{"id":332240,"date":"2025-08-10T04:20:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T04:20:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/332240\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T04:20:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T04:20:17","slug":"plan-marta-the-journey-of-815-young-women-sent-to-australia-by-francoist-spain-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/332240\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Plan Marta\u2019: The journey of 815 young women sent to Australia by Francoist Spain | International"},"content":{"rendered":"

They went on an adventure, with a two-year contract as domestic workers. After that time, they were free to return. But they weren\u2019t able to travel back from Australia<\/a> for decades. Firstly, because the return ticket cost the equivalent of several years of work. Secondly, because the loneliness was so intense for them that many quickly accepted \u2014 with varying degrees of conviction and fortune \u2014 marriage proposals from men who had arrived a few years earlier. In Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane, they ended up settling down, becoming socially involved, starting families, and founding their own meeting places to combat homesickness and rootlessness. Huge Spanish social clubs were opened in several cities, even Basque pelota courts<\/a> and gure txokos (social clubs), and later Galician cultural centers, and there were parties with paella and sangria, soccer tournaments, and even religious pilgrimages to pay homage to Our Lady of El Roc\u00edo in the middle of Oceania. For six decades, Spanish women have continued to meet on Saturdays in Sydney\u2019s Centennial Park.<\/p>\n

\"Inauguraci\u00f3nInauguration of the Gure Txoko pelota court in Sydney (1967), in a photo preserved by the family of Mar\u00eda Bego\u00f1a Zubiaur and Francisco Javier Montero, who worked on the construction of the Opera House.Archivo Montero Zubiaur<\/p>\n

It all began in the early 1960s and could serve as the inspiration for a long television series. These were young women recruited from villages in northern Spain: the Basque Country, Navarre, Asturias, Cantabria, Galicia, and only later from regions further south. They were drawn in by Catholic institutions under Franco\u2019s regime<\/a> in what was dubbed \u201cPlan Marta.\u201d They arrived in Australia in the footsteps of a contingent of men, also mostly from the Basque Country and Cantabria, who had been recruited through \u201cOperation Kangaroo\u201d (1958-1963) to provide cheap, reliable labor for the plantations, especially those growing sugar cane<\/a>. These women were known as the \u201cmartas\u201d or \u201cmarthas,\u201d and they were called upon to become perfect domestic servants, like the biblical figure Martha of Bethany or the class described by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/a>. Both men and women breathed life into and worked to build a country that was, for the most part, still in serious demographic distress.<\/p>\n

After World War II<\/a>, the slogan \u201cPopulate or Perish\u201d began to spread throughout Australia. But not everyone was welcome, including the country\u2019s Indigenous peoples<\/a> and Australia\u2019s neighbors to the East, who were seen as a threat pressing in from overpopulated territories. The white elite wanted to draw on Westerners, preferably English, Dutch, Americans, Germans and Poles. Mediterranean immigrants, however, could provide much-needed labor. During the three-day journey, Italian and Greek women who \u201cwere going to get married, or had already been married by proxy\u201d also boarded the planes carrying the Spanish women, explains Natalia Ortiz Ceberio, coordinator of Hispanic studies at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), in a telephone conversation from Sydney. For her, \u201cthe real deception\u201d of the authorities towards the Spanish women \u201cwas that no one informed them of the cost of returning… of how impossible it would be to pay for the return ticket,\u201d which was around 3,000 pesetas, or \u20ac18.<\/p>\n

\"GrupoGroup of \u2018martas\u2019 in Madrid in 1962, ready for the fifth flight of the plan that year.Archivo de la familia Aberasturi Erezuma<\/p>\n

\u201cWithout immigration, a future of the Australia we know will be both uneasy and brief. As a nation, we shall not survive,\u201d warned Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell in his speeches, as reflected by Javier Castro and Ortiz Ceberio in the documentary El avi\u00f3n de las novias (The Brides\u2019 Plane). At the same time, Australian newspapers of the era advertised Spaniards as a \u201ccultured and proud people.\u201d The UNSW professor is the author of several works on the sense of identity of emigrants and on the travels of Spanish women, such as El Plan Marta (1960-63), a book published by Dykinson and edited by Mar\u00eda Pilar Rodr\u00edguez. The researcher began tracking down stories of martas more than a decade ago, after reading in another volume, Operaci\u00f3n Canguro (Operation Kangaroo), by Ignacio Garc\u00eda, that there had been a flight carrying women following an initial migratory experiment with men, who traveled by boat. Since then, Ortiz Ceberio \u2014 an emigrant to Australia of Basque origin and founder of the Spanish Film Festival, which she directed for 15 years in both Australia and New Zealand \u2014 ended up discovering in the archives of the Episcopal Conference that, in reality, \u201cthere had been at least 17 flights.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"J\u00f3venesSpanish youths from Operation Kangaroo at the Bonegilla migrant reception camp, built after World War II in Victoria.Archivo de la familia de Vulcano Mateo<\/p>\n

Since the first trip on March 11, 1960, \u201c815 martas arrived in three years,\u201d of whom the author has located and interviewed more than 100. Some signed up without understanding the contract. Many were unable to even locate Australia on a map. Josefina Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s suitcase had no address: she simply wrote her name and \u201cAustralia\u201d on the label, but she arrived with it on July 14, 1960. The truth is that neither she nor her companions really knew their destination. Over the years, the method changed, but those who were there at the beginning remember being taken to a church, lined up, and then Australian women would choose which girl they would take to serve in their homes, \u201clike sheep at the market.\u201d Those who did not go with families were taken to work for Catholic congregations.<\/p>\n

Young, unmarried, healthy, and officially Catholic<\/p>\n

The machinery was set in motion after a visit to Spain in 1959 by the Cardinal Primate of Australia, and soon the recruitment drive was helped by the consulates, the Spanish Emigration Institute, the Episcopal Conference on Migration, and a dense network that reached even the most remote parishes of Spain through Catholic Action and the Christian Workers\u2019 Youth. The candidates were first selected here. They had to be young, unmarried, healthy, and officially Catholic. But a few were not, in reality, as devout as desired, and what they really longed for was to free themselves from the rigidity of family life and the feminine roles instilled by Francoism<\/a>. Some were single mothers who left their children in Spain with the idea of bringing them over later.<\/p>\n

They underwent a medical examination and a \u201ctraining\u201d course at the convent of the Madres Reparadoras in Madrid, where they were taught efficient domestic service, Australian customs and schedules, and survival English for a housekeeper: it was enough to know that a spoon was called a spoon and a mop was called a mop. The important thing was to be able to name the most basic kitchen and cleaning utensils, because the rest, if their life was going to be eminently domestic, did not matter. The boys who had gone to cut cane, on the other hand, had received a much more comprehensive training through the Good Immigrant\u2019s Manual, which they could learn during the month-long boat trip.<\/p>\n

Mari Paz Moreno says in the documentary that she signed up because she \u201cwanted to learn English.\u201d She was a young woman with an education, working at the news agency Europa Press, and eager to see the world. When she arrived in Australia, she discovered that the urban environment was \u201ca graveyard\u201d where, at 6 p.m., there was nowhere to \u201chave a coffee.\u201d But on the other hand, she concludes, \u201cin many ways\u201d Australia \u201cwas a country with a future,\u201d while Spain, at that time, \u201cwas a country with a past.\u201d The history of Australia was thus written with the names of women such as Carmina \u00c1lvarez Patallo, Juli de la Rosa, Puri Paredes, Mari Cruz V\u00e1zquez, Maruja Vesu\u00f1a, Irene Gonz\u00e1lez, Cruz Pereira, Ana Mar\u00eda Godino, Mar\u00eda Jos\u00e9 Ugarte, Teresa Santamar\u00eda, Leontina Garc\u00eda, Genoveva Mateo, Mar\u00eda Cruz del \u00c1lamo, Julia Gonz\u00e1lez and Bego\u00f1a Zubiaur, and men such as Francisco Javier Montero, Vulcano Mateo, and Eulogio Altuna, who at 93 years old, now back in his home city of San Sebasti\u00e1n<\/a>, in northern Spain, is the living memory of the cane cutters.<\/p>\n

\"GrupoGroup of \u2018martas\u2019 at the Madres Reparadoras school in Madrid on September 30, 1961.Archivo de Julia Gonz\u00e1lez.<\/p>\n

Ortiz Ceberio explains that \u201cthe first ones did not pay for the one-way ticket.\u201d The next group, following the pull effect, \u201chad to pay for part of it.\u201d The rest was paid for by the various administrations interested in these migrations. If they were homesick and wanted to return before the two years had elapsed, the martas had to pay back their debt, in addition to the return fare. Despite everything, for many, the outlook in Spain was no better, and when the agreement between the two countries ended, \u201cthere were hundreds and hundreds of women asking to come to Australia,\u201d says the researcher.<\/p>\n

\"GrupoGroup of \u2018martas\u2019 in Madrid in 1962.Archivo de la familia Aberasturi Erezuma<\/p>\n

Generally, those who were already there had \u201ckept quiet\u201d about how hard it was to work in houses in a country whose language they did not know. To provide \u201cspiritual support\u201d and help the martas with any problems that arose at work, or when their spirits flagged, the Church sent three \u201clay sisters\u201d: Paquita Bret\u00f3n, Mar\u00eda Luisa Erro, and Mari Carmen Cervera. It was known as \u201cimmigrant sickness or Australia sickness,\u201d says the professor, the \u201cdepression<\/a>\u201d and \u201cdespair\u201d of being \u201cfar from everything,\u201d with no escape from the vast island, at a distance that was \u201cimpossible to overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They went on an adventure, with a two-year contract as domestic workers. After that time, they were free…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[186,99071,2000,299,68489,5479,119197,1464,119198,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-332240","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-cantabria","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-francisco-franco","13":"tag-madrid","14":"tag-margaret-atwood","15":"tag-melbourne","16":"tag-principado-de-asturias","17":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115002555043167057","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}