Chapter Four: Finding warmth

In 1994, our family's first real home in Australia was a small flat in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Fitzroy today looks almost nothing like it did back then. In the nineties, it had a rougher edge to it, home to plenty of other migrant and working-class communities, all trying to make ends meet in their own way. Our flat had thin walls, thin enough that even a whispered conversation in the next room could be heard clear as day. A kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, where my father would still find room to cure his own beef jerky via the window, sixteen floors up in a Fitzroy high-rise. Cold that crept in through every gap in the window frames and stayed there, even with the heater running.

Our parents had never known a winter like it. Where they'd come from, cold wasn't something that settled into your bones for months at a time. It was a season you noticed and then moved past. In Melbourne, it simply didn't leave. Our mother has told us, more than once, about the particular ache of being cold not just outside, but inside the flat too, cold in a way that no extra blanket seemed to fix.

They tried. For a while, they genuinely tried to make Fitzroy work. New language, new currency, new customs, new weather, all at once, and somewhere in the middle of learning all of it, the cold became the one thing that felt impossible to learn to live with. Our father, we're told, was the one who first said it out loud, maybe we're in the wrong part of this country.

So our parents and along with our cousins did something that still strikes us as remarkably brave, even now. With now, three small children, no real savings, and only a rough idea of what they were heading toward, our parents packed up what little they had and moved north, to Queensland, chasing sun the way other people chase opportunity.

What they found, when they arrived in Queensland, was warmth, and almost nothing else, a subtropical breeze that felt, for the first time in years, like home.

We grew up hearing about those early Queensland years the way some families talk about a difficult but formative trip, with a strange mix of hardship and quiet pride. There was no furniture in that first home our parents rented. None. Just bare floors and bare walls, and a family slowly, slowly filling the space with whatever they could find, borrow, or eventually afford.

It wasn't a hardship our parents complained about, even then. It was simply the shape their life had taken, and compared to where they'd come from, an empty room with no furniture in it was still, in its own way, a kind of freedom. No queue. No camp boundary. No waiting for someone else's decision about their future. Just an empty house that was entirely, finally, theirs to fill.

They filled it slowly, the way most things in our family seem to happen, without urgency, without complaint, one new chair and one good year at a time. The cold of Fitzroy became a story we'd tell each other, almost fondly, once enough warmth and enough years had passed to make it bearable to look back on.

We think now about how much of what Norwynd would eventually stand for, slowness, intention, finding warmth in simple things, making do with care rather than rushing toward more, was quietly laid down in this chapter. Not as a philosophy our parents read about or chose deliberately. Just as the only way they knew how to live, in a minimal home, in a sunburnt state, a long way from everything they'd once known.