Janina Milek – born in Poland in 1921, shunted out of it with her parents and siblings by the Russians to become human draught horses in Siberia in 1940, released via Uzbekistan to a refugee camp in Iran in 1942, transferred to another refugee camp in Lusaka in Africa in 1943, and shipped to Australia in 1950 – told Tim Chappell that her family was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. When she finally had some kind of say as to where she might live (an Australian commission offered places to healthy persons from the African camp), the one thing she knew was that she would not go back to Poland and live ‘on the back of an old woman’s tongue’ (Janina’s marvellous phrase for gossip mongering). Her mother, to whom Janina had been completely devoted, suddenly announced that she wanted only to return home. Janina was deserted by the one person she now lived to care for.

It wasn’t only the gossip that Janina Milek was avoiding (she was unmarried and determined to stay so), but the church, the class system and communism. These reasons make her seem like a political animal, but all she wanted was freedom and a house of her own. Decades after being welcomed to Western Australia by a group of women who handed her a posy of flowers, a bag of lollies and a cup of tea, she finally buys a small house. On arrival, one of her two small cases held only the large aluminium dish she had been given in Pahlavi. Earlier, in Teheran, rough blankets, grey and beautiful, had been distributed. This was Janina’s Persian blanket.