Bloomfield writes that Australia was “not just a place to me. It was a promise.” Her mother’s brother had migrated under the assisted passage scheme in the early 1960s, and her grandmother and aunt followed. As a preschooler, she begged to be enrolled in English classes before she could read or write.
But the reality of arrival was jarring. In Greece she had been a top student and had led her school’s Ohi Day parade, the first girl chosen. In Australia, nothing was familiar: no uniform, different subjects, no grades, and students calling teachers by their first names. Her textbook English did not match the way Australian teenagers spoke, and she stood out in formal clothes while classmates wore trackies and runners.
Even Greek school was complicated. Australian-born classmates called her a “tape recorder” because she sounded like the homeland they had never known. “Somehow, I was different in both worlds,” she writes.
School, once her greatest joy, became something she dreaded. The swimming carnival was beyond her Aegean dog-paddle, and the Australian sun taught her a painful lesson about sunburn before “Slip, Slop, Slap” became part of her education. She asked to join Special English classes in a portable building beside the school oval, despite her teacher’s protest that she was an A student. There she met other newcomers: sisters from Sicily whose home had been destroyed by an earthquake, and a Vietnamese refugee named Thao.
The essay concludes with the reflection that “identity could be negotiated in small, everyday choices.”