Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Centenary of ANZAC) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a very fine woman from South Australia, Eva Nagy, who was born in Hungary in January 1928 and has made a terrific contribution to the beauty of Adelaide and its wonderful and unique heritage buildings. Now retired, Eva Nagy is a survivor with a fascinating story.

Her sedate lifestyle currently in Adelaide belies her earlier life as a young and courageous Hungarian freedom fighter and young student revolutionary who, along with her brave contemporaries, incurred the wrath of Russia's Stalinist regime. Bullets could not dent the bravery of these young freedom fighters. Eva survived the ravages of both the Great Depression and World War II, during which Hungary was occupied by both the Nazis and the Soviets, and was awarded a diploma of architecture by the Budapest College of Technology in 1954—60 years ago. This was the period Churchill famously declared that an iron curtain had descended across Europe, and Hungary found itself on the wrong side of that curtain.

Post-war Hungarians increasingly sought an independent path to national sovereignty. By the early 1950s, there was significant unrest against the puppet communist regime backed by Stalin's Soviet Union. In October 1956, Stalin, under cover of the Suez crisis, sent tanks into Hungary and Budapest to quell the freedom fighters, and among them was a young Eva Nagy. As Stalin said at the time, there would have been no revolution if a few poets had been eliminated. Even as recently as the 1990s, Eva was able to show her children the bullet holes in the buildings of Budapest from shots fired at students and young revolutionaries, such as herself, by the Russians.

Realising the West was unwilling to support Hungary's fight for freedom, Eva took the fateful decision to flee her homeland. With her children, Kathy, eight, and Charles, six, she made the dangerous journey across the Russian-tank patrolled minefields on the Hungarian-Austrian border, finding refuge in England, where she obtained permanent residency. There she met her second husband, Nicholas Nagy, and had her third child, Tony, born in Bradford—and he is in the Senate this evening to listen to this speech. Nicholas too was a refugee, and as an artillery officer he fought both Nazis and communists. His uncle, Vilmos Nagy de Nagybaczon, had been Hungary's Minister for Defence until mid-1943 when he was ousted for his support of the Jews. For this support, in 1966, Vilmos became the first Hungarian selected Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Institute of Jerusalem.

In England, Eva joined the structural department of Leeds City Council. Life in England's north was not the easiest. There were few opportunities for tertiary education and her youngest child suffered extreme asthma, which was exacerbated by industrial smog. So Eva and the Nagy family migrated to Australia as part of our great post-war migration boom. Not being British citizens, they were not the infamous Ten-Pound Poms; they paid an 'uplift': eleven pounds, three shillings and four pence.

Arriving in Adelaide in 1969, their first home was a quonset hut near Glenelg, where many tens of thousands of new Australians spent their first weeks. Hungary and England's loss proved invaluable for Adelaide. Thankfully, times have changed a lot since the 1960s, but back then, being a migrant and a woman, Eva worked twice as hard to get established. With an excellent reference from the Leeds City Chief Engineer, she gained a position as a draftswoman with engineers Kinnaird Hill de Rohan and Young. In October 1971, Eva joined the state's Land Titles Office as a tracer. At that time, the two-tier pay system was still in place, and women were paid only two-thirds the rate of men. Eva also obtained recognition by the South Australian Institute of Technology for her Hungarian qualifications—equivalent to an architectural technician certificate awarded by SAIT.

In 1973, Eva joined the architecture section of the South Australian Public Buildings Department as a technical officer grade 2. The Dunstan government had recently passed the new Heritage Act to protect historic sites and the department realised it needed a dedicated team of architects and heritage specialists. So, along with architect Adrian Evans and historical officer Fred Bierbaum, Eva formed Australia's first Heritage Unit. One of their earliest projects was restoration of the old Attorney-General's building near Victoria Square. Fittingly, it became the first home to the Legal Services Commission. The building now has National Trust classification, is included on the Register of the National Estate of the Heritage Commission and is a key component of the Victoria Square heritage precinct.

Eva worked on many significant buildings between 1975 and 1986. These include: Ayers House; the Art Gallery of South Australia; the Old Police Barracks Armoury, which became the Art Gallery Historical Museum; the Destitute Asylum, now the Migration Museum; the Museum of South Australia; the Supreme Court; and the adaptation and restoration of the Currie Street Primary School, now the Adelaide Remand Centre. Eva worked as a consultant on many projects. She liaised with the South Australian Police Department on the Fort Largs Police Academy and consulted on the Burra Primary School and Miners Cottages. One of Eva's tasks was preserving heritage furniture—and there was plenty of rivalry between bureaucrats and politicians to obtain prized items.

Eva retired in 1989 but still remains engaged in public life. In 1994 she joined the ABC National Advisory Council, where she worked with senior management and developed her interest in migrant communities. Now enjoying her retirement, Eva Nagy has left to her adopted home and state a lasting legacy. Any visitor to Adelaide and South Australia will see and enjoy the beauty of its heritage buildings. Many of these beautiful buildings are testament to Eva's commitment and life-long love of history and heritage architecture. I thank her for this fine contribution.