in Ukraine. Kym did a fascinating PowerPoint presentation of photographs of his father’s journey and his own trips to Ukraine and Cleveland. He ended with a short You Tube clip from Christmas Day last year of 4 ladies in traditional clothing singing Christmas carols in a Kiev park with an air raid siren sounding in the background.
Ukraine has 7 countries that border it and was separated from Russia by the Kerch Strait, which connects the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea. The colour of the flag is yellow and blue represented by blue for the sky and the yellow for the wheat and sunflowers. The country is very rich in food production with sugar beets grown for sugar as an example.
It is rich in manufacturing, agriculture, fishing, mining, local dance and music, and hopefully tourism to name a few of its resources. Ukraine is the 2nd largest country in Europe, with the most traditional food being borscht (a beetroot soup). Apart from Ukrainian, there are about 20 different languages spoken. It is known for being the breadbasket of Europe.
Gini Gale gave a vote of thanks and then we all joined together to try various dishes of Ukraine. It was very yummy and members tried new dishes ranging from slow cooked meat to stroganoff, savoury pancakes, potato cakes, prunes with walnuts, salads depending on the regions. And lots of yummy deserts that were traditional Ukrainian cakes, apple cakes and a honey cake. It was a lovely day enjoyed by all.
Next meeting is March 2nd , 2023 to meet at Robyn Schinkels home where she will teach us to mosaic. Please contact President Beth Gale on 0407 656 043 for further information.
This article appeared in the Naracoorte Community News.
