Pod Insights ABC Rewind 01 The Loveday Trilogy | Oskar Speck About this episode The extraordinary tale of one man's mind-bendingly long kayak journey that begins in Germany and ends up in an Australian Detention camp during World War 2.
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0:23 Speaker 01 Hi, I'm Mike Glad with you for Rewind. The Love Day trilogy is a series based on the stories of three fascinating and very different characters who had one thing in common: they were all at Love Day internment camp in the South Australian riverland during World War Two.
0:40 Speaker 02 Love Day was the largest of the internment camps in Australia. Indeed, I suspect it was the largest internment camp in the southern hemisphere in the Second World War. All men?
0:51 Speaker 03 They were all civilians.
0:53 Speaker 02 As they called them, enemy aliens.
0:56 Speaker 03 They were interned there because their countries were at war, where Australia.
1:01 Speaker 02 Love Day is not just one camp, it's actually a group of camps.
1:06 Speaker 03 Camp Nine, where the Italians were, and Camp Ten, where the Germans were, and Camp Fourteen was opened up and the Japanese were interned there.
1:16 Speaker 02 Men who had been living in Australia when the war broke out, or had been overseas and who were brought to Australia to be interned.
1:28 Speaker 03 Love Day was opened in 1941. It's approximately halfway between Adelaide and Mildura, and it's part of an irrigation settlement. They could irrigate from the Murray.
1:40 Speaker 02 Australian authorities were keen for it to be a productive camp. They wanted to produce vegetables and fruit.
1:49 Speaker 03 And they also had a poultry farm and a pigery.
1:54 Speaker 02 There was a poppy crop that was used for opium production. Pyrethrum was produced there, and at a time, of course, where supply chains had been disrupted because of the war efforts.
2:09 Speaker 03 Australia became a seed-starved nation because all our exported seed came from America. And once Pearl Harbour was attacked, we no longer had access to merchant shipping. So they started to plant up seed here. They opened up 440 acres. It was huge. We're in the middle of the camp now, but if you look over into the distance, it went as far as the skyline. They were very big camps.
2:45 Speaker 01 Historians Rosemary Gower and Peter Montieth will be joining us in the series as we go along.
2:57 Speaker 01 Today, there are only a few buildings left at Love Day. The decaying hall, the remains of the cell blocks and the pigery. Most of the camp has been subsumed by working vineyards and farms. I'm imagining 5,000 internees working in this landscape, guarded by 1,500 military personnel. That's 6,500 life stories hidden here, and one of them belonged to my grandfather, Alfred Giles, an army chaplain who conducted the peace service at the Love Day Hall. But I don't want to make this series a general history of the camp. Instead, I want to get to know three individuals whose fates led them here and whose personal
3:41 Speaker 01 stories give us some insight into the times. The first is a man named Oscar Speck.
3:53 Speaker 04 Oscar Speck was a man who travelled from Germany to Australia in the 1930s by kayak, a voyage that took 30,000 kilometres by paddle and sail, and it took seven years. But that was just the beginning of the story.
4:10 Speaker 01 That's Penny Cuthbert, who was a curator at the National Maritime Museum in Sydney.
4:15 Speaker 04 Speck was born in 1907 in a village near Hamburg. Things were difficult in Germany at the time. He was growing up in the years after the First World War. And he was forced to leave school at the age of 14. And as a young man, worked as an electrical contractor. And subsequently ran a small factory known as Speck & Gelof in Altona in Hamburg. And that factory had about 21 employees.
4:44 Speaker 05 Ich hatte keine Idee, dass ich nach Australien fahren würde oder jemals nach Australien fahren würde. Aber ich nahm mein Faltboot, fuhr nach Ulm und dann die Donau runter bis zur jugoslawischen Grenze.
4:58 Speaker 01 That's the voice of Oscar Speck, who was interviewed by SBS journalist Margot Cuthill.
5:05 Speaker 04 When I met him in 1987, I was immediately in awe of him. There was a strength about him, a straightforwardness. He actually was one of the two most impressive men I've ever met, along with Edmund Hillary, the explorer. And I think this is the league we need to put Oscar Speck in.
5:30 Speaker 01 In 1932, just before the Nazis seized power, economic conditions were terrible in Germany.
5:37 Speaker 04 And the business that Speck was running was forced to close. And he found himself, along with millions of other Germans, unemployed.
5:48 Speaker 05 Die Zeiten in Deutschland waren so katastrophal. Ich hatte mein Geschäft verloren.
5:53 Speaker 06 The times in Germany were very catastrophic. As a young man, I had already lost my business. I owned a collapsible boat and was a member of a boating club. All I wanted was to get out of Germany for a while. Seeing the world seemed like a better option, even considering that I had only managed to put together a little bit of money.
6:19 Speaker 01 His fault boat, a collapsible or folding kayak, was named Zonenschein, Sunshine, and was built for leisurely river paddling.
6:29 Speaker 07 It was made from treated cotton and it had a wood frame, so the owner could take it apart and travel with it on the train or the bus. And that was very important, as you can imagine. Not many people had a car then.
6:45 Speaker 01 Speck had heard there was work in the mines in Cyprus and decided he'd try and get there by kayak.
6:53 Speaker 04 And it afforded him the chance to pursue his two passions, which were kayaking and also a long-term interest in geology. From Hamburg, he folded up his kayak and he got the train to a place called Ulm on the Danube River. And that took him through the central European countries, including Austria, Hungary. He passed through cities such as Vienna and Budapest.
7:24 Speaker 06 Ich fuhr also bis zur Jugoslawisch. I paddled the boat down to the Yugoslav Bulgarian border. Then the Danube started to get boring. And I had heard that nobody had ever sailed down the Vada in Macedonia before. So I decided to paddle to Skopje in Macedonia and become the first.
7:45 Speaker 04 And so he went down the Vada River and eventually got to the Mediterranean coast, to the Greek port of Thessaloniki. And it was from there that the plans changed, because he had to suddenly develop and learn new skills to sail and paddle this kayak on an ocean as opposed to on a river.
8:19 Speaker 06 Fault boats are not built for the sea. Take just one wave wrong and your boat would spin sideways. You'll turn over and be swamped. Your first capsized on the open ocean would be your last.
8:32 Speaker 07 He had a sail and a front-controlled rudder that was different from other pioneer fault boats. So, you know, he found out he could also use it at sea.
8:44 Speaker 01 But because the boat was so small, Speck had to hug the coast so he could sleep on land each night. And sometimes he had to push on for long paddles between islands.
8:55 Speaker 07 Yeah, he could not sleep on the boat. That would have been terribly dangerous. So sometimes he had to do crossings like, you know, 34 hours.
9:05 Speaker 04 So he island-hopped and eventually got to Cyprus.
9:09 Speaker 06 By now I had decided that I did not want that Cyprus job. I wanted much more, to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history. It was about now that I first said to myself, "Why not Australia?"
9:23 Speaker 04 It's really there that the idea of a world trip took hold and the idea of wanderlust.
9:30 Speaker 07 Also, another point, the pioneer fault work company sponsored him with a new fault boat whenever he requested a replacement. I think he needed four, provided he would finish the trip in Australia.
9:46 Speaker 01 Back in Germany, Hitler was now brutally establishing his dictatorship. Speck kept paddling away from the fatherland.
9:55 Speaker 04 And then from Cyprus, he did a very long ocean crossing to Syria, and that was two days on the open water without sleeping.
10:05 Speaker 06 Well, there were distances where it just was impossible. When you had to cover 50 or 60 kilometres until you could land again.
10:14 Speaker 04 And he applied to get permission to go through the Suez Canal, and that was denied. So Plan B was folding up his kayak and catching a bus which took him to the Euphrates River. And he paddled the Euphrates down to the Persian Gulf.
10:46 Speaker 01 On the long paddle down the Euphrates, Speck passed through places familiar to us from recent wars: Raqqa, Baghdad, Basra. On the Persian Gulf in Iran, he caught a dose of malaria, which plagued him for the rest of the voyage. But after a break, he pushed on.
11:06 Speaker 04 He's hugged the coast of Iran through to Pakistan.
11:11 Speaker 01 Near the border of Iran and Pakistan, he went ashore looking for water.
11:19 Speaker 06 Somebody must have seen me landing, put my boat into the water and disappeared. There I sat, wearing only my shorts, no passport, no money, no luggage, no boat, nothing.
11:39 Speaker 01 The culprits turned out to be the police themselves, who led him back to his boat after being offered a substantial bribe.
11:49 Speaker 06 It was perfect. Nobody had even opened the splash protection cover. Everything was there. Of course, they waited until I found my wallet and I gave exactly half of my money to the policeman.
12:00 Speaker 04 And given that he was always travelling on a shoestring, that must have hurt.
12:17 Speaker 01 Although the pioneer fault boat company sponsored him with replacement craft and he had a little bit of financial help from his family, he mostly had to live on his wits, raising money by giving talks and writing articles.
12:31 Speaker 04 He then went down the Malabar coast, the west coast of India, rounded the southernmost cape of India at Kanyukamari and then went up the east coast, known as the Khoromandal coast. He went round Sri Lanka and then ended up going through the Bay of Bengal.
12:57 Speaker 01 Now, I'm an amateur kayaker and I know 30 Ks is a very hard day's paddle. But 30,000? That's mind bending.
13:10 Speaker 06 When the wind becomes strong, you must take in your tiny sail and paddle. Life becomes a dreary, endless monotony of paddling. Arms and shoulders aching and your whole body longing inexpressibly for one thing. Sleep. But you must not even doze for one moment. You must be constantly using the rudder, meeting each wave just right.
13:49 Speaker 01 Often, when Speck stopped for the night, it took a long time before he could unlock his hands, which were welded into their gripping posture on the paddle. His kayak, originally a two-seater, had been modified to a single seat, with enough storage to allow him to carry his clothes and maps, food and water. But what exactly did he eat?
14:12 Speaker 07 Most villagers, or almost all the villagers, they were very, very happy to welcome him because, you know, he was a sensation then and he was their honorary guest. And he stayed with them and they slaughtered the chicken for him. And also on board of course he had coconut nuts. Then he had tinned sardines and meat in tins, he told me. And most importantly, tinned milk. And this was very, very important for sea kayaking because you have to paddle and steer. So all you could do for sustenance was sipping the sweet condensed milk.
14:50 Speaker 05 Das war nicht, weil ich glaubte kondensierte Milch ist das Beste essen.
14:56 Speaker 06 And it wasn't because I thought that condensed milk was the best food. But it was possible to eat condensed milk even during storms.
15:18 Speaker 01 By the time he got to Burma in April 1936, Speck had been paddling for four years. His family, tired of sending him money, wanted him to come back to work in the new Germany, now industrialising and rearming as a totalitarian Nazi state. He retorted that making the longest solo kayak paddle in history was doing enough for the new Germany.
15:47 Speaker 07 It would have worked out for him so well to go back. He would have been celebrated. There would have been books made about him. He would have been Gerber's little pet. So he would have done really, really, really very well, courtesy of the regime. So he didn't go back. So anyone saying he was a sympathiser, they just don't know what they're talking about, I'm sorry.
16:11 Speaker 01 Some old photos show him flying a swastika on his kayak, which is always a disturbing image. But Margot Cuthill says there's a simple explanation for that.
16:23 Speaker 07 September 1935, the Nazi flag. Initially, the banner of the Nazi Party became the only national flag in Germany. So he sailed under a German flag.
16:39 Speaker 07 He went down through Burma, Myanmar, Thailand and then the Malay Peninsula to Singapore. From Singapore, he went through the archipelago of Indonesia.
16:55 Speaker 01 Speck may not have sympathised with the Nazis, but he did have to deal with them, as they were the German government at the time. When he reached Jakarta, Trautmann, the Nazi district group leader, tried to publicise Speck as a symbol of the new Aryan man.
17:12 Speaker 07 Speck always arranged for talks through German embassies. Trautmann, of course, introduced him as a new hero, you know, the new German Herrn Rasse, master race. But the following fallout between those two men shows that they were, you know, ideologically, they were not on the same page.
17:34 Speaker 04 The thing that was driving him the most was the trip. His own interests, his story. He, I think, felt that Troutman was going to use his story for propaganda and wasn't comfortable about how that was going to be presented. So there was, you know, an initial kind of flirtation or connection there, but it wasn't to last.
18:13 Speaker 01 Speck pushed on through Indonesia, island by island. Over the course of his journey across the world, he'd been given great hospitality from local villagers. But suddenly, something went terribly wrong.
18:27 Speaker 04 He was attacked at night by locals on Lekor Island.
18:32 Speaker 07 He was attacked so badly that his ear drum burst.
18:38 Speaker 04 They were armed with knives and machetes. He had an unloaded pistol and tried to defend himself and describes being overwhelmed, tied up with buffalo hide, and his boat and possessions were plundered. And he also describes being beaten until he was semi-conscious.
18:58 Speaker 07 And I think what happened, he always accepted hospitality because you have to. But one time, he just was too tired and then, you know, he was attacked.
19:10 Speaker 04 He was in a bad way, but managed to escape and reach his boat. And he was able to get away because he had a boat and they didn't.
19:29 Speaker 05 Und wo ich dann dieses Pech hatte mit den Eingewohnen.
19:34 Speaker 06 I had bad luck with the natives. It was a misunderstanding, but the result was that I had to add one and a half years to my journey. I had thought to reach Australia within six months. Instead, it took me more than two years.
19:48 Speaker 05 Und dessen dauerte es über zwei Jahre, bis ich in Australien war.
19:54 Speaker 01 The injured Speck had to paddle all the way back to Surabaya to get medical attention. Even worse, when he finally recovered, the Dutch East Indies authorities wouldn't let him travel the southern coast of New Guinea.
20:08 Speaker 04 So he was forced therefore to go the long way around New Guinea, so up along the north coast.
20:18 Speaker 01 By now, it was October 1938, and Hitler had annexed Austria and the Sudetenland. Ten months later, having braved huge surf, sharks and crocodiles, Speck rounded the eastern tip of New Guinea. Bill O'Donnell, 10 years old at the time, was looking out of the school window on Samurai Island when he saw Speck arrive.
20:41 Speaker 05 It was a very small canoe. I remember it had a couple of zip and sections in it, that he had some clothes and a few bit of food and that sort of thing, but it was very basic. He stayed with us that night, had dinner. During the evening, Dad tuned into Germany on the shortwave radio, and it was the first time I ever heard Hitler make a speech. He was carrying on in full voice, and Oscar Speck apparently wasn't terribly interested. And then we farewellled him at about 7am the following morning off the beach, heading for Australia.
21:15 Speaker 01 Speck arrived in Daru, to be told the Second World War had begun, and he was now an enemy alien.
21:22 Speaker 05 That was after Bette came up with me to the Magistrate.
21:27 Speaker 06 We went to the magistrate, who was very friendly, and he said: "Well, I don't want to lock you up here after that long journey. I'll send a telegram to Morsby and ask if you're allowed to travel on." About an hour later, the answer arrived: "Proceed Thursday Island." Then the magistrate said: "Do you have a weapon?" I said: "Yes, I have a heavy pistol." "Leave it here and travel on immediately. Any minute, another telegram might arrive, and then I will have to arrest you."
21:56 Speaker 04 Given that he'd travelled so far, the authorities felt only fair to let him continue into the Torres Strait so that he could finish his voyage in Australian waters. So, from Daru, he was able to get to Saibai Island in the Torres Strait. And there, he was greeted on arrival by a crowd of Saibai islanders, but also three Australian policemen, who congratulated him on his trip and reaching Australia after such a long voyage, but then had to arrest him, because Australia by then was in a state of war with Germany.
22:38 Speaker 06 They were very friendly and very polite and everything, but I was declared a prisoner of war.
22:52 Speaker 01 After seven years of freedom on the waters, he was sent to the mainland and interned at Tatura in Victoria.
23:01 Speaker 04 Well, I think he became extremely frustrated. This played out in endless correspondence with the camp authorities.
23:12 Speaker 01 Which got him precisely nowhere. So, ever the adventurer, he began planning an escape.
23:24 Speaker 05 Born on the 4th of January 1919.
23:29 Speaker 01 Frederick Embritz was recorded by Penny Cuthbert in 2002. Embritz and a Jewish friend had left Germany the same way Speck had, by kayak down the Danube. They ended up in Beirut, were arrested when the war broke out, and were sent to Taturra to be interned.
23:47 Speaker 05 That's when I met Oscar and we were talking about boats and lulls, lots of things. And that's when we found out that we had a common interest in kayaks. You know, we mentioned this, like, how did you get away and all this? And we got away the same way. What I gather is he was an adventurer by nature.
24:09 Speaker 04 And they made a pact with each other to escape from Taturra and meet in Sydney outside Randwick Racecourse.
24:19 Speaker 05 We didn't know anything about Sydney, but we knew there's a racecourse that we might, that we meet at the front entrance at the main gate of the racecourse on Easter Saturday.
24:31 Speaker 04 And Frederick made the rendezvous and Speck didn't. How Speck got out of Taturra was there was a shed where tools were kept and he got inside a large toolbox which was carried out of the camp. And from there he was able to eventually get to Melbourne. And by then he'd had civilian clothes, he had a bicycle. And there were accounts in Melbourne newspapers to look out for Oscar Speck, who was on the run, and a description was given of him. Policemen in the Melbourne suburb of Kew spotted him and arrested him.
25:15 Speaker 04 And he initially denied being Oscar Speck, but under subsequent questioning fessed up. And he was then handed over to military authorities and returned to Taturra camp. And his punishment for escaping was 28 days in solitary confinement. And then he was subsequently transferred to the Love Day internment camps in South Australia.
25:59 Speaker 01 Ambritz lived and worked in Sydney as a fugitive, but eventually handed himself in to a police station and they sent him back to Tutsira, while Speck spent the next three years at Love Day.
26:12 Speaker 06 The devil only knows what will become of us after this long loss of freedom.
26:18 Speaker 04 So he was in Love Day until January 1946 and then was released. But it was in the camps that he was able to learn how to cut opal. Being interested in geology, his plan was, after release, to try and make a living mining. And literally, within a few days of his release from the Love Day camps, he was mining opal at Lightning Ridge. Extreme heat, really hard work.
26:52 Speaker 05 The hardest thing he did in his life was this digging in Lightning Ridge. He said that's 100 times worse than sitting in the kayak.
27:01 Speaker 04 The reason for learning to cut opal was he realised early on in the piece that it was much easier to cut opal than mine it. So that was his strategy, to set up a business cutting and selling opals, which is what he did in Sydney.
27:21 Speaker 07 And then he became an opal dealer, a very, very successful opal dealer. If you look at his property in Killcare, I think he was very, very successful.
27:33 Speaker 01 Speck moved north from Sydney and built a large Italianate house and garden overlooking the ocean at Killcare. He only went back to Germany once in the 1970s, but didn't like it much.
27:45 Speaker 05 He left Germany behind him. Harm was Australia for him, especially after he built his
27:54 Speaker 01 Speck and Embritz did finally reunite in Sydney, and Speck was best man at Embritz's wedding.
28:00 Speaker 06 My wife liked him too.
28:02 Speaker 01 Speck himself never married or had children, though he did have a long-term relationship with a woman named Nancy Steele.
28:10 Speaker 04 Nancy was based in Sydney and once Speck moved to the central coast of New South Wales, she would travel up on weekends to stay with him. And this went on for decades.
28:22 Speaker 07 But she moved in and stayed with him for the last two years of his life because he was not well.
28:36 Speaker 01 By now, Speck's kayaking feat had been almost forgotten. In his last letter to his sister greater, Speck wrote:
28:45 Speaker 06 I am satisfied, recognition or no recognition. We have a strange situation, one of the most difficult world records to this day, and it will still be in a hundred years and wholly unknown. But I am satisfied. The war interfered much more with millions of fates. Why shouldn't I be satisfied?
29:06 Speaker 04 Speck died in March 1993, aged 86, after a long illness, and was buried in Point Clare Cemetery on the central coast of New South Wales. His partner Nancy Steele had a gravestone erected saying in loving memory of Oscar Walter Speck, always loved and remembered by Nancy.
29:37 Speaker 01 It seemed no one would ever repeat Speck's epic kayak journey. But then, in 2016...
29:43 Speaker 02 A West Australian woman has reached the final leg of her incredible five-year journey, paddling from Germany to Australia in a sea kayak. Sandy Robson is recreating the voyage of a German man who kayaked all the way to Australia in the 1930s. Papua New Guinea correspondent Eric Torchek caught up with Sandy as she set off for the Torres Strait. Even though I'm solo, I've just had this amazing support rallying around me. And that's really made me...
30:09 Speaker 01 Think about how we interact with people and how we treat people and how we welcome people as well. Robson had to skip the Euphrates section because of the war in Syria, but otherwise made it the whole way.
30:23 Speaker 00 I really loved it and you have to to be able to continue for that amount of time. I really love connecting with nature and I like places where nature is big and where I feel small in comparison. And I love the simplicity of travelling in a kayak and just having a few things. And I think that, you know, you really learn a lot about yourself and just really seeing how the people live.
30:47 Speaker 01 Before I began researching this Love Day series and stumbled across his biography and a list of detainees, I'd never heard of Oscar Speck. And it made me wonder why, considering his prodigious achievement.
31:03 Speaker 04 The times were against him. There was so much going on. War had been declared.
31:08 Speaker 06 Oscar, he was a bit of a loner. Very intelligent, ambitious and self-centred.
31:17 Speaker 07 What should we think of him today? Well, he was an amazing man. Because he's one of the great seafarers that we should celebrate. But in 39, of course, he had to put his head down. They probably didn't want to celebrate an achievement by someone who was considered an enemy.
31:35 Speaker 04 And he made a number of attempts to have his story told. He planned to have a film, a documentary film made, but that never came to fruition.
31:46 Speaker 07 But, you know, he wasn't too fussed about it.
31:50 Speaker 05 Ni, die verreut niemals. Aber nochmal Unternehmen garantiert nicht. Verreut habe ich das nie.
31:59 Speaker 06 Did I regret my journey? Never. Would I do it again?
32:05 Speaker 06 Not now.
32:10 Speaker 01 And that was the story of Oscar Speck, the first in our Love Day trilogy, here in Rewind. Our reader was Andrea Sobek. Special thanks to Miff Bryant and Dana Fletcher at the Australian Maritime Museum for letting me into their archives, and to Margot Cuthill for permission to use her unique recording of Oscar Speck. Sound engineering and original music was by Tom Henry, and production was by me, Mike Ladd. I hope you can join me next time for the tragic story of Italian anarchist Francesco Fantin. And head to the ABC Listen app for the full Love Day series and other great history podcasts.
32:49 Speaker 07 You've been listening to an ABC podcast. You can discover more ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.
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