The Perils of
Migration
by Gwen Boswell
I inwardly smile
at some of the questions and behaviours of new
migrants now, but when I think back to when I
first arrived in Australia, I was just the same,
rather vulnerable to say the least. Alas,
migration can make you act and feel like a bit of
twit on occasions. In my particular case,
arriving from England, there was not even the
added confusion associated with being unable to
speaka the language.
One of the first
things that struck me when we arrived was the way
some of the ex-pats we met only wanted to point
out the terrors of living here. So much so, that
I was beginning to think my family had travelled
12,000 miles not for the sought after changed
lifestyle, but to die from a very painful and
probably slow death. The choices were endless for
us, as we could be bitten by spiders, various
snakes and be completely, or even half-eaten by a
shark. Should our luck prevail and we manage to
avoid the foregoing, there was always good old
skin cancer to look forward to. Ay up, welcome to
Australia.
Some of my first
encounters with the Antipodean’s florae and
fauna were certainly a source of amusement to
others. Consider firstly, that I am city born and
bred and most of the fresh food that I came into
contact with in the old country, arrived in neat
little packages from Sainsburys. I did actually
know that some of it grew in fields or somewhere
else where there was dirt and as I am not
completely stupid, I also knew you needed water
somewhere in the process.
Such urban
ignorance backfired on me the day we moved into
our new Aussie home. I ran in from the garden in
a state of terror, screaming to my husband that
there was something large and horrible at the
back of the garden, under the green things. I
said he would need to arm himself with a garden
fork or something before venturing into the
undergrowth to protect his family from the beast.
(‘Always room for a bit of drama, thankyou).
Anyway, you can
now move well back from the edge of your seat, as
this particular drama is a fizzler. Oh yes, my
husband certainly needed a garden fork for the
thing in the garden, but only because it was a
pumpkin. Hilarious I know, a grown woman running
away from a pumpkin, but I had never given a
thought to where pumpkin came from, or even that
people actually eat it. In Birmingham, pumpkin
just appeared in the shops every October for
nasty faces to be cut out of them, to scare - was
it witches away, or children to death – can’t
quite remember?
Nowadays, as I am
a seasoned ex-pat myself, I take on my early
tormentor with gusto. (Who?). I invite the
grotesque Cucurbita Pepo into my kitchen and when
he is sitting unsuspecting on my bench top, I
pounce on him from behind and cut him into pieces.
Revenge is truly sweet, especially when sugar is
added to the enemy and it’s made into a pie.
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