ERIK'S PAGE
1910 - 30 October 1968
My father Erik Gunnar Nils Eriksson was born in 1910 in Uppsala, Sweden. Although known in later life in Australia as Erik, his Swedish family referred to him as Gunnar, to lessen any confusion, given that his father was also Erik Eriksson.
When his father Erik died in 1927, the family fortunes quickly changed for the worse and Gunnar, the youngest of the children, was sent to Australia to live on a farm in Western Australia. He arrived in Fremantle in 1929 as an 18 year old, having travelled via America where he had stayed for a short time. Disaster struck immediately upon arrival in Australia – the ship dragged anchor, drifted onto rocks and sank, leaving him with nothing except for the clothes in which he stood.
Speaking hardly a word of English, he somehow made his way to the required farm and spent the next few years there working for what amounted to bed and board. Surviving the Great Depression in rural Australia was not a pleasant experience.
Teaming up with some other young men, dad drifted into drilling and eventually made this his career. Together they formed a company called Australian Diamond Drillers. He met our mother while drilling water bores in Stawall soon after the war. Mum was a teacher at Stawall High School. They married on 2 July 1946 in the Stawall Catholic Church. By that time, dad had changed the spelling of his family name from Eriksson to Erickson. He said in later life that this was to avoid confusion in the spelling.
Our father travelled widely in his job and worked on many famous projects including the Snowy Mountain Scheme in NSW, The Mt Lyell Copper Mine in Tasmania, the Rum Jungle Uranium Mine in the Northern Territory and the Wittenoon Asbestos Mine in Western Australia. He also spent periods working in Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and South America.
In 1968, dad was working in Broken Hill on a drilling project when, one hot day, he complained he was not feeling well and went to rest under the shade of a tree. When co-workers came to check up on him half an hour later, he was dead – the victim of a massive heart attack. The date was 30 October 1968 and dad was aged 58 years.
He was buried in Eltham Cemetary. Our mother Betty died in 1990 and was also buried at Eltham in a grave close to that of her husband.
I am pleased to advise that we maintain contact with our extended family in Sweden. We have visited them and they have visited us on multiple occasions.
Erik Gunnar Eriksson - a biography
Eriksson
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To contact us, send a mail item to Tim
Erickson (terick@melbpc.org.au)