Heinrich Peter Persoon

Long listed as 'missing' in the 1913 guardianship file and in Leo Klerks' research (letters 1986/1988); primary sources now bring his life into view. He returned from Germany to Amsterdam on 22 September 1927, lived as a painter with the service personnel of the Burger Ziekenhuis hospital (Linnaeusstraat 89) and on 14 December 1928 was transferred to his father Pieter's household. He was an art painter (also a house painter). On 7 August 1935 he married Maria Adriana Hurkens in Amsterdam. In May 1941 Henk and Maria lived at Cornelis Anthoniszstraat 49-III in Amsterdam; an Amsterdam police report records a complaint by the municipal Labour Exchange against the couple for unlawfully drawing wage advances (f 108, outcome unknown). The marriage was dissolved by the Amsterdam court in June 1944. During the war he lived at Frans Halsstraat 55 in Amsterdam, the same building as his father, and on 31 May 1944 he was transported to Goslar in Germany as a forced labourer (passport A 352585). After the war he emigrated to Australia: on 13 June 1951 he arrived aboard the Sibajak in Melbourne (Dutch passport 306438, Amsterdam 1949). He lived there under the anglicised name Harry Peter Peerson, resided in Queensland (Brisbane) from 1951 to 1959 and thereafter at 40 Kingsway, Dee Why (Sydney), and worked as a sign writer. On 30 December 1953 he remarried in Brisbane to Elizabeth Rebecca Schuurhof (born 29 September 1920 in Leiden). On 18 April 1963 he became an Australian citizen at Brookvale (certificate E.M.(1) 146108). He died on 30 July 1963, aged fifty-eight, at home at 40 Kingsway, Dee Why, of heart disease (coronary obstruction with arteriosclerosis) from which he had suffered for one to two years; on 31 July 1963 he was buried, without a funeral service, at Frenchs Forest Bushland Cemetery. His death certificate (NSW 27295/1963, registered by his widow Elizabeth) gives his occupation as 'Artist'. All of this is recorded in his immigration and naturalization file at the National Archives of Australia and in the Australian death and cemetery indexes; the state of Victoria (where his former wife Maria and their son lived) is ruled out as the place of death. On his naturalization form Henk gave his parents' names from memory and garbled ('Leonardus Ludovicus Peerson', born Holland c. 1872, and Maria Giesen, born Germany c. 1878), showing how faint his memory of his childhood home had become almost fifty years after the family broke up in 1913. His surname was also written as Peerson. The Amsterdam service-personnel register gives his date of birth as 15 July 1905; his passport, registration card and the Australian migrant file give 5 July 1905.