When we arrived in Australia, the passport control officer took my papers, looked me up and down over the top of her spectacles, and sternly back at the forms. She straightened her back like someone weary from a long day’s work, yawned and lazily cracked her bulbous knuckles. A broad grin swept across her face – ‘Come on in!’ she bellowed.

We’ve all had that moment when we feel guilty, but have no idea why, as we stand at the desk. And this entry to Oz gave me pause to think about how many millions must have been through this gate, or one very like it, for real, worrying if they’d get in. To start a new life. To leave a past behind, maybe a family, or persecution, or war, or fear. Or simply because they saw an opportunity to do better for themselves and their dear ones. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 28% of Australians were born elsewhere. That’s just amazing. Three out of every ten living Australians are immigrants.

When I went to see Australia play India in a one-day cricket match,  we were surrounded by Indian families: men, women, teenagers, children. And although they were all now Australians, they of course wore the blue sports shirts of India, and waved the Indian flag. Apart from one little boy, maybe eight years old. Alone amongst his family – and clearly the youngest – he wore a yellow Australian cricket shirt, and proudly waved a huge, billowing Australian flag.

I have previous with The Immigrant Condition. My mother’s aunt, Rachel, drove in a battered car with her husband across the rubble of Europe in 1948 all the way to Israel to be part of the new Zionist dream. She was an artist. They lived in the same one room basement flat in Jerusalem for the rest of their lives, where they raised their children and where she painted, and where they ate and talked. And talked more. And forced more food down me. And she never learned a single word of Hebrew. She spoke English wherever she went, shopping, working, walking in the Judean Hills. Yet despite that commitment and that journey, she remained a gentle English water colourist.

The other day we were invited west of the city to the commuter town of Penrith, to meet an old friend of TC’s mother. Jocelyn is a sprightly, feisty 90 year old who you can just tell has always been a tough cookie who brooks no sentiment. She lives now with her son, Ken, and his wife, Pam.

Penrith is not a wealthy town. It is a classic dormitory, with people who commute to Parramatta or the City, and it’s full of malls, large sales depots, car showrooms, and endless sports fields for things I’ve never heard of (like Aquatic Golf – the mind boggles). There’s a river that has been dammed upstream to provide Sydney’s water supply, leaving a motionless brown sludge sullenly hanging around the rowing club, where we were treated to lunch.

Anyway, Jocelyn’s story. She was born in Dublin around 1926, and her father was an IRA man. Here our mouths dropped. There on the wall of their house is a photo of her father with Michael Collins – THE Michael Collins – revisiting the jail in which they’d previously been held by the British (photo at the head of this blog post). And on the coffee table is a photo of her father inside the General Post Office during the Easter Rising of 1916. Although most eventually surrendered, many were executed, but Jocelyn’s father was spared: because he was under 18. Later, I found these photos quite easily on the Internet, so I’m not quite sure what the mix is here between genealogical research and family heirloom – or between myth and fact.

From what we could tell, Jocelyn left Dublin for Lowestoft in the early 1940s, where she worked in the forces. At secretarial college she learned shorthand and typing. She married a Lowestoft man who couldn’t hold down a job, and they had their first child – Ken – in the town. He remembers the house they lived in until he was 4 (and showed us a photo of himself at that time: maybe around 1958).

Then, with the Australian Government offering promises of a new life in a new country, away from war, poverty and rationing, Jocelyn told her husband Joe she was going – ‘And you can come too if you like’. These people were known as Ten Pound Poms. They were settled in a Nissen hut in government housing, and eventually Joe fell into a steady job in a steel mill, many years later getting an office job, once his arms had been ruined by the hard, hot work. Jocelyn moved in with Ken and Pam after Joe died.

And then there is the story of Pam’s father. Jan came from the Netherlands and when the Germans invaded, he was put in a workhouse. He and a friend escaped and were given refuge by the French Resistance, and safe passage to the UK, where he joined the RAF. Jan was posted to Australia, and after a few years was discharged from the Air Force, whereupon he started a family, settling in Sydney. In the 1950s he was then drafted to fight for the Netherlands in Indonesia, but changed his name to avoid detection. He never went back to the Netherlands for fear of being arrested as a deserter, never saw his home family again.

Pam and Ken met when they were both 17, working in Woolworths, and when they got married they moved way out, to the brand new village of Penrith: the only place they could afford to live.

They are worlds away from TC and me. We had enough to talk about for a good day out, but we have very different lives. They – and of course Jocelyn – have seen entirely different, harsher challenges. Yet despite this they gave us that ‘Come on in!’ welcome, as if we were family, or good old friends who have been absent for far too long, and they seemed genuinely upset we wouldn’t stay a few nights in the spare room. Gosh, Australians are generous-hearted people. And they are unmistakably, indisputably Australian – not from Ireland, Suffolk or the Netherlands.

I cannot say how much I respect people who make a home in a new growing country. Penrith might be their world, and it may not be for me, but they still live in their first house, bought in 1974. They’ve remodelled it to fit Jocelyn in, and it now has three bedrooms. They’ve watched Penrith grow around them, from a two street village to a sprawling hinterland between the bush and the city. Jocelyn still speaks with a Dublin accent, and they pronounce Lowestoft in that Suffolk way, without the final ‘t’.

They’ve brought with them all the stories and photos of the lives that Jocelyn left behind and that Ken and Pam have built there in Penrith, with their children – who went to school there, got married there, and now have their own children there. Four generations. There are new family histories being built and shared.

I can’t help but think of that little boy at the cricket. At the stories he too will learn, keep and retell to his own children, some with a little more embellishment and conjecture each time, as they settle down to another barbecue in a town somewhere in Australia that’s yet to be built. He will work hard and hold hands shyly with his wife, who he met at college. They will keep their parents’ traditions, suitably modified for a more modern age. They will save up for an expensive family trip back to Mumbai to show their children where their grandparents came from.

And I know after that trip, when he gets back to Sydney and takes the suitcases from the taxi, thinking about work tomorrow, that the Australian flag will still be fluttering proudly on the lawn.

Jocelyn, Joe, Ken, Pam and Jan are not their real names, and any errors of fact in their stories are due to my misunderstandings.