I think the movie Belfast would resonate with you and some of your readers, Ryan. The wonderful Van Morrison sound track aside, it is a tender and moving film about 'leaving' and how difficult it is. As Buddy and his family leave Belfast, I thought of my grandparents, my uncles and my father (as a little Calabrian boy!) leaving their neighbourhood in Palmi in post WW2 Italy - and what a wrench it must have been, knowing they would likely never see their family, neighbours and homeland again. For the first time, I felt almost overwhelming sadness for my Pop and Nonna. What motivated them to go? Poverty. Unemployment. The call of a 'better life'. I wish they were still alive so that I could ask them if they found that 'better life' for themselves. I recently read a book called The Girl Who Left written by Debra Gavranich. It is a daughter's semi-fictionalised story of her mother's life. In the early 1950s, Marija emigrates to a cane farm in Mossman, Australia, as a 19 year old 'proxy bride' from a village in the middle of a small Croatian island off the coast of Split. During WW2, the village was occupied by the Italians and the Nazis. The residents lived in fear as the Partisan activities meant reprisals against the villagers. It gives an insight into life in Croatia at that time - the poverty and subsistence farming and life under communist Tito following the war - and why families were willing to give away their daughters as 'proxy brides' to Croatian men living in other countries, many of whom they had never met. It's heavy. And we, as the descendants of these daring 'ordinary' people, perhaps bear a little bit of their (great) loss, which might explain our yearning for a distant land. Even if we love this wide brown land of ours with its wild and rugged coast line that is now our 'home'.
Ryan: How movingly you present that sense of otherness and the human need to find the roots of one's existence. I grew up in rural NSW only occasionally seeing relatives in the big smoke - a paternal Scottish Granny, and a maternal English grand-father - and raised within a fundamentalist Protestant sect which was entirely about being separate from the world - and certainly not being yoked to it (via marriage to someone outside "the faith"). Friends and neighbours - especially in that rural town - were more recently from distant lands - Italy, China, Germany, The Netherlands, England and Scotland - and in the assimilationist days of the early 1960s a Gamilaraay family as neighbours, too. Who am I? A bullying step-father did not make it an easy pathway to understanding my place but "escape" early on at 16 to Sydney U gave me space - studies - including of History - to think more broadly - and the determination to travel - to my grand-father's Kent briefly - when I was 23 - finding relatives - unsure what it all meant. And then again staying in different parts of Europe and in the UK - learning more of family - aged 27, 28 - still to young in some senses - so not until I was in my latter 30s did I more thoroughly explore the paternal family roots (East Anglia) and my Granny's Scottish Borders family backgrounds - kinship lines untangling into the kinds of narratives which gave a sense of the rootedness so lacking in the my childhood/teenage years. This is part of who I am - where I came from - a glimpse of my own possibilities as I examined the kinds of lives of so many out of which my own existence had sprung. There were moments I thought that I could easily live in those ancestral places - but the limitations - of weather, of class - of political contexts - revealed to me that I was a product of here - this Terra Australis and the effort to reconcile this life in an invaded land with my uncovered First Australians kinship links became very important as a kind of anchor. Nonetheless that connection was made even clearer when I spent some 16 years in Japan - so by being outside - the feeling became stronger that I was a product of this landscape, this land - a land over which I have travelled most corners, too. I remain in contact with my cousins in Scotland, in England - other parts of the world where "family" has scattered to - but I feel myself Australian.
It is funny how our own lives are an untangling, or a making sense of consequences of decisions taken buy our ancestors 100s of years previously. It is an interesting process.
Your story really struck home to me as I am the daughter of a WW11 Polish migrant, and due to the circumstances of my father leaving am only now just enjoying a connection to Poland. I have experienced all of the thoughts and desires you talk about too for my fathers homeland. But as you say, maybe it’s not about geography but the values, way of living, attitudes etc that are our inheritance, and give us our sense of connection and belonging. And you can have that anywhere:)
We emigrated to NZ 14 years ago. So we are the ones to give up everything and move to the other side of the world from the UK. It is hard, but obviously we would never go back the UK, which sounds like a crazy place at the moment!! We left to give our children a better place to live. When things are hard, which they have been, we find comfort in that. I do miss my friends, as we really haven’t made that many here. We have 3 Kiwi grandchildren now, so we feel like we put down the roots. In this mad world I do feel proud we were brave enough to do it!
I see a lot of similarities between Italian and Japanese culture...a really strong sense of culture. Does that help or hinder when you move around the world?
A sense of belonging (particularly in relation to strong group/“clique” relationships) does discourage you from leaving where you are. I know so many people who don’t leave where they have been because of fear of losing those connections. I never liked feeling of that ‘inward’ force but I do always crave for sense of belonging. So weird! I think I’m looking for somewhere around the middle of a north-south magnet.
Beautifully written Ryan. I believe that we all belong no-where, and therefore we all belong everywhere.
When we were on our worldly bike trip ....people would call out all of the time...."where are you from, where are you from, where are you from"? Marty got so sick of it he wrote on his left pannier "I am from Earth OK!".
Ha! I think that question shows how important place is in determining who we are, people want to peg you, find a connection. In Australia I've always found that hard to answer, overseas a much easier answer. But yes, does get repetitive!
"Giovanni wasn’t just living any dream, he was living my dream."
Oh, I felt that in the marrow of my bones. Migration often comes with sacrifices, but I think the things we give up now can lead to bountiful gifts in the future.
Very true. I wonder if our ancestors did it more for family and today we do it for ourselves? Today maybe more pull factors and back then were push factors? I don't really have an answer. Just pondering.
Living in New Zealand and being born in the Netherlands, I find myself with 2 countries where I feel equally at home. I'm sorry that Lupari didn't feel like home to you, but at least you have explored your roots. I am lucky in that I still have loads of uncles, aunts and cousins in Holland, which means that when I visit, I am not treated like a visitor. But I also relate to what you are saying Ryan, about an obsession with people's roots. This is even more so in New Zealand. Maori have a thing called a pepeha which is a form of introduction, but more than that, it is a way of sharing meaningful information, especially for people who feel a strong connection to where they come from. People say their name, their tribal affiliation, their waka or canoe, their mountain, their river. My canoe was an immigrant ship, we didn't have mountains and I didn't live super close to a river. But I do have my people. It takes courage to make a home in a new country, and leave your roots behind. We are all migrants in New Zealand, some came here hundreds of years ago, some more recently. We all have the gift of migration, even though sometimes we might wish that we hadn't. I dare say though, out of all the countries in the world that I would want to live and raise a family in, NZ and Aussie would be numbers 1 and 2.
It's great that you are able to collect and engage with so many threads of culture. I think that is a real benefit of migration, once you get comfortable with that.
Very moving piece Ryan. Being the child of migrants myself, and moving between rural SA and the city while growing up, your piece really resonated with me. When I'm home I'm "other" and when I go to where my parents are from I am "other"...so where am I not "other" and not passing through? The people, the relatives, the place, the memories - all these components contribute to how I feel about where I belong but where are all the ties - the bits that tether? Maybe we carry them inside us, and as you said we are wherever we choose to be and make our own community.
Ryan - you have firmly hit another nail squarely on the head. Once we realize that we are ALL migrants, the only difference being when do we draw the line separating migrant from native, we free ourselves to find our own communities. These communities, for thee and me and countless other wanderers, is not geographically limited. You are family, community, neighbor and friend no matter where your feet find themselves. Thanks for explaining us to ourselves.
Hello neighbour! Thanks for dropping by. Good point about separating migrant from native. Surely the term migrant becomes redundant once the actual migration is finished? Hope you are well!
You’ll forever be part of my community Ryan, from long ago days chasing lizards, school yard endeavours and of course, our shared love of cricket. I know wherever we meet, I always feel connected to that place and that time
I think the movie Belfast would resonate with you and some of your readers, Ryan. The wonderful Van Morrison sound track aside, it is a tender and moving film about 'leaving' and how difficult it is. As Buddy and his family leave Belfast, I thought of my grandparents, my uncles and my father (as a little Calabrian boy!) leaving their neighbourhood in Palmi in post WW2 Italy - and what a wrench it must have been, knowing they would likely never see their family, neighbours and homeland again. For the first time, I felt almost overwhelming sadness for my Pop and Nonna. What motivated them to go? Poverty. Unemployment. The call of a 'better life'. I wish they were still alive so that I could ask them if they found that 'better life' for themselves. I recently read a book called The Girl Who Left written by Debra Gavranich. It is a daughter's semi-fictionalised story of her mother's life. In the early 1950s, Marija emigrates to a cane farm in Mossman, Australia, as a 19 year old 'proxy bride' from a village in the middle of a small Croatian island off the coast of Split. During WW2, the village was occupied by the Italians and the Nazis. The residents lived in fear as the Partisan activities meant reprisals against the villagers. It gives an insight into life in Croatia at that time - the poverty and subsistence farming and life under communist Tito following the war - and why families were willing to give away their daughters as 'proxy brides' to Croatian men living in other countries, many of whom they had never met. It's heavy. And we, as the descendants of these daring 'ordinary' people, perhaps bear a little bit of their (great) loss, which might explain our yearning for a distant land. Even if we love this wide brown land of ours with its wild and rugged coast line that is now our 'home'.
Thanks for sharing this Donna. I'm going to keep an eye out for these movies you mention. I agree, strange how we feel that loss throughout the years.
Ryan: How movingly you present that sense of otherness and the human need to find the roots of one's existence. I grew up in rural NSW only occasionally seeing relatives in the big smoke - a paternal Scottish Granny, and a maternal English grand-father - and raised within a fundamentalist Protestant sect which was entirely about being separate from the world - and certainly not being yoked to it (via marriage to someone outside "the faith"). Friends and neighbours - especially in that rural town - were more recently from distant lands - Italy, China, Germany, The Netherlands, England and Scotland - and in the assimilationist days of the early 1960s a Gamilaraay family as neighbours, too. Who am I? A bullying step-father did not make it an easy pathway to understanding my place but "escape" early on at 16 to Sydney U gave me space - studies - including of History - to think more broadly - and the determination to travel - to my grand-father's Kent briefly - when I was 23 - finding relatives - unsure what it all meant. And then again staying in different parts of Europe and in the UK - learning more of family - aged 27, 28 - still to young in some senses - so not until I was in my latter 30s did I more thoroughly explore the paternal family roots (East Anglia) and my Granny's Scottish Borders family backgrounds - kinship lines untangling into the kinds of narratives which gave a sense of the rootedness so lacking in the my childhood/teenage years. This is part of who I am - where I came from - a glimpse of my own possibilities as I examined the kinds of lives of so many out of which my own existence had sprung. There were moments I thought that I could easily live in those ancestral places - but the limitations - of weather, of class - of political contexts - revealed to me that I was a product of here - this Terra Australis and the effort to reconcile this life in an invaded land with my uncovered First Australians kinship links became very important as a kind of anchor. Nonetheless that connection was made even clearer when I spent some 16 years in Japan - so by being outside - the feeling became stronger that I was a product of this landscape, this land - a land over which I have travelled most corners, too. I remain in contact with my cousins in Scotland, in England - other parts of the world where "family" has scattered to - but I feel myself Australian.
It is funny how our own lives are an untangling, or a making sense of consequences of decisions taken buy our ancestors 100s of years previously. It is an interesting process.
Your story really struck home to me as I am the daughter of a WW11 Polish migrant, and due to the circumstances of my father leaving am only now just enjoying a connection to Poland. I have experienced all of the thoughts and desires you talk about too for my fathers homeland. But as you say, maybe it’s not about geography but the values, way of living, attitudes etc that are our inheritance, and give us our sense of connection and belonging. And you can have that anywhere:)
I find it also connects us back to them in some way. Even, as in my case, I never even met them. Thanks for reading and sharing your story. RB
We emigrated to NZ 14 years ago. So we are the ones to give up everything and move to the other side of the world from the UK. It is hard, but obviously we would never go back the UK, which sounds like a crazy place at the moment!! We left to give our children a better place to live. When things are hard, which they have been, we find comfort in that. I do miss my friends, as we really haven’t made that many here. We have 3 Kiwi grandchildren now, so we feel like we put down the roots. In this mad world I do feel proud we were brave enough to do it!
Good on you for making a change, and yes, it is never easy relocating. I hope you find what you need in NZ. Thanks for reading!
Resonates so well with me! Creating, not finding, your own place, your identity👏
I see a lot of similarities between Italian and Japanese culture...a really strong sense of culture. Does that help or hinder when you move around the world?
A sense of belonging (particularly in relation to strong group/“clique” relationships) does discourage you from leaving where you are. I know so many people who don’t leave where they have been because of fear of losing those connections. I never liked feeling of that ‘inward’ force but I do always crave for sense of belonging. So weird! I think I’m looking for somewhere around the middle of a north-south magnet.
Beautifully written, yet again, Ryan.
Thank you Amy.
Beautifully written Ryan. I believe that we all belong no-where, and therefore we all belong everywhere.
When we were on our worldly bike trip ....people would call out all of the time...."where are you from, where are you from, where are you from"? Marty got so sick of it he wrote on his left pannier "I am from Earth OK!".
Ha! I think that question shows how important place is in determining who we are, people want to peg you, find a connection. In Australia I've always found that hard to answer, overseas a much easier answer. But yes, does get repetitive!
"Giovanni wasn’t just living any dream, he was living my dream."
Oh, I felt that in the marrow of my bones. Migration often comes with sacrifices, but I think the things we give up now can lead to bountiful gifts in the future.
Very true. I wonder if our ancestors did it more for family and today we do it for ourselves? Today maybe more pull factors and back then were push factors? I don't really have an answer. Just pondering.
These days, it's more for escaping political instability, climate change and persecution for gender/sexual orientations.
As always, excellent.
If your grandfather hadn't left Lipari, you might not have been born!
Well I definitely have that to be grateful for!
Living in New Zealand and being born in the Netherlands, I find myself with 2 countries where I feel equally at home. I'm sorry that Lupari didn't feel like home to you, but at least you have explored your roots. I am lucky in that I still have loads of uncles, aunts and cousins in Holland, which means that when I visit, I am not treated like a visitor. But I also relate to what you are saying Ryan, about an obsession with people's roots. This is even more so in New Zealand. Maori have a thing called a pepeha which is a form of introduction, but more than that, it is a way of sharing meaningful information, especially for people who feel a strong connection to where they come from. People say their name, their tribal affiliation, their waka or canoe, their mountain, their river. My canoe was an immigrant ship, we didn't have mountains and I didn't live super close to a river. But I do have my people. It takes courage to make a home in a new country, and leave your roots behind. We are all migrants in New Zealand, some came here hundreds of years ago, some more recently. We all have the gift of migration, even though sometimes we might wish that we hadn't. I dare say though, out of all the countries in the world that I would want to live and raise a family in, NZ and Aussie would be numbers 1 and 2.
It's great that you are able to collect and engage with so many threads of culture. I think that is a real benefit of migration, once you get comfortable with that.
Very moving piece Ryan. Being the child of migrants myself, and moving between rural SA and the city while growing up, your piece really resonated with me. When I'm home I'm "other" and when I go to where my parents are from I am "other"...so where am I not "other" and not passing through? The people, the relatives, the place, the memories - all these components contribute to how I feel about where I belong but where are all the ties - the bits that tether? Maybe we carry them inside us, and as you said we are wherever we choose to be and make our own community.
Maybe there are no ties and that allows us to move freely between cultures when we allow ourselves to do or when we stop seeking the ties.
Ryan - you have firmly hit another nail squarely on the head. Once we realize that we are ALL migrants, the only difference being when do we draw the line separating migrant from native, we free ourselves to find our own communities. These communities, for thee and me and countless other wanderers, is not geographically limited. You are family, community, neighbor and friend no matter where your feet find themselves. Thanks for explaining us to ourselves.
Hello neighbour! Thanks for dropping by. Good point about separating migrant from native. Surely the term migrant becomes redundant once the actual migration is finished? Hope you are well!
You’ll forever be part of my community Ryan, from long ago days chasing lizards, school yard endeavours and of course, our shared love of cricket. I know wherever we meet, I always feel connected to that place and that time
That is true. There is definitely community in shared history.