Screened at and playing to full venues across Victoria and New South Wales (cinemas, clubs, art and community centres, you name it; this impressive immersive art project is now taking on a life of its own and travels in whatever direction it so desires, with groups across the board voicing their wishes to be included in one way or the other in a bold undertaking that continues to develop organically), multi award-winning Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey – winner of the People’s Choice award at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival 2025 – is a veritable multimedia feat that connects audiences cross-generationally and stands out as an astonishing achievement where past, present and future meet at an important crossroads.
Simon Reich, director of this captivating documentary, pays tribute to his immigrant German father Manfred Reich and with that he simultaneously embraces those European migrants who arrived by ship to these foreign lands in the 1950s and 60s as part of Australia’s ‘populate or perish policy’, or what is to date the biggest immigration initiative in the nation’s history.[1]
Reich, who has “a passion for migrants”[2] informs us that: “The show is the culmination of many years of research and interviews. All the investigation, interviews, video editing, camera work, sound design, music composition and graphic design were created by myself”.
His is rapidly becoming a household name and the important documentary that explores memory and nostalgia, longing and belonging[3] is a nod of approval to those European post-war migrants and people who came before and who set foot on foreign soil in this vast territory way back when – yet, in fact, not that long ago. Their voices and stories are now heard and shared “en masse” – for us to behold and learn from.
Ultimately, these are OUR OWN stories and the narrative told becomes a dialogue between Europe and Australia. Stories that concern and connect all of us, stories of stoic resilience and survival, stories that express a human desire for more, that reflect a lust for life and a refusal to give up, and an eagerness to learn more about what lies beneath and beyond.
The bold and tough decision by people hard done by, to leave war-torn countries yet familiarity behind and venture into the, literally, far away distance where the sky was wider, the stars shone brighter, and the space was immense – ever so immense. And, at the same time, this comparatively “insular country down under now had to deal with many different countries”[4]. As part of a successful scheme initiated by the Ben Chifley government [5], Australia offered these European migrants a real chance at new beginnings.
Simon Reich is a multitalented artist extraordinaire who likewise acts as stage musician and has a background in the creative industries. In Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey he performs on stage as part of a live soundtrack consisting of strings and grand piano. The synchronised evocative music score succinctly enriches and further embellishes the audio-visual interviews with 15 elderly participants all with a story to tell – refreshingly ordinary people, one might argue, with extraordinary experiences [6].
The Bonegilla project originally began to take shape when Reich created his Spotify podcast Up from the Rubble [7] – “which is about my father. But there’s also two series of six, which are all the people you saw, plus more, but all their extended stories…”
The effect on the audience of this expansive multimedia endeavour is instantly holistic as we are taken on a mental and narrative journey that is as much external as it is internal and where, in the documentary, members of a generation inevitably ‘on their way out’ finally get to publicly make their voices heard at a time when historical awareness is crucial to our better understanding of the present as informed by the recent past. Who are we? Who have we become and what has shaped our identities? What does it mean to be Australian in the first place? And will the migrant invariably remain a migrant at heart?
Reich’s documentary is an essential time document that provides the background to Australia as the multicultural nation it is today.[8] His multifaceted show allows for parallel stories to be told on multiple screens; the interviews with post-war migrants from several European countries (excluding Brits who had arrived on the Ten Pounds Pom or ten pounds assisted passage scheme as part of the prior White Australia Policy [9]) commanding immediate screen presence by being shown directly centre stage.
Related website “Bonegilla Migrant Experience”[10] informs us that 300,000 Europeans passed through Bonegilla between 1947 and 1971.[11] What was a blow to a war-torn Europe zapped of energy and in need of strong labour meant a comparable win for Australia and while, in the case of Bonegilla, this camp or reception and training centre in Wodonga became a new home away from home, reactions were mixed. To some it was a place of “milk and honey” while others recall experiencing very different feelings.[12]
Over to Simon Reich:
What prompted you to make this documentary?
“It all started with my father. To go right back, I was a sign writer. I worked for 32 years and did murals and things like that. So that was my day job. And then at night, I played in a band on weekends, and I just composed music myself.
And then when I sold my business, I decided to go and do a bachelor of audio” – and this is where it all began with Reich’s ambitious capstone project.[13] And then later came the “idea to make a film about my father and his time in the war in Berlin and his eventual immigration to Australia.
But Covid hit, and we couldn’t do it as a film, so we did it as a podcast. I’m actually glad I did it that way, because it meant that I concentrated on his words, on the things that he was saying, and the way the story would evolve and the narrative. It was good, I think, because I’m not a filmmaker. I’ve never filmed anybody before in my life [and he laughs]. Having said that, I’ve never done a podcast before either.
So, because I had the background in audio, I made sure all the audio was pristine and clear and so on. But I didn’t expect to have, I suppose, a moment with my father where I found out things I’d never found out before. And I think because he’d been through the war, I believe he had post-traumatic stress disorder from what he’d seen.
What ended up happening is that by doing the podcast, I ended up realizing that something had affected him, and it changed who he was as a person, and it made me, I guess, understand his point of view and see; especially because I saw the things that he described he’d seen. So, I put it out there, and it won a few awards in America. And so, I thought I might be onto something here.”
“Now, because I originally wanted it to be a film, I was recording him with audio for audio, but I filmed him as well. And so, I was preparing for the future, I guess, and that continued because I decided to go to the Bonegilla migrant camp, where probably more than three quarters of Australia’s migrants came.
In America, they have Ellis Island, where all the refugees would come. But in Australia, most of them came to Bonegilla, which is an old army camp near Albury-Wodonga. And so I went to the camp, and it now is a museum, and I asked them if they had any recordings of their former people that had gone through it, and they didn’t.
And so, I presented myself as a story catcher; someone who would keep those histories, and to begin with they then contracted me to start getting stories and now they play them on TV screens in the huts around the camp. And that’s when the genesis of the idea of what became the show began.”
You have created a holistic multimedia experience. In what way?
I started to get this idea of doing a live show. And I remember sitting on the veranda with my wife years ago, and I said to her, ‘I’ve got this idea. I’m going to have two screens. One will be the interviews, and one will be all their home movies, their photographs, their documents, and then I’ll cover the stage with candles, I’ll play grand piano, and I’ll have string instruments’. And she said, ‘I can’t sort of visualize it myself, you know?’ And then the first night I did it at the Melbourne Museum she sat there and looked at what was created. And she goes: ‘That’s exactly what you had envisaged’.
You use real footage as well. What do the candles and additional memorabilia represent?
“It’s funny, because I guess you might have seen that there’s been these candlelight concerts where people do symphony, like classical music and so on, and they spread the candles all the way across the stage. It looks magnificent.
So, my first thought was that it would be aesthetic. But I’ve noticed in a few reviews that because I put the candles out, and then within the candles, I have memorabilia from the migrants. So, they’ve lent me their cases that they came over with, their toys, the books, some of them have said, ‘No, you keep it. You use it for the show. That’s great’.
If you came up to the front of the stage, it included all their old records, their record players and typewriters, things like that. So, then it became almost a shrine.” And he adds that in one of the reviews it was highlighted that these candles became almost like the embodiment of these migrants.[14]
What elements or aspects of the film resonate with audiences across the board? And is it ultimately universal?
Yes, well I think that’s what makes this show not just be categorized as historic, but it transfers to today, because in Australia they were the first; the people that I interviewed were the first wave of non-British Isles migrants. So, Australia never had a policy about anyone else, unless they came from the British Isles.
So, what happened after the war is that there were all these displaced camps of people that had lost homes, lost relatives. They were in these camps, mostly in Germany and Italy and they didn’t have a home to go to. And some of them, if they’d come from the communist countries didn’t want to go back.
So, a few countries were asked if they could help in this repatriation, and they included America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. And these people were asked, ‘Can you help us out?’ And so that’s why this was very important.
It really did shock the nation because they had only had white people that came from the British Isles, who were their supposed kindred spirits and so on. And the show talks about how they copped racism and pushback, and that has continued since each new wave.
So, there was another wave that came after the Lebanon War. So, we had a lot of Lebanese come to Australia, and then we had the Vietnam War, and a lot of Vietnamese came. And each new wave, and right up to today; whether they be Somalians or Afghanis, pretty much all of them have had this war experience.
So, it also tells that these poor people have had violent and terribly oppressive times and just wanted to escape. And of course, they do, and then they come to Australia and get racism thrown at them when they didn’t really ask for it, you know, and just wanted a new home. So, the story is not just historical, but it’s constantly rearing its head, the same things. And I really wanted to make sure that we understand that war achieves nothing.
When my dad was in the middle of Berlin at Potsdamer Platz, he looked around and virtually all of Berlin was flattened. And in his mind, he thought, this will never happen again. And yet we never learn from history. We know it’s terrible, and now we’re speaking Iran, Israel, the Palestine war as well.
So, in that way, it is a living, breathing document, because I continue to interview people all the time. For instance, in a week, I’m going to interview another person, and three weeks ago, I interviewed a whole Italian club – over two weeks all the old people came, and I recorded them one after another, and we didn’t have enough time, so I had to come back.
But they brought along all their photographs and memorabilia and little things that they had, and they really opened up. I think when you get to a certain age, you think, ‘I think it’s time to share now.’ But they didn’t really talk much to the children. /…/ I reckon the biggest comment I get after each show is, ‘I wish I had asked my parents these stories, because they’re gone forever.’[15]
Among the interviewees [16], Father Karmel Borg stands out in his vivid recollections of war in Malta as a small country almost completely obliterated: “God bless Australia and don’t forget Malta and that is the way it should be.” According to my friend Louise Crossley who had Father Borg as a priest at St Peter Chanel Catholic Church in Deer Park, the multiple bombing of Malta and the fact that it survived at all “was a miracle given its size. Could this be considered an allegory of Borg’s life?”
I mean, they’re all fantastic. But Borg was amazing and he alone could have a documentary by himself. Because, you know, there are those that are priests or pastors, and they always want to turn it around to say: ‘This is what God did’, and all that. But his stories were full of hope and they were funny. He was a great storyteller. He also talked about being harassed on a tram by a person yelling at him in front of the whole tram, and then he turned it around and it ended up being that the whole tram clapped when he stood up to a bully.
And I just loved the fact that he didn’t fight back with fists and kicking or back down and just get off the tram with the tail between his legs. He was able to stand up for himself. And he was showing the whole crowd, as well, that we’re not pushovers, but we have just as much right to be here as you.
What other immediate hardships did the migrants have to contend with once they arrived in Australia?
They were getting on a ship, and it was a one-way ticket; Australia would pay for the ticket, you then had to sign up to a two-year contract that you would do the jobs that the Australian government told you to do but unfortunately; let’s say you were a trained nuclear physicist or a ballet dancer or whatever. They didn’t recognize any of your qualifications.
In fact, one guy told me that when the camp director came up and spoke to the crowd that had just arrived he said, ‘We know what you people have done, you’ve been on the black market, and you’ve got qualifications that you never got, so we’re not going to recognize any’. But what ended up happening – and this is how the stories evolved – is when the people would go to work [they were recognised] for being really smart. And it ended up that organically they would rise.
A mutual decoding?
“There are Australians and foreigners in the audience, who might not speak English very well. And yet the dialogues, the fact that [the interviewees] are not native English speakers also kind of connects with the audience. I never knew what the audience would do. So, in fact, sometimes it’s amazing to hear what they laugh at and what they respond to.”
Reich goes on to say that he can tell how the show is going judging by the audience’s laughter and ability to relax and ease up: “I guess I can tell … especially when it comes to the part where that lady in German keeps trying to flip between German and English, and she doesn’t get it and the whole crowd laughs. You know, that’s my first indicator.
If they laugh at that, then we’ve got a crowd.” /…/ “Just recently, probably in the last 10 shows, she then goes on to say how she survived her whole family. And then she lists all the operations she’s been through. And then she said, ‘and I still keep going’ and only in the last 10 shows, people have started cheering that.”
Please comment on the Italian migrants and their ability to connect with Australians? (it is almost as if the ‘Aussies’ were getting ready to make the effort, unknowingly, to change according to European knowledge and customs)
So, the food, definitely the food … and then they brought new music. And they were very well-dressed people. So, on a Saturday night the camp would take them down to the local hall and they would have a dance. And of course, the local Australian girls would look at all these Italian men all dressed up with their ties and pointy shoes and what ended up happening is the girls started to want to dance with the Italians, because they were such great dancers. So, there was a bit of pushback there too, with the Aussie guys feeling ‘you’re stealing our girls’.
But definitely, they brought so much of their customs and culture. And it did take time. And I think that’s why the current run of migrants, you know, you need time for them to bed in.
What is home? And what constitutes homecoming? Is home the place you left behind, where you have your origins? Or is it a place in your mind, or something else?
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that probably 80% to 90% loved Australia and still love it. They want to be here. And I think if you saw in the film Nancy Darmanin said she went back to Malta for a holiday: ‘Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s just lovely. But the second time I went, it didn’t feel like home.’ But her explanation of that was, ‘[w]ell, my children are in Australia, my grandchildren are here, so this is now my home.’
And I know some people said their father had instructed them: ‘Don’t bury me in Australia. I want to be buried back in Austria. Take my ashes back to Austria, or I will fly back to the relatives and die over there’.[17] But I think at the end of the film, it also tells how Europe’s in flux. You don’t know. Are the Russians going to attack at any time? Whereas Australia, you know, we’re so far away from everything. It’s too much of a land mass to try and capture. You couldn’t.
What makes this documentary, that takes WW2 and the post-war era as points of departure, different from what is already out there?
“It is a success because it’s so humorous, yet dry.” Reich adds that while the documentary doesn’t shy away from the tragic, it also embraces the funny stories, which opens up to people’s humanity. “Also, people feel that by watching this three-dimensional show they can live vicariously through other people and understand what their own parents were going through.”
How has your work been received specifically by the Italian community in Melbourne?
Each time I do the show someone tells me about a different angle, and it could happen. When I did this at the Italian Social Club in Williamstown 160 people or something came and the President said afterwards: ‘That was great. Really enjoyed it. But could we do one where it’s all Italians?’ And some Italians have come to me and said, ‘Oh, I thought Bonegilla was only for Italians’. So, I’m making one that is just [for] Italians – of any diaspora, Italians are the ones that really come out in force, you know.
How do you keep your faith in dire apocalyptic times or find it again?
I’m very disillusioned with the way things are. In fact, sometimes I won’t even watch the news for a week, you know, because could it get any worse? And it does. Every day it gets worse.
You summed it up when you said: ‘We have a short memory’. How can we not look at the past and go: ‘This didn’t work last time. It’s not going to work again.’ And I’ll tell you one thing that I think I tried to bring out in this. There are so many films about army personnel in the war, like Saving Private Ryan and all these other ones.
But then there’s also quite a few films about the Holocaust, and I’m not taking away from Jews and what’s happened, but there’s next to nothing about the people that were just living in the houses, in the streets, in the towns. They were the meat in the sandwich; they weren’t supporting one or the other. So, this gives voice to the people who didn’t have any political affiliation. They didn’t want to go to war.
Hearing all the bad news, I’m chipping away and trying to bring humanity back, to bring respect, to bring connection between different cultures, and to just realize that they created an Australia that I’m so proud of. And if I can chip away, you know, 200 people at a time in each of these shows… Let’s try and hope that the good will overcome the bad.
That’s very significant. Any famous last words for the audience?
As a kid, I always wanted to be a sign writer but painting pictures and so on. So, I have a real love of the visual arts. And at the same time, I was really into music, so I was inhabiting two spaces of the arts, and that meant that everything that led up to the show I was learning about.
So, how to make the graphics, how to make the pictures come alive on the screen. How to visualize something like the display on this on the floor. How to run that second screen, just the visual look of the show. And then obviously, I delved into wanting to have a soundtrack that was appropriate to it.
And the reason I picked piano and violin – and in the bigger shows I have a string quartet – is that it’s timeless. It gets emotion, it evokes core sentiments, and it doesn’t date [he adds that a lot of the music has been improvised and that they play according to the reaction and emotions of the crowd].
Immediate plans?
We’re doing an Australia tour this year. We’re going back to Sydney in two weeks, and then we’re into South Australia, New South Wales and Queensland. But there’s additional things that happen now, for instance, Griffith in New South Wales; when they listened to me talk about it to show at their Performing Arts Centre, they wanted to expand it so they got the library and the heritage department of their council, and they’ve put a call out for people to come and be interviewed when I’m going to go up for a week to interview as many people as I can in the town, and then I’m going to cut that into a specific documentary about them.
I don’t do this for money or anything. I just love what I do and get a thrill from not only the people opening up but their families as well. That’s the thing that really gets to me; when they send things to me and say, ‘[w]e can’t express enough of how much you’ve unlocked a history that we didn’t know anything about’. It can’t be categorized as an art project, a music, a documentary. You know, it’s almost blowing out to be something much wider. It’s creating a society that’s clinging together and where families are being reunited.[18]
Therein lies the lasting legacy of Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey.
It All Started With My Father – Interview with Simon Reich, Documentary Filmmaker, Multimedia Visionary, and Story Catcher galore!
Words: Dr Jytte Holmqvist
Images: Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey (supplied) | Simon Reich (supplied) | Simon Reich presenting at a screening (supplied) | Simon Reich on Piano (supplied) | Alex Burkhoy on violin and Simon Reich on piano (supplied) | Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey screening (supplied)
Recommended websites:
Trailer about the show:
Audience feedback:
How the show appears on stage:
A teaser for the follow up show:
Footnotes:
[1] See also www.nma.gov.au
[3] According to Paul Ricoeur, “[s]earching for a memory … attests to one of the major finalities of the act of remembering, namely, struggling against forgetting, wresting a few scraps of memory from the ‘rapacity’ of time, from ‘sinking’ into ‘oblivion’”. Memory, History, Forgetting (London, 2006), p. 30.
[6] Reich says the interviewees were very candid about their experiences and that he “fell in love with them all”.
[7] “Up from the Rubble charts the amazing story of Manfred Reich’s survival in Nazi Germany. Throughout the podcast, Manfred illustrates his connection with pivotal points in recent German history and tells the story of Manfred’s immigration to Australia and his short return to Germany during the Berlin Wall Crisis of 1961.His many anecdotes show the tenacity of the human spirit, the horrors of war, and yet through it all, Manfred remains an entertaining and at times, funny storyteller”: open.spotify.com
[8] “Forty-six per cent of Australians were either born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. This makes Australia a very multicultural society”: immi.homeaffairs.gov.au
[9] collections.museumsvictoria.com.au
[11] www.bonegilla.org.au See also: www.bonegilla.org.au
[12] By way of example, Reich informs me that “[a]s you watch the interviews, some will say they complained about it, but some of them felt, ‘Oh my goodness, we’re back in the concentration camps.’ And German had become like the lingua franca. So almost everyone understood German and the announcements would be made in German, and some of them were a little bit triggered. And, because it was an old army base, there were other army bases around it and that triggered things as well. But if you watch the film and the interviews, some of them said, ‘Look, we didn’t have any food. We didn’t have any homes. We were just happy to have a roof over our head, a blanket and some food, you know.’ So, it went both ways. And that’s why I want people to tell their unfiltered stories.”
[14] One might add that these migrants have a burning desire to share and light up the darkness and show us the way forward; or, in Leonard Cohen’s words: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”.
[15] Speaking of the Italian experience of war and migration, the Bonegilla – The Migrant’s Journey event at the Hawthorn Art Centre 29 March 2026 also featured an in-person marketing by Moreno Giovanni whose all-encompassing books The Fireflies of Autumn and Other Tales of San Ginese (2018) and The Immigrants: Fabula Mirabilis, or, A Wonderful Story (2025) were available for purchase.
[16] Note, as well, the Facebook group “Bonegilla was my first home in Australia”.
[17] Speaking of the relatives, Simon Reich notes that these migrants sharing their stories is relevant and they are being appreciated for it: “The relatives go, ‘Wow, is that what they went through?’ Or ‘I’m so much more proud of them now, because I didn’t realize how much struggle they went through’. “So, it raises their love and respect for the elders.”
[18] Reich’s upcoming interrelated documentary is Bonegilla – Their Life in a Suitcase. Don’t miss it!