Reflections of the 11,120,000th Australian

Coincidentally and connectedly the conversation of the nation is alive with the discussion of population and of the immigration intake. As a migrant myself (when I arrived in January 1965 I became, roughly, the 11,120,000th Australian) I prick up my white, Anglo-Saxon ears whenever migration is discussed.

Of course, because we have truth and reason on our side, I am with those calling for a more populous Australia. In recent days outspoken, informed, level-headed champions of a bigger Australia have included Reserve Bank of Australia governor Governor Philip Lowe (he says strong population growth helps make Australia younger and more economically robust) and (a star is born!) much-in-media-demand ANU demographer Dr Liz Allen, a model of bushy-tailed positivity. Champions of a more shrivelled, bonsaied Australia include, needless to say, Pauline Hanson.

But, rising above the mere mathematics of the population-immigration debate (number crunchers fancy the number of visas granted in 2017-18 is likely to be 165,000) I have been thinking about the whole wondrous phenomenon of migration, our species’ need of it, hunger for it and aptitude for it.

When you are a thinking migrant, and especially when you are a thinking migrant of a certain age (carbon dating estimates my age as between 71 and 73) your olde decision to migrate may begin to haunt you a little. You may marvel at it and in amazement gasp to yourself “Why did I do it?” You may ask yourself what your life would have been if you’d not uprooted yourself but had stayed with your roots deep in the loam of your homeland.

In the 1960s was the migrant itch in my urchin feet (sensibly shod in multiply-darned school uniform socks and in sensible, second-hand school shoes) the same itch that propelled our barefoot ancient ancestors out of Africa (to then go and live everywhere in the world) some 65,000 years ago?

Today I marvel that no English government authorities ever took the immature teenage Ian aside to ask him if he was sure about this migration thing. Had he thought it through? Did he have the foggiest idea what it might mean, at his tender age, at any age, to swap countries, to forsake the familiar, to skedaddle off into the unknown?

How and why was I, so young and immature and undereducated, allowed to do what my impulses dictated? Why did the English government, perhaps even Her Majesty the Queen, not intervene, hanging on to me, treasuring me, forbidding me to weaken England by my migration at least until I’d come of age (about 35 for a decision so important)?

I have a fondness for all migrants, and hope and pray that every one of every annual batch of 165,000 finds joy and fulfilment here. But, if I could, I would sit all intending migrants down and caution them (my avuncular cautions almost certainly going in one ear and out the other) that being a migrant may, one day, play with their minds. It may divide the self.

My advice to everyone who doesn’t fully need to migrate would be to be beware. "Home" is not easily left behind. This is especially so if a goodly chunk of a not unhappy childhood has been spent there.

This columnist, more than 50 years after leaving England for Australia, now finds himself a strangely transnational creature. I am not talking about anything as trivial as feeling conflicted about which country wins the Ashes (for me it has always had to be my beloved Australia), but about bigger, deeper matters.

For example (I have just been back in England in my childhood haunts so these feelings are vivid) I realise that all of my significant dead, family and friends, are buried and commemorated in England. I can only afford to visit their graves, talking to them, laying flowers, sprucing up their headstones, every two or three years.

Beware, intending migrants, the sorts of emotional pushes and pulls and yearnings that migrating across the world may have in store for you.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a scenically engaging and dramatic English place, a seaside resort I have always in my writings called Crabtorture Bay (not its real name). And now I find that my heart finds that place so engaging that I am torn between it and my beloved home Canberra (its real name).

Thinking deeply about these things lately I have realised, with a start, that of the five pictures on my study’s walls four are views/artists impressions of Crabtorture Bay. There it is, posed dramatically on tall cliffs overlooking the capricious North Sea.

“What can this mean, this sentimental gallery?” I asked Voss, my dog, for the dear brute shares my picture-decorated study with me.

“Am I somehow subconsciously, emotionally, still living in the corner of England I thought I had left behind me? Is this always the plight of the thinking migrant, everywhere, across the ages? Must migration always divide the self like this, leaving the migrant conflicted, bewildered?”

But Voss remained tight-jowled, leaving me to wrestle alone with my latest bout of MDS (migrant dilemma syndrome).