Published: 29 April 2022
Last updated: 4 March 2024
MIRIAM COSIC talks to Tania de Jong, the powerhouse behind Driftwood - yes, a musical - based on the family’s escape and artistic imprint on Melbourne
KARL DULDIG AND Slawa Horowitz-Duldig were still living in Vienna in the 1930s, watching war and antisemitism building around them. Austria was more than sympathetic to the rise of Nazi Germany and the Anchluss took place in March 1938, just after the birth of their only child, Eva. The loss of civil rights for Austrian Jews quickly followed.
By August that year, Karl, a pro-level tennis player as well as a fine sculptor, was in Switzerland on a temporary visa for the tennis circuit there. When his club membership was cancelled, it became almost impossible for him to go home and he made an appointment with a sympathetic Swiss immigration official who organised a passport for Slawa and Eva.
As she was organising to leave, an official letter arrived, telling her to vacate their beautiful apartment. The creation of ghettos was proceeding apace. She and Eva joined Karl in Zurich in December.
They arrived in Singapore in May the following year. And in September 1940, a year after the war had been declared in Europe, they arrived in Sydney Harbour aboard the Queen Mary, the largest ship afloat, its name painted over for wartime and reading Transport W 1. The family had moved to Australia.
Now, on May 13, Driftwood - the Musical will premiere in Melbourne, based on the moving yet lively memoir written by the Duldigs' daughter, Eva.
Eva’s memoir, titled Driftwood, was published 42 years after Slawa's death in 1975, when Eva inherited all of her parents' memorabilia. She later set up a memorial to them and their art, called the Duldig Studio museum + sculpture garden, in the old family house in East Malvern. The musical production will trace their lives from Vienna to their establishment of this flourishing life in Melbourne.
