If you close your eyes, there is no knowing where you are; so it has been said, at any rate. When I close my eyes, I am most often in one of two places: Melbourne, or the Greek village where I have lived on and off for the last 30 years.
When I was first in Greece, and had come to accept that I would not be returning to Australia any time soon, I would close my eyes and see not rocks, tufted mountains, olive trees and cypresses, but a maze of suburban streets edged by clipped nature strips, each of which had a prunus tree planted in its centre. It was one way of coping with the pain of migration.
Now that I'm in Melbourne on yet another visit, I close my eyes, and am immediately 10,000 miles away, wondering how my two Greece-resident sons are faring. My eldest, who lives in Melbourne, wonders this, too. Greek life is very hard: again.
My sons are no longer little boys, but how clearly I remember the way they were. The third was born in Athens, but his brothers had been born in Melbourne, and migration was the last thing they had expected: they were still only seven and five when this happened.
Yet for them, as for me, transplantation was a benign experience compared with that of so many people. We were welcomed by a family, we were not a different colour, and our dress did not distinguish us markedly from the local population, even though I was the only jeans-wearing woman in town at that time.
We were not escaping from war, likely death or persecution. We had not been detained in a refugee camp, had never endured squalor or hunger, and had not been threatened with a move to yet another very foreign place, where we might have had to face the prospect of more suffering.
The ABC news is providing background as I write: the High Court is in session in Melbourne, in an attempt to prevent the Federal Government from going ahead with its plan to send a batch of asylum seekers to Malaysia. In another report, a seven-year-old child refugee is refusing to eat.
I am not sure why this incident is deemed newsworthy: the only wonder is that the report mentions just one child. My eldest son had a session of not eating, despite more favourable circumstances. And indeed, his migration