Remembering Minto: Life and Memories of a Community

Agnes Kovacs
I wanted to leave Hungary and go and live in a nicer country…

I’ve lived in Minto for 21 years and I’m 54. I was renting a flat in North Sydney and the Department of Housing came to see me and told me I only had to wait a short time, about two years, to get a bigger place. In December 1985, I moved here and they offered me this townhouse which I still live in.

I’m originally from Hungary. I’m half Hungarian but I’m a little bit Aussie now. When I was young I wanted to leave Hungary and go and live in a nicer country but they wouldn’t give me a passport to go and live in western country like Germany or Austria. I could only get a passport to Yugoslavia. So my sister, her boyfriend and myself, we went to Yugoslavia.

We were hitch-hiking and we went to the Austrian and Yugoslav border. We arrived in the afternoon but we didn’t go close to the border because the guards were there and they would have taken us to gaol, so we climbed the mountains towards Austria which was a five hour climb. It was very good exercise. It was evening when we arrived in a little village in Austria. The pub was open and we had a little bit of Canadian money. We didn’t have shillings, we didn’t have Austrian money. We bought beer because we were very thirsty and tired.

The pub owner said, “We can help you,” [but] he called the police. The police took us to gaol and we were there for three days. We told them we would like to go to Australia so they got two uniformed detectives who took us to a camp near Vienna and we spent six months in the camp.

We had to go to the Australian Embassy in Vienna. They asked questions, we had to fill out forms, we had to have health checks. We arrived in Australia in January 1975.

I was surprised when I saw what Sydney looked like: no high rise buildings. I thought that was strange because in Hungary, most people live in high rise buildings. Not comfortably like here. You don’t have a garden and sometimes you don’t even have a balcony. And I didn’t like Australian food. It took me about two years to like lamb. I love lamb now but in those days, lamb, even the smell of it when you went to a butcher shop, the smell was shocking.

I was very excited and happy when I saw my house in Minto because it had a garden. It meant you can have animals, which I have. You can have a garden and have vegetables. I grow a few vegetables in the backyard but the summer was hot. It takes time to get used to the heat because this part of Sydney is hotter than where I lived before. And in winter, it’s cooler than in North Sydney.

I find that Minto is safe. They used to say Minto is an awful suburb, but we never have any attacks. My daughter walks often in the dark alone and I used to walk also from the station which is a 25-minute walk from here. Sometimes it was night time because we went to the Domain to see Carols by Candlelight.

Minto is quite good now, I really like it. It would be nice to have a club here because we don’t have one. We don’t have a vet or a health food shop, we have to go to Campbelltown or Ingleburn for that. I don’t like poker machines, I’m not a gambler but it would be nice to have a glass of beer in a club.