Chapter Three: Australian soil
There is one photograph that sits above all the others in our family's story. We don't need to be told which one. Every sibling, every cousin, every aunty who's ever flicked through the old albums stops on this same page.
It's our parents, on the day they first arrived in Melbourne. Tarmac under their feet for the first time in a country called Australia. Between them, almost everything they owned, blankets slung across their backs, because there had been no room and no money for anything more solid. Our mother carries a baby on her back. That baby is me. Her arms hold what little we'd brought from the camp, everything our family owned, bundled and carried across an ocean. Beside her, my older sister walks quietly, her eyes drifting toward the faces gathered at the gates. Faces she half-recognises, the way a child does when a memory lives in the body before the mind can name it. Around them, people are waving, crying, reaching toward each other with the particular relief of those who had not been certain they would ever stand in the same place again.
My father can be seen smiling in that photograph, and the reason is something you wouldn't know just from looking. Waiting for us in Australia, after years of separation, were my mother's first cousins, the people who had sponsored our family and made it possible for us to call Australia our new home. After everything it had taken to get there, our family was about to be reunited on solid ground, in a country none of us had chosen so much as been given a chance to enter. That's the smile in the photograph. Not relief at simply arriving, but the particular joy of finding family already standing on the other side, waiting.
We try to imagine it sometimes. The cold air on skin used to a different climate entirely. The strange shapes of English words spoken too fast to follow. The particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from one hard day, but from years of hard days finally arriving somewhere. Our parents didn't speak the language. They didn't know a single street name. They had no home waiting, no job lined up. What they had was each other, two small children, and whatever they'd managed to carry on their backs.
We think about that photograph as the true beginning of everything Norwynd would eventually become, not because they knew it then, but because of what it captured without meaning to. A family moving forward with almost nothing, because forward was the only direction left. Toward an unfamiliar country, in hope of something better on the other side of the journey.
There is no triumphant ending to this chapter. No music swelling as they step through the arrivals gate. Just a beginning, uncertain, under-resourced, and entirely theirs. The kind of beginning most of us, looking at our own comfortable lives now, can barely picture starting from.
We grew up with this photograph tucked into the same album, never far from view. As children we didn't fully understand what we were looking at. We do now. It is, quite simply, the moment our family's life in Australia began, cold tarmac, borrowed blankets, a baby on a back, and a small hand held tightly onto our mother's shirt.
