Teresa Podemska-Abt was born on 28th July 1952. She graduated from
the Wrocław University, the faculty of Polish Philology, and worked as a
Polish teacher.
In 1981, she left Poland with her husband, Artur, and their five-year old son Kamil and settled in Australia. In 1983, she established the School of Polish Language and Culture, she co-created radio broadcasts and cultural programs for the Polish community in Australia. She completed post-graduate studies in education, multiculturalism and Australian English-speaking media on the faculty of Education, University of Adelaide and wrote her PhD thesis on the Aboriginal literature at the University of South Australia. She organized meetings of the Polish diaspora with Polish artists, such as Jacek Kaczmarski, Edyta Geppert, Jerzy Stuhr. Together with Karol Herisz, Jerzy Dudziński, Wacław Jędrzejczak and Mirosław Dziczkowski she set up the Polish Cultural Association, the venue for Polish emigration creative activities.
The gist of Teresa Podemska-Abt’s academic
work is research and interpretation of contemporary Aboriginal
literature. She is the author of articles and scholar books on the
literature of Indigenous Australians. She is also a literary critic,
academic and literary essayist on Polish community literature and
migration. The prose by Teresa Podemska-Abt also includes editorials.
She has translated Aboriginal poetry into Polish. She also writes poems
and she published the following poetry collections: „Żywe sny” (Living
Dreams) and „Pomieszały mi się światy” (I Got the Worlds Mixed Up), her
poetry was included in many anthologies and literary magazines („Tygiel
Kultury”, „Poezja dzisiaj”).
Interview by Edi Pyrek in Adelaide in 2011.
The main reason why we emigrated, especially me, was the curiosity about the world. And an additional reason was my husband’s views who claimed that it will be worse and worse in Poland so it’s worth to change the place of our residence and give ourselves a chance to develop, to have a peaceful life. We realized that it will be quite far. My husband, Artur, chose Australia not knowing anything about this country. We decided to go there. Actually, the reason for our departure wasn’t the fact that the situation was bad. We were a bit involved with Solidarity. We had quite a good life back in Poland. We were quite well-off. We earned quite a lot. I think we just wanted to see the world. Since the Polish borders were still closed for an average citizen so the simplest way to see the world was to leave Poland.
The last day in Poland was quite dramatic, I suppose. So much anxiety because Artur wasn’t in Poland anymore. He had left earlier. We, I mean all three of us, got passports but I was a bit afraid whether they will allow us to go as a whole family. We were to join somebody who had already left Poland. I remember this anxiety but our parents supported us, especially mine. They were so enthusiastic about us leaving to see the world. I come from a repatriate family so I think that my family has experienced emigration. But there was this fear that we may not see each other again. On our departure day my dad took us to the airport to Warsaw. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I suppose it was in May, such wonderful spring full of scents. I remember fields of wheat. I think a typical Polish landscape stayed with me, in my imagination, in my memory.
I started having new ideas for my life. I got really into Australia. I wanted to learn about its history. So I had to postpone my ambitious plans connected with Polish diaspora and fulfil my Australian plans, plans for my life. In the first period an emigrant doesn’t really know who they are. It’s like losing one’s ground. Questions on identity start to appear, what to do with their life. I also started to miss my family a lot. We knew we couldn’t go back to Poland. It was real chaos back in Poland. We watched, listened to the radio back then but there wasn’t a lot of information. When reading Australian newspapers, due to our language limitations, we didn’t get everything that was written there. From time to time Poland was described in the newspaper but the news was only disturbing. We started thinking that we have to focus on our own lives.
We are speech, we are language. By a mobile phone, by grandma’s stories, by teaching a child the simplest family history we are so close to Aboriginal people, it’s even hard to imagine. We are just speech. We are history. Hi-story. Aboriginal people believe in stories. We, in our literature, in our history, in our myth, we have legends, myths, we have something that we have been since the beginning of time. We learn by roots. We learn by belonging to certain cultures or to culture, if one could say that about one super-culture. In general, we are all the children of one mother, Earth or one mother, Space. I think this is the most beautiful part. The most beautiful element that I have found on my journey between me, a Pole, and them, the Aboriginal people. I can feel the speech, I can feel the language as my mother and my grandmother had passed in on to me when I was just a child, as I try to pass on to all my readers when I’m writing my poems.
My suitcase contained mostly my mother’s prayer book, in a symbolic sense. I’m not a Catholic but this book was the book of life for me. My mother, when she had given it to me, said: “Every time you’ll be missing me, just open it, touch it and you’ll feel me right here.” So that was in a metaphorical, spiritual sense, in such a humane way important for me because I had a piece of my family with me. But, at the same time, being the person I am today I knew that I was carrying this book with me. The book I can always read. And, anyway, I used this book almost 30 years later when one of my best friends, my emigration mother, Ms Wiesława Dudzińska asked me to sing a Polish religious song to her. At that moment, the book made a miracle. I went to hospital with her, we found a litany and started to read it together. A few days later Ms Wiesia was gone; she went to this realm that we know so little of. Somewhere far away. Her energy, her wonderful maternal care for me here, in emigration, stayed with me. And I still have this book with me. It’s really important for me.
The longing in emigration is very serious but, to be honest, it doesn’t affect me every day. Every day there is something like awareness that I am very far away and the distance is really hard to accept, the geographical distance I mean. But the nostalgia, the longing is very painful. And I suppose this is the only word I can use here. When somebody here or there is ill, is an invalid, we need family and family love. We need support and in such a situation you cannot give it or receive it. Even when you have wonderful friends here, but when someone there suffers or dies, then you miss them terribly because Australia is very far from Poland and sometimes we just can’t… The fact that we cannot get a ticket for the next day, the plane ticket, every time, it’s such a physical defect of Australia, amplifying the feeling of nostalgia.
For many years spent in emigration we have been wondering how to describe us so that we would be remembered as Poles by Poles. The simplest way is to create a museum and this idea that is just being born, which starts living in our minds, is our dream come true. Dreams so that the Polish diasporas all over the world, the Polish diaspora in Australia also or mostly, existed in those categories. So that in the opinion of a Pole living in Poland we will not only be the people who live far, far away, who left, who have their own lives there. We will be seen as a part of life in Poland. I think that Poland never dies inside of us. Poland is really our home and Poland is our biggest dreams that we had fulfilled back there and now they have moved with us here, where we can fulfil our Polish dreams and our Poland here, in Australia.
