Conforming to a well-documented pattern, my father became more conservative as he aged, although he found it hard to admit it. But in an unguarded moment, sometime in the 1980s, he confessed he had grave reservations about Asian immigration.
'A whole way of life is passing away,' he said. 'But that's human history, Dad,' I replied. When I added that I had had a happy childhood, but that I felt Australia had become much more interesting and richer since, largely as a result of immigration, he looked away and changed the subject. He never elaborated on the idea of a whole way of life.
It seems to me that a similar feeling, involving the resentment of change and a longing for the past, figures largely in the cultural and political movements that are currently happening with alarming immediacy in the Western world.
The Leave movement in Britain's Brexit had as a motto: I want my country back. Donald Trump claims he will Make America great again. And my native land has an organisation called, with unconscious irony, Reclaim Australia, which fears both Islam and a threat to 'cultural identity'.
The fear may well be about a loss of privilege as much as anything else, the loss of the security that came with the belief that one's comfortable place in the world was set and would never alter.
How far are these movements and feelings connected with a concept of home? I've recently come across a word I didn't know before, the Welsh word hiraeth. It is apparently difficult to translate, but roughly means a longing for a home that one can never return to; connected with this idea is also the notion that perhaps that home never existed at all.
Perhaps the saying there's no place like home has another truth? Open any collection of quotations and you will find a long list of references to home. One idea is that home is where you started from. Another is that home is childhood recreated.
It would seem, then, that home is a place that you leave behind. Bill Bryson, who is from Des Moines, Iowa, (well, somebody had to be, as he says) considers that you can't beat the telephone company, or make a waiter look at you unless he wants to, and you can never go home again.
"Every migrant, and every ageing person, loses a home and the past: that is simply the way things are."
Then there's