Finding our place in the sun

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." .........T. S. Eliot

This is a true story...

It is mid-December in 1946 and Strikeforce 8 is nearing the end of its first year of what would prove to be a two-and-half-year deployment to stabilise and secure what was then the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

Lying on his sweat-soaked bed in Charitas Field Hospital, Sumatra, slowly recovering from a near fatal attack of malaria and paratyphoid, Dutch Commando Corporal Pierre de Haas gradually forms an idea. Being lonely, and half a world away from Holland, and a failed romance, he decides to place an advertisement in a popular magazine for music lovers, Tuney Tunes, seeking a young and attractive girl 20+ to correspond with as a pen friend.

A few weeks later, in the small rural village of Oudenbosch, The Netherlands, eighteen-year-old Corry Siemons sees his advertisement and, despite her mother telling her that she is too young, and, laughingly, that she might be thrown back in the water like an undersized fish, Corry replies to "Mister de Haas". She is very clear that she wants to keep it to correspondence only and no nonsense!

Clearly, this was not to be ... Not too many years later, by then with a young family of five children, Corry and Pierre find themselves in the Wacol Migrant Centre near Brisbane, in a Nissan hut with no running water, or bathroom, and with no car and no phone. They are to spend the next eighteen months in transition, living in these primitive conditions while striving to secure a better future for their young family.

Many years later, Corry and Pierre each write about these most challenging and formative periods of their lives. Woven together, and barely believable at times, their odyssey reveals how tenuous life can be, how fate shapes decisions, and how these decisions then shape destiny.

Their story is one of love and enduring hope, of bravery and resilience. It will inspire others who are yearning to find their own 'place in the sun' ... and who might just have the courage to risk it all.