How did Australia become my second home?

Sydney, ’97. We arrived on her 801 sub-class visa. She purchased me a plush ginger cat from the stopover airport, and at seven years old I understood this toy was my symbol for no return. Australia was forced ‘home’.

I spent years on a school surrounded by mountain ash forest and it’s the landscape and connection to land that keeps me here in my mid-twenties. Melbourne is a strange city, and I know it is because motherlands beckon the majority of us back, in various volumes. Immigration seems my norm now, but in reality, it is a wound I self heal daily.

Gumtree rustling above, the endless trips alone through bush, individual cultures as tightly gripped as I do my Slavic. 300 hundred years of colonisation has annihilated plenty of connection to this land, deeper than any immigrant knows.

My deepest wish is that this can be reversed or preserved. What a true treasure. I cannot even imagine.