Every week on a Monday morning, Dirk van Diggele shows up to his iPad class at Orana Neighbourhood House in Wantirna South. There’s nothing odd about that, except that Dirk is 98.
“I’m still learning, still always looking for knowledge,” he says.
Dirk was born in Deventer in the eastern part of Holland on 2 January 1929. He was the youngest of three children, with a sister eight years older and a brother six years older. “I was the mistake!” he jokes.
His father worked as a monument maker for cemeteries, before becoming an importer of marble and granite, while his mother cared for the family at home.
Dirk was 11 years old when German soldiers marched through his hometown.
“I still remember them walking in at 10 o’clock on a Friday morning,” he recalls. “It was a beautiful sunny day.”
They were shooting at the Dutch soldiers in bunkers on the west side of the Ysel River.
Dirk remembers food rationing, and their family radio being confiscated, “I remember my father putting it on the back of his bike and taking it off to a distribution centre.”
He remembers air-raid sirens and bombing. He remembers a Jewish schoolmate being forced to wear the yellow star and then disappearing. “We knew Jewish people were being forced to get onto trains, but we couldn’t say or do anything.” There was fear and mistrust that came with living under occupation.
“You had to be careful what you said,” he says.
One of Dirk’s jobs during the war was to sit high in the willow trees and cut branches that fell to people below. These branches were then woven together and used to reinforce the walls of the German soldier’s trenches.
As a teenager during the German occupation, Dirk was also put to work for Organisation Todt, the Nazi regime’s huge engineering and construction organisation, which used conscripted and forced labour across occupied Europe.
However, one small incident during these years of misery would unexpectedly influence the direction of Dirk’s life.
At around 14, Dirk watched a soldier take a battery from a damaged truck and state he would use it to power a lamp at a time when there was no electricity.
Dirk was fascinated.
“He knew something that I didn’t,” Dirk remembers. “I was inspired.”
That inspiration and curiosity led Dirk to go to trade school to study mechanical work. Later he attended college and continued studying at night school many times throughout his life.
It also led him to Orana, over 80 years later.
Skating in the Moonlight
Augusta was a young girl whose family moved into Dirk’s neighbourhood when she was nine and Dirk was eleven. At first, they were just friends, playing together in the street. Then as they grew older, they went canoeing together on the Ysel river and ice-skating in winter.
Asked whether there was any romance during those moonlit skating trips, Dirk is understated.
“No, I was too shy.”
By their early twenties, they had started going steady and Dirk was thinking about moving to Australia. He had seen a movie about cattle being taken from the Northern Territory down south, and he was particularly taken by the warmth, space, and also the sight of sailing boats on Sydney Harbour.
The Netherlands government were paying for people’s passages, so one day he said to Augusta, “I'm going to Australia,” and she said, “ok, I’ll come with you.”
They would only take couples, not individuals, so they got married at the registry office, aged just 23 and 21, and boarded a ship. The journey took around four weeks.
“But I caught whooping cough and was isolated in the hospital wing for most of it,” says Dirk.
Their first glimpse of their new country was Fremantle, and Dirk admits his impression was initially terrible.
“It was like the Wild West in WA, and if I’d had the money, I would have booked a ticket straight back!”
Dirk and Augusta continued to Melbourne, the city that would become their home. With little understanding of Australia and only the English they had learned at school, they relied heavily on one another.
“We were children, 21 and 23 years old,” Dirk says. “We had no experience!”
Over time they made friends, built a community around themselves and began creating a life together.
Dirk’s Vision
Dirk and Augusta first lived in a house at Gowan Brae, Sir Bruce Small’s 300-acre property in Tullamarine. At the time, the sprawling farm, not far from Essendon Airport, was used for dairy farming and racehorse agistment.
“I went to the city looking for work,” said Dirk, and first got a job with Liberty Motors. Soon after they moved to East Bentleigh. Not long after that, he saw a large block of land up for sale in the Ferntree Gully area.
“I had a vision,” he says. “Somehow we managed to sell our house and get a loan to buy the large block of land with an old house with the idea to turn it into a garden centre.”
Dirk didn't actually know that much about gardening. But he could see houses being built throughout the surrounding area and reasoned that new homeowners would need plants, soil, sand and landscaping materials.
“It was a gamble and I could have gone bankrupt.” But it later became the well-known Banksia Nursery.
The early years were very difficult. There were permits, council requirements, equipment to buy, an old house to repair and an enormous amount of work to be done.
“Augusta was very good at the paperwork,” Dirk says. “Without her, I wouldn’t have made it.”
Their children, Peter and Michelle, grew up on the property, surrounded by trucks, tractors, machinery and nursery life. They got paid to help out on the weekends.
The nursery was Dirk's life's work, seven days a week. For around 60 years he worked, by his own admission, extremely hard. Asked if he was a workaholic, his answer is an uncomplicated:
“Yeah. But I enjoyed what I was doing. And the achievement.”
Even now, he talks about the business almost as though it were a creative work that was never quite finished.
“It’s like an opera. An unfinished opera.”
Dirk’s son Peter died unexpectedly from a heart attack in his early 50s. And Augusta, the girl he had known since childhood and the woman with whom he built his Australian life, developed dementia in her later years.
Dirk visited her in an aged care home several times a week. Even towards the end, Augusta still knew him.
After so many decades together, Dirk finds it difficult to describe what losing her meant.
After that many years, he says, a person “becomes part of you.”
Eventually, after decades of work and profound hardship, circumstances forced Dirk to sell the business. He was 92 years old when he finally stopped working. For perhaps the first time in his adult life, he didn't have somewhere he needed to be.
“I was kind of lost,” he admits.
Finding Orana
When Dirk saw an advertisement in the Studfield News for an iPad class at Orana Neighbourhood House, he was inspired.
He had been given an iPad as a Christmas gift from one of the suppliers to Banksia Nursery, but he didn't really know how to use it. So, at 92, he did what he had been doing since he was a teenage boy! Remembering the time he watched someone connect a battery to a lamp, he decided to he needed to learn.
Dirk still comes every Monday on his ride-on scooter to class. He has learnt to use his iPad for emails, watching clips on YouTube, finding information and using FaceTime to stay connected with his 80 year old cousin back in Holland.
After a lifetime centred around work, Orana Neighbourhood House gives Dirk a reason to get out of the house, spend time with other people, listen, talk and continue learning.
“It’s so nice to come here,” he says. “For me, it gives me a break, an escape from my apartment.”
He admits sometimes he doesn't particularly feel like going out. But having somewhere to go helps. And there is value simply in sitting with other people.
“You pick up a few things when you just listen,” he says.
Dirk believes places like Neighbourhood Houses can be particularly valuable as people grow older, because learning doesn't have to stop with retirement. And where else can you go to learn something new in your 90s? What place holds the space for you, checks up on you when you don’t come in if you’ve had a setback and are in hospital. The staff at Orana have checked in on Dirk when he lay in hospital earlier this year, and his iPad class cheered when he returned to them again.
“You still like to be active, no matter what age you are. And you like to add to what you know, and what you can learn.”
For Dirk, that is exactly what Orana provides:
“Go and try to improve your knowledge.”
“I’m still learning, still always looking for knowledge,” he says.
Dirk was born in Deventer in the eastern part of Holland on 2 January 1929. He was the youngest of three children, with a sister eight years older and a brother six years older. “I was the mistake!” he jokes.
His father worked as a monument maker for cemeteries, before becoming an importer of marble and granite, while his mother cared for the family at home.
Dirk was 11 years old when German soldiers marched through his hometown.
“I still remember them walking in at 10 o’clock on a Friday morning,” he recalls. “It was a beautiful sunny day.”
They were shooting at the Dutch soldiers in bunkers on the west side of the Ysel River.
Dirk remembers food rationing, and their family radio being confiscated, “I remember my father putting it on the back of his bike and taking it off to a distribution centre.”
He remembers air-raid sirens and bombing. He remembers a Jewish schoolmate being forced to wear the yellow star and then disappearing. “We knew Jewish people were being forced to get onto trains, but we couldn’t say or do anything.” There was fear and mistrust that came with living under occupation.
“You had to be careful what you said,” he says.
One of Dirk’s jobs during the war was to sit high in the willow trees and cut branches that fell to people below. These branches were then woven together and used to reinforce the walls of the German soldier’s trenches.
As a teenager during the German occupation, Dirk was also put to work for Organisation Todt, the Nazi regime’s huge engineering and construction organisation, which used conscripted and forced labour across occupied Europe.
However, one small incident during these years of misery would unexpectedly influence the direction of Dirk’s life.
At around 14, Dirk watched a soldier take a battery from a damaged truck and state he would use it to power a lamp at a time when there was no electricity.
Dirk was fascinated.
“He knew something that I didn’t,” Dirk remembers. “I was inspired.”
That inspiration and curiosity led Dirk to go to trade school to study mechanical work. Later he attended college and continued studying at night school many times throughout his life.
It also led him to Orana, over 80 years later.
Skating in the Moonlight
Augusta was a young girl whose family moved into Dirk’s neighbourhood when she was nine and Dirk was eleven. At first, they were just friends, playing together in the street. Then as they grew older, they went canoeing together on the Ysel river and ice-skating in winter.
Asked whether there was any romance during those moonlit skating trips, Dirk is understated.
“No, I was too shy.”
By their early twenties, they had started going steady and Dirk was thinking about moving to Australia. He had seen a movie about cattle being taken from the Northern Territory down south, and he was particularly taken by the warmth, space, and also the sight of sailing boats on Sydney Harbour.
The Netherlands government were paying for people’s passages, so one day he said to Augusta, “I'm going to Australia,” and she said, “ok, I’ll come with you.”
They would only take couples, not individuals, so they got married at the registry office, aged just 23 and 21, and boarded a ship. The journey took around four weeks.
“But I caught whooping cough and was isolated in the hospital wing for most of it,” says Dirk.
Their first glimpse of their new country was Fremantle, and Dirk admits his impression was initially terrible.
“It was like the Wild West in WA, and if I’d had the money, I would have booked a ticket straight back!”
Dirk and Augusta continued to Melbourne, the city that would become their home. With little understanding of Australia and only the English they had learned at school, they relied heavily on one another.
“We were children, 21 and 23 years old,” Dirk says. “We had no experience!”
Over time they made friends, built a community around themselves and began creating a life together.
Dirk’s Vision
Dirk and Augusta first lived in a house at Gowan Brae, Sir Bruce Small’s 300-acre property in Tullamarine. At the time, the sprawling farm, not far from Essendon Airport, was used for dairy farming and racehorse agistment.
“I went to the city looking for work,” said Dirk, and first got a job with Liberty Motors. Soon after they moved to East Bentleigh. Not long after that, he saw a large block of land up for sale in the Ferntree Gully area.
“I had a vision,” he says. “Somehow we managed to sell our house and get a loan to buy the large block of land with an old house with the idea to turn it into a garden centre.”
Dirk didn't actually know that much about gardening. But he could see houses being built throughout the surrounding area and reasoned that new homeowners would need plants, soil, sand and landscaping materials.
“It was a gamble and I could have gone bankrupt.” But it later became the well-known Banksia Nursery.
The early years were very difficult. There were permits, council requirements, equipment to buy, an old house to repair and an enormous amount of work to be done.
“Augusta was very good at the paperwork,” Dirk says. “Without her, I wouldn’t have made it.”
Their children, Peter and Michelle, grew up on the property, surrounded by trucks, tractors, machinery and nursery life. They got paid to help out on the weekends.
The nursery was Dirk's life's work, seven days a week. For around 60 years he worked, by his own admission, extremely hard. Asked if he was a workaholic, his answer is an uncomplicated:
“Yeah. But I enjoyed what I was doing. And the achievement.”
Even now, he talks about the business almost as though it were a creative work that was never quite finished.
“It’s like an opera. An unfinished opera.”
Dirk’s son Peter died unexpectedly from a heart attack in his early 50s. And Augusta, the girl he had known since childhood and the woman with whom he built his Australian life, developed dementia in her later years.
Dirk visited her in an aged care home several times a week. Even towards the end, Augusta still knew him.
After so many decades together, Dirk finds it difficult to describe what losing her meant.
After that many years, he says, a person “becomes part of you.”
Eventually, after decades of work and profound hardship, circumstances forced Dirk to sell the business. He was 92 years old when he finally stopped working. For perhaps the first time in his adult life, he didn't have somewhere he needed to be.
“I was kind of lost,” he admits.
Finding Orana
When Dirk saw an advertisement in the Studfield News for an iPad class at Orana Neighbourhood House, he was inspired.
He had been given an iPad as a Christmas gift from one of the suppliers to Banksia Nursery, but he didn't really know how to use it. So, at 92, he did what he had been doing since he was a teenage boy! Remembering the time he watched someone connect a battery to a lamp, he decided to he needed to learn.
Dirk still comes every Monday on his ride-on scooter to class. He has learnt to use his iPad for emails, watching clips on YouTube, finding information and using FaceTime to stay connected with his 80 year old cousin back in Holland.
After a lifetime centred around work, Orana Neighbourhood House gives Dirk a reason to get out of the house, spend time with other people, listen, talk and continue learning.
“It’s so nice to come here,” he says. “For me, it gives me a break, an escape from my apartment.”
He admits sometimes he doesn't particularly feel like going out. But having somewhere to go helps. And there is value simply in sitting with other people.
“You pick up a few things when you just listen,” he says.
Dirk believes places like Neighbourhood Houses can be particularly valuable as people grow older, because learning doesn't have to stop with retirement. And where else can you go to learn something new in your 90s? What place holds the space for you, checks up on you when you don’t come in if you’ve had a setback and are in hospital. The staff at Orana have checked in on Dirk when he lay in hospital earlier this year, and his iPad class cheered when he returned to them again.
“You still like to be active, no matter what age you are. And you like to add to what you know, and what you can learn.”
For Dirk, that is exactly what Orana provides:
“Go and try to improve your knowledge.”
