Migration Can Be a Choice. Belonging Still Comes at a Cost

Not everyone who leaves home is escaping something.

Some leave their homeland because they have to. Others leave because they can. For some, leaving is about survival. For others, it may be work, love, adventure or simply the possibility of a better life.

The reasons are not equal. Neither are the circumstances.
But once you arrive somewhere new, another journey begins.

Sue was 21 and newly married when she boarded a plane from Yorkshire to Australia in 1978.
There was no dramatic reason behind her decision. She speaks fondly of the home and family she left behind. She was young, curious and looking for something different. Australia was an adventure. And importantly, if it hadn’t worked out, going back to Britain was always an option.

That choice gave her a freedom that many migrants never have. It didn’t, however, tell her how to build a life once she got here.

Sue remembers arriving at Melbourne’s Maribyrnong migrant hostel and walking around like a “stunned rabbit”. She had come from a small town in Yorkshire and suddenly found herself surrounded by people from Vietnam, South America and other parts of the world she had barely encountered before. She needed to find work, understand a new city, make friends and learn how to live independently.
Some of the memories she shares may sound almost ordinary now.

Walking to a job interview at Myer, she was caught in heavy rain. Worried about arriving soaked, a shy Sue bravely walked into a mechanic’s workshop and asked a stranger for a lift.

He gave her one.
She got the job.

At the migrant hostel, an Irish man walking past stopped to say hello, and he and his family became some of Sue’s first friends in Australia, a relationship that lasted long after their hostel days were over.

Another couple Sue and her husband had known for only a few weeks lent them their car while they travelled overseas.

During that trip, they made the time to visit Sue’s parents in Yorkshire and later welcomed the young couple into their family house in Bendigo.

None of these moments would make a migration headline. Yet perhaps this is how belonging often begins. Not with a grand declaration that this is now home, but with a collection of small things that slowly make a strange place less strange.

Frank’s road to Australia took several more turns.

Born in Scotland, he left home at 16 and spent eight years in England before moving to South Africa. He remembers Britain at the time as a difficult place to find work. Five years later, amid recession and the tensions of apartheid-era South Africa, he moved again, arriving in Australia in 1987.

For Frank, starting again was not something that happened once.
Scotland. England. South Africa. Australia.

Each move came with a different reason, a different context, and another attempt to find where life might take root. In Melbourne, football gave him one of those roots. He arrived as a player, later moved into coaching, and decades later is still part of the game here.
Sue’s roots grew differently.

A job became a career. Friendships accumulated. A house was bought. Children arrived. Her sister eventually moved to Australia, followed later by her parents. The young woman who had crossed the world with little certainty about what came next now has three daughters and six grandchildren here.
Perhaps that is one of the things we underestimate about starting again.

You can arrive with a passport, money, qualifications and the freedom to leave if things don’t work out. Those things matter. They make one migration very different from another.
But none of them can give you belonging.

That comes more slowly.

Through a first job. A friend. A familiar street. Someone inviting you home for Easter. A football club. A house that eventually feels like yours. Children who grow up belonging to the country that once felt completely foreign to you.

And sometimes through the kindness of people who remember what it felt like to arrive.

Almost five decades after Sue first walked into that migrant hostel, she still opens her Melbourne home to people from around the world. She has hosted hundreds of guests over the past ten years. Some stay briefly. Some return. Some become friends.

There is a quiet symmetry in that.

Once, Sue arrived somewhere unfamiliar and other people helped make room for her.

Today, she does the same for others.

Migration may begin with the decision to leave.
But leaving is only the first part of the story.

Belonging is built. Becoming takes time. And both ask something of you.