Dagmar Limp speaks to her audience at the Good Food Room in Warburton with interviewer and Upper Yarra U3A member Alison O’Brien.
By Mara Pattison-Sowden
THE experience of beginning life in war-torn Berlin has led Warburton resident Dagmar Limp to a life of helping others.
Dagmar has been a passionate supporter of community activities throughout the Upper Yarra for almost 20 years, and is known for her work as president of the Yarra Ranges Film Society and as a volunteer at Koha Community Café. She was the first speaker in a series of discussions with Women of Interest in the Upper Yarra, and was interviewed by Alison O’Brien at the Good Food Room last week.
Food was scarce in 1947, Dagmar told her audience, and it was bitterly cold in Berlin.
Her mother was left with four children on her own, Dagmar the youngest and the only girl, and they lived in a flat surrounded by bombed out areas.
“To be really hungry, not just once but for every meal, is something that shakes your life,” she said.
“What happens to you as a young person you take throughout your life.”
Her love of music and the arts stemmed from Berlin, where “we used to exchange our money for East Berlin money and go to the opera”.
“I couldn’t read or write before college, I could have easily fallen off the perch but it all came together,” she said. “That’s when I got to know Schubert and Shakespeare.”
She said as a young person the slightest encouragement or a kind word would motivate her.
“I was in West Berlin when refugees from the East arrived,” she said.
“My passion to help them was quite clear…we’re all responsible for each other.”
Dagmar arrived in Australia at the age of 19 without a word of English, and her first stop was Launceston, Tasmania, where two of her brothers had already emigrated.
“I worked for a family and then a café, and I avoided German people to help pick up English,” she said.
“Someone asked for ‘rolled oats’ one morning and I didn’t know what it was so I gave him Weet-bix.”
Dagmar first learnt about Warburton after she had been working for a garage in Melbourne.
“I was young and gorgeous and they would put me in a white mini skirt, white boots and a blue jacket and I would sell this product to the Launching Place garage,” she said.
“Eventually I came up to Warburton and would sit by the river thinking that these people were so lucky.”
After a weekend holiday in Reefton, Dagmar and her husband Klaus moved to Warburton permanently.
She was president of the Yarra Ranges Film Society for four years, and knew the value of contacts and networking.
She was keen to support upcoming filmmakers and approached the Victorian College of the Arts.
When she told them she wanted to screen student’s short films during the Warburton Film Festival they jumped at the chance, “they gave me all their students’ graduation work”.
She had enticed the late filmmaker Sarah Watts to attend their event, and very nervously asked award-winning filmmaker Paul Cox the next year.
“I just asked him if he would come and he came…the smile on my face, you couldn’t wipe it off,” she said.
Dagmar said she wanted to see a film made in Warburton, and she eventually got a call from a director thinking of using the town in her new film, hence last year’s Surviving Georgia.
Dagmar volunteered on the set and organised the extras, even making a cameo appearance in the film.
Her current interest lies in the philosophy of Koha Community Café, run on Thursday nights in Yarra Junction.
“I stood there the first night and thought ‘where is the roster?’ Do we have these volunteers’ contacts’, so I knew that was one thing I could do,” she said.
“From my point of view I had just retired from the Film Society and I wasn’t going to take on any more community work.
“But Koha has been so fulfilling and the amount of people you get to meet, it’s like belonging to a family.
“It doesn’t take much for me to get passionate…there’ll be something else, but at the moment I’m still enjoying Koha.”
Women of Interest is a community initiative supported by Upper Yarra Community Enterprise, Upper Yarra Community House and Upper Yarra U3A.
The next Woman of Interest will be CEO of Upper Yarra Community House Sally Brennan, who is passionate about education, particularly for young teenagers and those who have difficulty fitting into mainstream education.
Sally will speak at the Yarra Junction Library at 2pm on Saturday 3 March.
