I knew something had shifted when I caught myself referring to Australian competitors at the last Commonwealth Games as 'our athletes.'
I had been living in Melbourne for nearly six years by then, long eligible to apply for citizenship. When so many people would envy this privilege, why did I not jump at the chance as soon as I could?
It was because I was still feeling caught in an imaginary homeland. Salman Rushdie refers to this peculiar space in which migrants dwell, where they no longer feel entirely at home in their native land yet remain somewhat an outsider in their adopted one. It is not an easy landscape to navigate.
Certain things made it harder for me.
I arrived in December 2000. The following year, a Pakistani refugee self-immolated in front of Parliament after his application for his family was rejected. A Norwegian freighter was refused entry after rescuing hundreds of Afghans in international waters. Not long after this, asylum seekers were accused of throwing children overboard.
It was also the year when two planes slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York. The seismic waves spread outward. In broad daylight on an inner Melbourne street, a woman had her hijab yanked off her head by a stranger. Such tensions erupted a few years later on the beach of Cronulla.
These events had nothing to do with me, but I absorbed them. I am brown-skinned. Though not a Muslim, I have an Arabic name. Most of all, I was not born here.
I was eligible for citizenship, and on some level desired it, but was equally certain that it would be no protection against somebody on the street who decides that I do not belong. The political language at the time did nothing to invalidate such views.
Thus, my initial vision of a sun-dappled, enlightened country was replaced by shadow. It darkened further in my readings about the Stolen Generations and the conditions in which many Indigenous Australians live. I encountered the urban poverty that lay hidden.
I grappled with these things as I made a life for myself. I got married, worked for youth organisations, gained a teaching qualification, and started teaching at a state school.
I was politically aware but detached, standing at a