No-one ever emigrates because of the success they've enjoyed at home. No one ever says, "Well, I have a happy home life, I'm rich and I have many friends - so I'm off." The only reason anyone has for going to live in another country is because they've cocked everything up in their own.
Being just nineteen years old, my opportunities for cocking things up had been rather limited by the time I left; in fact, my only - and certainly biggest - cock-up had been that I allowed myself to be born to parents who were so dirt-poor that they packed me off to work as soon as I had reached the minimum school-leaving age of fourteen.
Altogether some 229 "Auswanderer" boarded the ship FLAVIA in Bremerhaven on that fateful day in June 1965. When, some five weeks later, we reached Sydney, one other young German and I ventured from the ship which was tied up at Pyrmont, to explore the Rocks and sit at the foot of the Argyle Stairs leading up to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
We still had some distance to go before we would finally disembark in Melbourne and be processed through the Bonegilla Migrant Centre, but we had already decided to come back to Sydney and sit at the foot of the Argyle Stairs every Sunday and wait for the other one to turn up.
I never did come back to Sydney, as I moved on to Melbourne and from Melbourne to Canberra, and from Canberra to South Africa, and then to Papua New Guinea, and on and on and on and on ... but sixty years later, while having forgotten the other young German's name, I haven't forgotten about those first few steps in what would become my future home and, still wondering how many Sundays my mate may've sat on those stairs waiting for me to turn up, I visited the Argyle Stairs again.
Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn't there.
