This is Linda’s story in her own words

I Linda Carucci was born in Towchester England in August 1941.  My parents were Scottish but dad was in the regular army and during World War 11, Dad was stationed in London. Towchester is outside London so I assume the wives were sent there after the Blitz.  Mum said she would put me in wardrobe draw to sleep.  Soon after she moved in with her parents on the outskirts of Perth in Scotland. We stayed there until the war ended when we moved to nearby Kinnoull. I started school there when I was 4 years old.  My brother had been born in 1943 and dad joined us there in 1946 after his discharge.  Soon after we moved to Kirkcaddy near dad’s parents and my sister was born there in 1947.  I remember my dad saying that he always felt closer to my sister because she was the only one he ‘knew ‘– he had missed my brother and I because of the war.

Before the war my father had been stationed in India.  He always wanted to move somewhere else.  I remember him saying to me “There’s better places than his, hen”.  One day he saw a newspaper article about a brave female taxi driver who survived being washed into a Mareeba river in a flood. He always said the article was in the Australian women’s weekly.  The taxi driver was Grace Borghero. She was the first female taxi driver in Australia.  He decided to write to her and ask he if she knew anyone who would sponsor him to immigrate to Australia.  When she wrote back she told him that she had a job for him and a cottage for us to live in and would sponsor him herself so we were accepted by Australia House as “£10 poms” with sponsored travel to Australia.

We were supposed to have left in February but there was a problem with the boat and it was in dry dock, then the dock flooded.  We finally sailed on the TSS  Maloja in March 1953.  I know my brother and I were very excited.  We were 11 and 9 and we spent our time roaming the ship.  My Mum, my sister and I shared a cabin with a married lady and her child, and a single lady. There were 6 berths to a cabin.  The men were elsewhere.  We were way down in the bottom of the boat and there was no lift.  It was the Maloja’s final trip and its stabilizers were not working and the air filtration was sporadic.

Mum and my sister were very sea sick and my sister had to go be hospitalised when we passed the Bay of Biscay.  When we arrived in Brisbane we were in a migrant camp for a short time.  It was close to the Story Bridge and my brother and I used to walk up to it.  We then boarded a train for Cairns and arrived about 7 weeks after we left England. On the boat we met a Welsh family going to Mossman, who came to Mareeba soon after and on the train an English family coming to Mareeba.  Grace Borghero (we always called her Aunty Grace) met us at the train station and we set off for Mareeba.  It was May so the weather was lovely but we were stunned by the sugar cane farms as we had never seen sugar cane before.  Aunty Grace stopped the car on the side of the road, strode into the paddocks coming back with a stick of cane for us to suck.  It was very exciting.  Then she pointed out the range and told us we were going to the top of that. Oh my God, we had never seen anything that looked so high.

When we arrived in Mareeba we went to Aunty Grace’s house for lovely dinner.  There was roast and pumpkin which I had never seen before and a wonderful fruit salad for dessert which was very different.  Aunty Grace had a cottage for us on a piece of land she owned right at the end of Walsh Street.  It was a bit of a shock. In Scotland we had lived in a council house and we had to have lodgers, two lovely Polish men, but it was a nice red brick building with all the amenities.  Here we had a bath tub and cold-water taps.  There was a tap in the kitchen but no sink.  We had a bowl on a cupboard underneath and you would have to go and empty it outside.  The bathroom was a tub.  Dad decided he wanted a shower so he hooked a hose onto the tap and ran it up the wall to a syrup tin with holes in it and that was our shower.  In Scotland we had bathed once a week with washes between but here I wanted to bath every day.  That was not on- I created too much washing. Then we had to walk down the back to the outdoor dunny! It had tins inside and every week the man would come to empty it and we would hear “plonk plonk, slosh slosh” as he walked out with the full tins.  Dad called it “the houses of parliament”.  He would say – “I have to go and see Mr Menzies”.

We had left all our things behind – I had to leave the beautify doll house dad had made and all my dolly prams.  Mum and Dad had sold the furniture because you had a limited amount of space on the ship.  But we kids loved it here.  We could roam around and go swimming and often I would go to Aunty Grace to pay the rent and she would take me out in her taxi. Although she never said anything, I don’t think my mother ever really felt comfortable here.  My parents never talked about feelings or the past, even if you asked.  Dad seemed content though and he carved a sign for the cottage that said “Dunroamin’ “.  He joined the RSL and the Bowls club and would go to the dances where he played the banjo.  When we arrived in Mareeba the Tinaroo Dam was being built and dad’s job was with Irrigation building the channels out to Mutchilba.  When that finished he found work at the Railway and then Lawson’s Saw Mill where he worked until he retired.  Mum found work cleaning initially and then at the cigarette factory that was behind where Angelina’s Delicatessen is today.  Dad and mum never had any desire to own property-they rented all their lives.

In Scotland I had been in high school doing French, Latin, Algebra and Geometry.  In Mareeba they didn’t know what to do with me but thankfully put me in grade 7 in a class without French or maths!  I was always self-conscious about my accent.  The other kids couldn’t really understand me.  They asked me my name and thought I said Linda Peach instead of Linda Page. I have never fully lost my accent, although my sister, who started school in Mareeba, was speaking like an Aussie in 6 months.  There was another girl from Scotland there who had been in Mareeba a little while and she took me under her wing.   I finished Grade 7 and went to high school.  I really did not like school and after 8 months asked dad if I could leave.  He said “you get a job hen – you can leave”.  I had one the next day.  I got a job at Penny’s which taken over by Coles. It was where the River’s shop is today.  This is where I met my husband, George Carucci.  His family had a café not far from there.  I was 15 and George was 17.  He used to drive in from Biboohra although he didn’t have a license.  Not long after that I found work in a Haberdashery which was on the corner opposite Grahams Hotel.

Neither of our parents were pleased with our relationship, George’s parents because I wasn’t Italian and my father was furious because he was Italian.  Dad had fought in Italy during the war against the Italians but we eventually got over that and George’s parents treated me like a daughter and my parents took to George.  My brother joined the air force and left Mareeba but my sister married a Croatian man.  My father used to say “I brought a pure Scottish family here and I ended up with a bloody league of Nations”.

George and I were married in the Presbyterian Church in Mareeba in 1959 and moved to his parent’s farm.  My father-in-law had not been able to work the farm for some years because of lungs damaged during WW1 so George and his mother worked the farm.  In 1960 George’s parents sold the farm and helped us buy a home in Robyns Street.  When George’s parents said they were going to sell I decided to find work in town and started with Jack and Newell’s.  Later I went back to the Haberdashery and was there until I was 6 months pregnant with my first son in 1961 followed by our second son in 1963.  In 1965 our third son was born and not long after that we moved to the farm we bought on Chewko Road.  We were on the farm until 2005.  While on the farm we started a business in Mareeba that we ran for 32 years.

Mareeba has been good to me and I feel I have had a great life here.  My sons live here and some of our grandchildren. I have never been back to Scotland nor do I want to go.  My sister lived in Scotland for 17 years and she offered to pay for my parents to go back for a trip but they never wanted to go although dad wanted to be buried in Scotland.  He would say, “when I die hen, you ’crematise’ me and send me back”.  And we did.  Mum is buried here.

Mareeba has the best climate in the world and is a very friendly town, with many, many different nations living in harmony. I have lived here for 65 years now and intend to live here for the rest of my days as a proud Australian and an even prouder Mareebaite