Fritz-Juergen Schroeder cast a knowing eye over the single bed in the corrugated-iron hut and pointed out an old suitcase not much larger than a child's school satchel.
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"That's about the size of the bag I brought with me," he said.
Schroeder was paying a nostalgic visit to his first home in Australia: the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre.
Hundreds of former residents are making the trip back to their first stop in Australia for its its 70th anniversary, to take tours around the block of about 20 huts that remain at Bonegilla, to view short films of how it once was, to attend plays and discussions and to view the Albury Library Museum's collection of migrant records and memorabilia.
Fritz-Juergen Schroeder was just 19 when he arrived in 1960.
Born during World War II in Berlin, where his family's home was bombed, and raised in the shattered city in the years it struggled to recover, he spoke no English.
He chose Australia for a new life, despite barely being able to find it on a map. He was qualified as an electrician, and he wanted work.
Young Schroeder applied for a one-way assisted passage from the Australian government and boarded the Castel Felice – a ship that carried more than 100,000 European migrants to Australia and New Zealand over 101 sailings between 1952 and 1970.
He disembarked at Port Melbourne in October 1960, was put on a train to Wodonga ("the red rattler, they called it") and found himself at the vast migrant camp on the shore of Lake Hume.
"I was given a room with a bed in a hut. I thought 'where the bloody hell am I?'"
Schroeder spent about three weeks at the camp, attending a few English classes and waiting to be assigned a job.
Like most post-war migrants, Schroeder discovered his trade qualification meant nothing to the Australian authorities. His first job was picking asparagus on a farm near Garfield, in Gippsland. The second was digging potatoes.
His lack of English had him feeling isolated, and his name didn't help, either.
"You can imagine – it wasn't so long since the war, and I was named Fritz," he said.
There was embarrassment. He visited the Myer's department store in Melbourne to buy a belt. He used the German word: "gurtel". With the store assistants laughing about a man asking for a girdle, he rushed away.
But one day, he said, "something clicked" and he could speak English.
He had by then graduated from potato digging to the Australian Jam Company factory in Chapel Street, South Yarra, and eventually he gained work with a large electrical engineering company based in Richmond. Schroeder was sent around Australia, plying his trade for 30 years on some of Australia's biggest infrastructure projects.
Having raised one family, he married Donna, an American musician, in 2010 and went to live in the USA for more than three years.
"But I discovered I missed Australia," he said. "I wanted to come back."
Schroeder and Donna now live in retirement in St Arnaud, a town in Victoria's Wimmera.
The boy from Berlin had found home.
And on Bonegilla's 70th anniversary, he'd come full circle.
Fritz-Juergen Schroeder bought a plaque recording his arrival in Australia, and it was affixed to a wall at Bonegilla. He wanted to see it, and to show it to his wife.