I grew up in an old weatherboard house in Brighton.

My mother was born in the house and still lives there. Our family has resided there for around 100 years now, and my grandfather, and especially my father, rebuilt most of the house over time. We weren’t ‘renovating’, just keeping the house going! Even though I haven’t lived there for more than 30 years, life there is still an integral part of my mental picture of ‘home’.

I’ve done a lot of travelling, but Melbourne is the place I have kept on coming back to. I’m fascinated by how it has changed—for better and for worse—but also by what somehow remains. A definite change for the better is the way that diverse people have managed to find new ways of living together in this city. My mother’s family came to Australia from Ireland in the 1830s, and my father’s family, who were Geordies, arrived here in the 1920s. My best friend since childhood is the son of Greek migrants who arrived in the 1950s. I have a sister-in-law who was born in Japan, and a niece and nephew who have grown up in between the two countries. I’ve lived in Brunswick for nearly 20 years, and my immediate neighbours come from Iran, Argentina, Greece, China, Singapore and Italy. This kind of mixture is such a common Melbourne story that it’s a cliché, but it’s not one we should take for granted. Being at home with each other’s differences is something that we need to celebrate and continue to work at.

One of the special places for me in Melbourne is still the beach at Brighton.

If you stand on what is now called Green Point, you can look across the sweep of the coast, past St. Kilda to the forest of towers that define the 21st century city. What is magical to me is not so much the colourful bathing boxes in the foreground, which are such a magnet for the cameras of tourists and wedding parties, but what they have inadvertently protected: the middens buried in the sand, left by countless generations of Boonwurrung people feasting on shellfish from the reef. This is where I learnt to snorkel when I was growing up, but it wasn’t until much later that I learnt to appreciate its uniqueness. Here you can stand among the ti-tree where the Boonwurrung were standing when the first tall ships came into the bay, and adopt their vantage to look across the beach to land that has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years, onto the city that has grown apace in the last two centuries. The juxtaposition is both rare and challenging.

Will Melbourne still exist in another two centuries, let alone two hundred of them? If it does, it will be because Melbournians learn to better recognize and to benefit from the knowledge and culture of the people of the Kulin nations who have had stewardship of this place for so long.