Except for two periods of 18 months each, eight years apart, I have not lived in my country of birth, England, since the late '70s. My accent, though not as full-blooded as Gardening Australia’s Peter Cundall, is definitely from "oop North". While old school friends say I sound Aussie—it is that questioning lilt—English people here who I may be meeting for the first time will engage me in what I call Brit-to-Brits, conspiratorial conversations where it is assumed I will support England in the Ashes (I do not).
Coffee shop owners at Circular Quay think I am a tourist, yet I am an Australian citizen of 14 years, a victim of what so many migrants know: you are neither 100 per cent one thing, nor 100 per cent the other.
The "where you come from" part of everyone's emotional history is truncated as a migrant. Even if most of your family and friends also emigrate here (mine did not), your life starts again in a new country. And in a country of migrants this happens a lot.
Federal Liberal Party backbencher Petro Georgiou wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of the "Australian character that is fundamentally accepting of people trying to make a go of it, especially when we come to know them as individuals". Novelist Sophie Masson remembers her French migrant father enjoying the informality and anonymity of being in Australia where "you were free to be yourself".
Much as I would whole-heartedly endorse the openness and ready acceptance most Australians have for others, I have also found a surprising contrast, a closeness to family and sibling networks wherever this is physically possible by location.
I am an only child, and besides occasionally playing with a bevy of distant cousins around the same age, was usually the youngest in a world of great aunts and uncles, Germanic Ashkenazi Jews prone to high teas with kuchen and meringues. I have never since gravitated to big family gatherings. Nevertheless, in Australia I am continually struck, almost enviously, by the number of close-knit groups, either family or long-term friends who cut across class, race, gender, even length of time here because migrants often move en masse and end up in the same street.
There is a divide between people whose autobiography is split by geography—interstate and international—and those with ready-made cohorts built up gradually and jealously guarded, who remember that dreadful or amazing or