Migrants All, from Way Back

Migrants All, from Way Back

 

Today’s Big Problem for Europe

In the papers here this weekend there is a report from Europe that those nations are adopting tougher methods to sort out the flood of migrants currently arriving. Are they ‘economic migrants’, largely from poor African nations, or are they refugees from war zones in the Middle East? The first part of the plan Europe hopes to put in place is to send back the ‘economic migrants’. 

I just can’t imagine how that will turn out.

Recent Migrants,  from Bournemouth and Alexandria

 

Takis and I are migrants. I came to Australia from England, and my home town at that time was Bournemouth on the south coast. I came as ten-pound Pom, one of a number of young people who were looking for work and families looking to settle in warmer climes. 

I got a job as a teacher and began work two days after landing.

Takis had arrived on these shores a few years before me. He left Alexandria, Egypt, when nationalism was stirring and foreigners began moving out. His grandfather along with many other Greeks had been living in that country for several generations. Takis did not want to go back to war-weary Greece as most of his family chose to do. Instead he travelled out to Australia. He began looking for work, trying carpentry and bookkeeping for the national railways before setting up his own business.

Past Great Movements of People

There has always been a movement of peoples, from one country to another. Sometimes this is just one or two adventurers, sometimes a few who can see better opportunities elsewhere, sometimes a small flow of displaced people, and sometimes very large groups who are seeking refuge, such as happened after the second world war when boat loads of displaced Italians and Greeks arrived in Australia.

 

If I look back at the story of Takis’ family I see that it is the story of migrants. His grandfather left the island of Lemnos as a very young teenager. The people on the island at that time were suffering badly, homes with dirt floors, no shoes and hardly enough food to feed the family. George found a passage in a boat, probably working his way, and arrived in Alexandria to find work in a grocers shop run by another Lemnian. He later married the grocers’ daughter and set up his own businesses in that city.

What is a Migrant's Motivation

 

Some are looking for work opportunities

Some are seeking refuge

Some just want a better life than they had back home

Some are traders who'll settle where they find work

Some are students who've come to study

And some are expats, ‘returning migrants’. These are nostalgic for the place they once left and they want to 'return home'. Even though things may not be as they imagined nostalgia and a sense of belonging has brought them back. In the weekend paper I read a review of a book just published. It is a novel about a Jewish woman from Melbourne, the daughter of Holocaust survivors who returns to live in the difficult situation that is Israel today. 

It reminded me a little of our situation returning to Greece, a country that is also in chaos, though of a different kind. 

Can we Claim a Country?

 

Here in Australia we have peace, and a general degree of prosperity, and a very controlled number of new migrants, yet we have agitators who fear these new arrivals. Again, in the weekend news, there was the story of an anti-Islam rally in a country town called Bendigo. The rallying call was against the building of a proposed mosque.

Always an Older Country

How strange for me, a migrant myself, married to a migrant, both of us with children who were born in this country, to hear of people calling out ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi’, as if they were the ground swell and whole composition of this country. 

 

Especially when, that same night on the TV, I watched an Aboriginal dance company perform a moving dance about times, long, long, long, before all these self proclaimed ‘Real Australians’ arrived.

And Before, for Us?

Both sides of my family would claim to be English, but I’ve been told about a heritage that goes back to France, and the Norman invasion of England in 1066! And looking at my mother and her birth name I’d say she would have Saxon forebears.

While Takis’ family names tell their stories too. His father was Statiras, and the family came from Yannina. The name meaning weighing scales, and they were probably merchants in that city. His mother’s family came from Lemnos and with the name Pandazolou indicating some Turkish input I would think.