Elizabeth: I wanted to show Jan Australia, where I lived and where I came from. And I was missing the bush and the smell of the eucalypts and the big open skies. And so that’s when we decided to come to Australia.

I married Jan Dalman from Amsterdam and he was born in 1927. I was really pleased to take on his name, Dalman. So I now am known as Elizabeth Cameron Dalman. And I was born in Adelaide,  in South Australia. I’m a very proud Adelaide girl.

Andreas: My name is Andreas Dalman. My father is Jan Dalman. I first went to Amsterdam when I was too young to remember, but when I went there in my teens I really felt an affinity for the city or for the Dutch way of life and the attitude that Dutch people have.

Elizabeth: I travelled from Australia in my very early twenties to study in London, being an aspiring ballet dancer at the time. I ended up in Amsterdam and I got the job in the ballet company. But every Saturday there was this handsome young man with his camera around his neck, always taking photographs. And so slowly we got to know each other. But his great hobby was photography. I think that’s what kept him really creative and inspired.

Andreas:  My dad always told it that he was very keen to marry mum and I think he asked, he probably asked her maybe on the first or second meeting and she was very focused on her dance at that time and kind of just swatted him away. Like, you know, that’s silly.

Elizabeth: He was quite intrigued that there was an Australian dancer in the company, and so we’d sometimes go out together on our bicycles, pedal away to the park.

By the end of 1963, we got married in Amsterdam. I wanted to show Jan Australia, where I lived and where I came from. The bush and the smell of the eucalypts and the big open skies, And so that’s when we decided to come to Australia.

I was so inspired by Jan’s photography that I encouraged him to concentrate on that, and I found I couldn’t live without my dance so I set up a dance studio. And that’s how we began our early married life. And then a couple of years later, it became a company. And Australian Dance Theatre was born.

He loved the country. Every week we used to take a day off and just go exploring into the bush and into different parts of the country. He loved that. 

Andreas: He had a very great love of the Australian landscape. And I think all Dutch people have a bit of a love of the sun. 

Elizabeth: So at that time a lot of Dutch people were migrating. Holland was very crowded, and I think he thought that it might offer other opportunities.

But we had this very strong connection through our art forms, and that was our strongest and greatest link. And then in 1971, Andreas came along. That was, of course, the biggest creative event of our marriage together.

Andreas: Well, I never got to speak Dutch, because we didn’t, we weren’t a Dutch household. 

Elizabeth: He didn’t want to speak Dutch at home. He thought it was better that Andreas speak English very well.

Andreas: My dad didn’t really like my mum’s Dutch accent. And mum has also told me that he was, you know, he was very much trying to fit in and not be seen as an outsider in Australia.

Elizabeth: We used to call it a cultural cringe in Australia. It was still very conservative. It was very much still the colony of Great Britain. Things British were the things that were accepted. He had struggled so much with this idea of the New Australian. We used to hunt out other Dutch friends and other European people who were visiting. So our house became a place for meeting of people from Europe.

Andreas: Of course, I had an awareness of my father’s heritage. He was never able to not be Dutch. I think he always had very high standards, a very solid sense of justice and right and wrong, which I think is quite common in the Dutch psyche. 

Elizabeth: And whether Australia at that time was not as multicultural as it is now: the appreciation of diverse cultures and what that can bring to the nation as a whole. I think that’s changed a lot, yes.