| When the rest of the world was staging radical change and a new cultural order, my mum was going through her own private revolution. At thirty-eight she took herself off the shelf and caught a plane to Australia. After years of letters, a few photos, a visit, and a proposal, she married my dad, whom she had met in Africa five years earlier. |
|  | | She arrived in Australia in 1974, a farmer's daughter from Bavaria. She didn't know what to think. Her new home was a one-story house with a square of yellow grass out back and a rotating clothesline. Cheese was cheddar, coffee was instant, and cakes were sponge. This was Australia. She was saved from being called a Nazi because she was part of a whole postwar generation of migrants who moved to Australia. She still got funny looks sometimes. |
| | | The graveyards had weeds so high you couldn't read the inscriptions. It was a disgrace. The memory of neat parish plots in her hometown made her sad. It still disappoints her that my uncle doesn't have a tombstone twenty years after his death. |
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