I met my love by the gasworks wall

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Dreamed a dream by the old canal

I kissed my girl by the factory wall

- Ewan McColl's classic song about hating/loving one's hometown

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The subject of immigration is frothing and bubbling in the cauldron of Australia's public conversation. The new federal Liberal leader is growling (and what a manly growl he has!) that Australia admits far too many migrants and that far too many of them come from unacceptably foreign and unAustralian places.

So for the purposes of informed consumption of what the Liberals and other xenophobia-mongers are up to now with their immigration utterances, it's timely to remind ourselves that at the last count (in April 2025) there were 8.6 million people living in Australia who were born elsewhere. The 8.6 million of us (I say "us" because your columnist was born in England and was lured to Australia as a teenager) constitute 31.5 per cent of Australia's total population of 27.2 million.

So there I was this week thinking feverishly about migrants and migrations, about the hopes and fears and extreme upheavals of the migrant experience. Suddenly, coincidentally, into my inbox there alighted a thoughtful, thought-triggering new essay about our hometowns and our often complicated relationships with them.

Emanuela Anechoum's A Self Divided: What It Means To Leave Your Hometown, decorates the latest online Literary Hub.

We divide ourselves, Anechoum divines, when we leave 'home' and make another 'home' somewhere else. Powerful emotions, including 50 shades of homesickness, can emerge and can haunt us.

And it is not only that international migrations usually involves migrants leaving a familiar place - perhaps a........

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