I have attached some photos of my dad Dick Koning, who became a long time Rainbow resident in the early 1950s. The first pic is dad at the back of the Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne in June 1951.

Migrants arriving from Europe "camped" there until they were allocated work. Dad lived there for two weeks before being sent to Rainbow to work as a labourer for a local grazier.

The second photo is the liberty ship he arrived on from Amsterdam. He lived in dormitory accommodation. The dorm was the entire length of the ship. He worked for the grazier for nine months then worked at Rainbow flour mill, He boarded at the middle pub.

And finally the Chaplin family who befriended him. He still says if it wasn't for their kindness he doesn't think he would have lasted the distance in the early days.

He was 20, came alone, and didn't speak English. He learned English via a dictionary and Tom and Jerry comics. If any of these are suitable it would add another dimension to the story of Rainbow Post 1950s migration from war ravaged countries.

Also Dad bought a box brownie camera days after he arrived in Melbourne. He took photos of his new lifestyle over the years and sent them home to his family in Holland. Two years ago we received a box of every letter he had written home plus a lot of photos.

Sadly they are written in Dutch and we don't speak it. But his mum kept every letter he wrote. Most of the stories Rainbow-ites are familiar with are soldiers etc. fighting overseas. Dad lived in an occupied country. His childhood was seeing planes shot down, fears of bombs even though he lived in a rural setting, and running around in the year or so after the war as a teenager picking up discarded live hand grenades and exploding them in canals.

High school was very limited an afternoon or so a week because many schools were damaged in the war. He read a lot of westerns. Thought he had arrived in the wild west when he arrived in Rainbow for the first time and saw all that corrugated iron and bare floorboards.