Emigration to Australia
Ilse Prechtel was born on March 29, 1928, in Weiden, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria. In post-war Germany, the young and vivacious Ilse feels constrained. She meets the war refugee Vladas Sakauskas; the two marry. A life in Germany is not an option for the couple. The refugee organization IRO facilitates their move to Australia. Ilse follows her husband in August 1948. In Australia, Ilse initially finds work in Darwin, where she stays for a total of eight years. Meanwhile, she separates from her husband Vladas. Whenever she has time beside her job, she explores the Fifth Continent – for instance, hunting crocodiles on the water and buffalo from the air. A camera is her constant companion. In 1958, she moves to Brisbane, where she marries the architect Colin Tesch. One of her two sons, Peter, becomes the Australian ambassador to Germany in 2009, a year before Ilse’s death.
Kodak Retina IIc camera, 1950s
Ilse Tesch’s camera is an example of an everyday item that later becomes a migratory history museum object: the emigrant Ilse preserved the camera she acquired in Australia along with the photos taken during her travels in (and from) her new home; her two sons kept the camera and photos along with the stories of migration and adaptation they heard from their mother; and now the Deutsches Auswandererhaus preserves the camera with some photos and the stories that Peter and Matthew Tesch have shared with the museum as the story of an emigration.
