John Linton
We will have a family lunch at home later today which will be a token 'nod' to the meaning of the public holiday bestowed to mark the foundation of modern Australia. I will be the only migrant at that 'event' my father in law being a multi-generation Australian making my wife and our children even more multi-generational and my eldest son's girlfriend is of a similar background.
I was fortunate enough, though I'm not sure that was the way I saw it at the time, to arrive in this country with the equivalent of a few hundred dollars in 'my pocket' a few months short of my 18th birthday knowing no-one at all in this huge country and not even having any contacts to give some basic direction. I didn't see anything particularly wrong with that then and I'm certainly not complaining about it now (though I now, with children of my own, realise how very wrong it was).
I found myself a job (via the ads in the SMH) it was for a "Retail Executive Trainee" which actually meant sweeping the floors, cleaning the windows and moving boxes at Coles (it may have been Woolworths) at Maroubra Junction and after some weeks at the then equivalent of a back packer's hostel (but with much older people) moved in to share with three other males at a unit a hundred meters away from Maroubra Beach (also close to the bus stop that took me to my job) and again via the SMH ads.
So within a couple of weeks of arriving in Australia I had found PARADISE. I lived next to a great surf beach, I had three good new friends, I had a job, I was learning to surf and apart from teaching me to surf and drink endless middies at the Maroubra Bay Hotel my new friends introduced me to an endless stream of aspiring 'Gidgets' all of whom seemed to be blonde, tanned and to wear practically nothing (for those days) on and off the beach.
What more could any 17 year old immature male ask for?
Of course it couldn't last - and it didn't. Having to walk past the beach every week day morning to get a bus to go floor sweeping was too often interrupted by one or more of my new found friends waving to me saying there were better things to do on sunny summer's days - which of course was inarguable - and so after repeated warnings for non-attendance I was fired from my floor sweeping job as unreliable and inept (and who could argue with that assessment?). And so I found myself without a job, without any money and pretty soon, as I couldn't pay my share of the rent, without a roof over my head.
So my first, very painful lesson learned, I went on over the next few years learning ever more lessons, some even more painful, but also I saw more of my adopted country and fell ever more deeply in love with it - particularly in those days the towns and properties of the NSW Central West and its many, many very kind people who took pity on the skinny young boy with the odd accent who was so far from his family. Early on in my second job (which I managed to hold onto for much longer than my first job) I regularly visited Cooma then in the last days of the construction of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and due to hotel/motel accommodation shortages spent many nights in one or other of the dormitories built to house the workers on the scheme. Not a lot to do in those days at night in the SM so I sat around listening to the many, many stories of the backgrounds and hopes and dreams of the Yugoslavs, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, Germans and almost every other European nationality that were working there. In their different ways they all had a similar/same view of Australia as I did and I still remember some of the people I met on those freezing nights where I learned to drink Slivovitz and its many variations (some of which may actually have been made in a commercial distillery somewhere where someone checked the alcohol content).
It went on from there - magical experiences with more than a leavening of 'disasters' but always more opportunities to help recover from the 'bad times'. And above everything else; always really great people everywhere I have ever been in Australia who give so much of themselves to others without considering that there would be any other way of living.
So my "love" of Australia increased each year I have lived here - not in the sentimental/sloppy ways of "bringing a tear to my eye" when I hear the national anthem (the words of Advance Australia Fair actually make me cringe) nor do I get "a thrill" when I see the "red roofs of Sydney from the air" or even the harbour bridge and opera house when returning from overseas. I certainly don't share the xenophobic hysteria which ruins (for me) watching most international sporting events in Australia (and which might well explain my passion for AFL since the VFL days?).
After living in Australia for over 40 years I do love the country in a deep and unshakable way and am very happy to do whatever I can (with my very limited abilities) to give something back to a country that has given me everything.
So, I will raise a glass later today, privately so as not to embarrass my family, to Australia and will continue to be grateful that I was lucky enough to 'find' such an extraordinarily wonderful place so early in my life.
So......To Australia - a truly great place to live and grow.