Australia Day 2016

So the weather is hot, humid and dusty, the national flag is everywhere, appropriate or otherwise, and we are embarking on a parade in our scouting uniforms - it must be another Australia Day! This is our 19th take on this day and my 11th as a proud "New Australian".That's not bad for the couple who only came for a year!

I heard a remarkable Australia Day speech delivered by another New Australian. He is now a practising lawyer, but when he was 8 years old, he was forcibly enlisted into one side or other of the Sudanese civil war as a child soldier, and taught to hate and kill. Now that's child abuse!
He came here to Australia as a refugee and in time became, like me, a New Australian. Life is good here, and there are some really good reasons why folk desperately want to escape misery and fear to resettle on these preciously held shores.
There is, however, an element of Australia who have forgotten that unless their forebears arrived here 40,000 years ago, their family too was once classed as New Australians sometime in the past 200 years. They have forgotten what it feels like to be a stranger, reliant on other's hospitality to assist in making the best go of creating a home in a foreign land.
For us, it was the friendship of neighbours and a particularly dear friend, Robyn, who helped us to settle in Oz. Thank you to you all.