Bernadette Gray - Interview transcription

Date Recorded: February 2015

Place: Lake Macquarie

Interviewer: Could you please tell me your name and where you were born?

Bernadette: My name is Bernadette Gray. I was born in Samoa.

Interviewer: Could you tell me little bit about what your childhood was like growing up in Samoa?

Bernadette: My childhood was… I was really happy. Happy childhood at home. I was adopted out to my Aunty and I grew up in a Catholic family, a very strong Catholic family, and my adopted parents were ministers for the Catholic Church

Interviewer: Was your childhood very different to your children growing up?

Bernadette: Yes my childhood was different. Not much different, because I tried to bring them up the same way I was, but because my children were born in New Zealand it was totally different atmosphere back in Samoa than in New Zealand.

Interviewer: And how old were you when you moved to New Zealand?

Bernadette: I was 19½ years old.

Interviewer: And what was the reason why at that age you decided to leave Samoa?

Bernadette: I suppose my parents wanted me to move to New Zealand to get a better life and improve. To lead a better life and to grow up in a different country where you can get good jobs.

Interviewer: And did your family any of your family move with you to New Zealand?

Bernadette: No, my 2 sisters were already there when i moved.

Interviewer: That would have made it easier for you.

Bernadette: That's right.

Interviewer: How did you come to live in Lake Macquarie?

Bernadette: Well, we shifted from New Zealand to Australia because my daughter already moved here, and she lived in Lake Macquarie when we moved here. So we moved in with her and we are still in Lake Macquarie.

Interviewer: So I'm interested then in what prompted your daughter to choose Lake Macquarie.

Bernadette: I don't really know. Maybe it's the first place that when she came she stayed so we kept shifting around Cardiff but we never moved away from Cardiff.

Interviewer: So how did your lifestyle change when you moved to Australia?

Bernadette: What do you mean?

Interviewer: Did your lifestyle change to say your way of life in Samoa? What were the big changes?

Bernadette: Well, Samoa is a different place. We grew up in the… all live together, we all live together with families. We have open houses. We grew up in a place where we live together, we eat together even extended families, but when we move over to New Zealand it was more private, just you and the children.

Interviewer: was it more a village lifestyle in Samoa

Bernadette: Yes, it's a village lifestyle, we all seem to know everyone in the village because it's open and when we moved to Australia we were private to ourselves, to be honest I don't know many people in our street.

Interviewer: That's very different that's right

Bernadette: Yes, that's very different.

Interviewer: Do you find a difference in the type of food that's readily available in Australia compared to Samoa?

Bernadette: Yes, very much different. In Samoa, we get a lot of island food and we just couldn't get it over here. Like breadfruit, we are not allowed to bring that to Australia, and we miss a lot of our island food like taro, taros and all other things like restaurants and Samoan shops where you can buy different food and whatever you want to eat. A lot of baking and things that they bake in Samoa that you can't get over here. Between here and Sydney, Newcastle has only one place or two where you can buy island food like taros, bananas and other sorts of island food.

Interviewer: Can you grow that, do many Samoans in this region grow their own specialty food that they miss?

Bernadette: You can grow taro and bananas but I don't think you can get the same quality of the food like what you grow back in Samoa and other islands. You can grow banana but taro, I'm not too sure about taro, you can use the leaves from the taro but not the roots.

Interviewer: Do you have celebrations with the Samoan Community in this area?

Bernadette: Yes we do. On our independence back in Samoa on the first week of June when they celebrate it, back in Samoa, we celebrate it over here with all the Samoan community and with all the different churches. We all get together and celebrate and we have a feed together, we get to meet a lot of them and we even have sports, we have church on Sunday's and then we have sports on Monday.

Interviewer: For these big celebrations are people able to find the food that are favourites for Samoan people to bring to the celebration?

Bernadette: Yes we do manage to go and find it and cook what we can eat but still we don't get all of it.

Interviewer: Have you tried to pass on the Samoan culture to your children, I understand they weren't born in Samoa?

Bernadette: I do. Yes, we try to teach them our custom, even our food, we cook that food at home if we can give them and they like eating Samoan food as well as well as European food.

Interviewer: They are still a part of Samoan culture.

Bernadette: Oh yes, they are.

Interviewer: We might wrap it up there. Thank you for doing this.

This work by Lake Macquarie City Library is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License