1. Tywyah

‘WHERE THE HELL ARE WE?’ I said to my game-for-anything buddy. I’d counted four pubs and three butchers as we drove along the main street of the small country town.

‘Casino,’ she said. ‘The beef capital.’

‘Where even the radio station’s named for cattle?’ I said as I read out a billboard: COW FM.

I flicked through the CDs in the console. I couldn’t remember any more songs from Grease, The Sound of Music or Jesus Christ Superstar. My friend launched into ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’.

I joined in for the chorus, replacing Argentina with South Africa. Six and a half years earlier in January 1989, as an impatient and de- terminedly independent 22-year-old, I’d migrated to Australia. My stepfather, whose oldest sons had already migrated, had facilitated the golden opportunity: a permanent residency visa. My father’s sudden death had catapulted my decision to emigrate immediately, ahead of my mother and stepfather: I needed a safe home. I was no Eva Peron but leaving South Africa, mired then in a draconian state of emergency, had felt like a betrayal of the national democratic struggle and of the courageous and moral self I aspired to be. At the same time, I was deeply grateful for migration’s privileges: to study and live in a safe and peaceful country, free of the fears and insecurities, the alienation and guilt that came with being white and Jewish in apartheid South Africa.

Lismore, where I taught law at the university, was thirty kilometres behind us. Byron Bay, with its ropey fig trees and camphor laurels, sugarcane and white beaches, an hour and a half behind us. A year ago, hoping to find somewhere I might belong, I’d taken sick leave from my paid and unpaid legal jobs in Sydney, loaded my white hatchback and, together with my housemate, headed north.

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