Thank you, thank you so much everyone for your amazing and honest comments! I can really feel the love you all have for Australia and it's so refreshing to feel. I'
m wondering why Aus was 12th with your stories! A top five placement seems more apt.
Thanks for sharing too
@Michelle S! I was SO happy to see at least one say 'Hot Cross Bun', you made my day! Haha! If you don't mind, can you share more about why you were an 'accidental' migrant?
Well, Australia was never on my radar, at school, it was that big British island with kangaroos and aboriginals, next to Nouvelle Calédonie, one of our French colonies.. It started in Paris, with me having to choose between cooking lessons and learning German (adult classes) available same day. Chose "German", and was working in an American company. Eventually had to decide: do I go to the USA (had a green card to work as a translator to the United Nations, just needed to sign the contract in hand), or marry my German (actually "Austrian") teacher who intended to go to Australia for 2 years, then on to Japan (apart from being fluent in Russian, Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, Indonesian etc. he also knew Japanese
and he was sent to France, America and Japan for work as he could speak in their language), then back to Europe (was told by several people, including my family, that i was mad to go with him, rather than America
). With both our jobs it enabled us to travel a lot despite being away from everybody and everything and that was the clincher. Just imagine 1968
as a woman, pregnant, was given a mortgage in my own name by a bank (needless to say it was
not an Australian bank), and then was on
fully paid maternity leave for 2months... Yes... I was lucky, felt like the red carpet had been laid for me and certainly not the usual hardship migrant story against all odds. Also contrary to so many women I have a confortable old age despite my husband passing away a few years ago( we had a major car accident in the eighties, his employer stood by him for the 6months he was out of work, and he was helped to go to the office for another 6months... talk about silver lining...). We had in Lightning Ridge an aboriginal bloke putting a branch of Eucalyptus in our car water heater pipe to enable us to go back to Sydney, a Canberran bloke who decided to give us a grand tour of his city in his ute, same with another in Gosford deciding we could not walk that far, in Broken Hill on our way back from Alice Springs the local fireman took us up a hill for sightseeing, and upon me admiring his roses the gardener in charge of the local memorial gave me a bunch of roses that I managed to take all the way back to Sydney on the train, in the Warrumbungle National Park, bogged down, unable to go uphill another ute stopped to help us, the driver dressed to the ninth, with polished black shoes, suit, bow tie steps out in the mud, drive our car out and left "apologizing" because he was due somewhere, we were gobsmacked (including with us an English friend of our daughter just passing in Australia) and
forgot to thank him. Fortunately there was only one decent restaurant in Coonabarabran in those days, where we landed: it was also the place for our saviour's father 80th birthday celebration. Unbeknown to him we shouted (real) Champagne for the whole table, and left without a word. Later in the night he located our car at our motel and left a lovely thank you message that I kept to this day ... We have to say in the mid/late-sixties "migrants and Australian born" were not traipsing around the country as tourists
. I could tell you so many stories about Australian born and migrants of any nationality (English included... yes they were the poms, and had something in common with us... one recommending our daughter learn karate which a few years later may have saved her life or a fate worse ...one evening sitting on a bench waiting for a bus was attacked from behind, she lifted the bloke who landed in front of her and scampered away without a word) who helped us along the way to feel at ease in the place, let alone the stunning country itself (was told by an Australian in the seventies: it so boring nothing in between ... recently Sydney/Adelaide by car and return did not have time to be bored even in my old age).well you asked
never written so much about my experiences in Australia... Yes still love to go back to the other home...
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