Ikebal Patel

Story

Having travelled a little in Australia I felt that this would be the country that would offer my family the most opportunity to excel to the fullest of all our potentials. My own parents had arrived in Fiji from India for opportunities for the children and Australia seemed the natural stepping stone after Fiji.

Fiji had its first coup in May 1987 and I was scheduled to travel to England on a British Government scholarship.

I first applied for a visitor\’s visa to Australia for myself and my family on my way to Fiji. I expected all sorts of questions as there was a concern by most countries that Fijians would want to claim asylum after the recent coup in Fiji.

To my complete surprise, my entire family was given multiple entry visa for Australia for some 10 years. I had not requested for this and was thrilled with the faith the Australian High Commission in London had in my application.

I then applied for a single entry visitors visa to NZ but was declined, even though I studied in NZ on a scholarship with the NZ govt. My family really enjoyed the two weeks we spent in Australia. It was some 2 years later that we considered migrating from Fiji for better education for the children and better health services. I applied to migrate and within a year we were successful in securing a permanent resident visa on skills basis to Australia in 1990.

In mid 1992 I saw an advertisement for a position with an electricity distributor in Albury, Murray River Electricity and I applied for this position.

I was then called for an interview. I remember flying over Albury Wodonga as the plane came into land and still remember the fields of purple, which looked absolutely beautiful. It was only later that I realised that what I had so enjoyed was in fact a serious weed, the despised Paterson’s curse.

I was offered the job at the interview. I travelled to Sydney and phoned my wife that night and informed her that it was Albury Wodonga that we will call our home soon. She was happy, but she had no idea what she was getting into by agreeing to live here. She would find out later that this would be the best years of our lives, the serenity and peace of this area.

We decided on a date to leave Fiji. I stopped work on a Friday in Suva, and the company I worked for were kind enough to provide a car for me to transport my family to Nadi for a flight to Sydney the next morning.

At 7 am the next morning, a Saturday, my wife, our 4 children and I got on a plane to Sydney with our 7 suit cases. We had a 4 hour wait at the airport in Sydney before we boarded the flight to Albury.

A future colleague from Murray River Electricity was kind enough to pick us up from the airport and took us to the apartment in Albury that had been arranged for us. And he was good enough to tell us of a family from Fiji who lived in Albury at whose place we had dinner that night.

I remember walking with my family on Sunday morning to buy milk and bread and some essentials and to collect a missing suitcase from the flight the night before. My wife and children had started working back to the apartment on South Albury and I was quite a way behind with the suit case on my shoulder. A City Council truck who was working on the road stopped and offered me a lift to the apartment.

I basically left Suva, Fiji on the previous Friday afternoon at 4.30 and started work the next Monday in Albury. We were soon educated about the snakes and the spiders and how they could be quite menacing. And we also found out very quickly that Australian flies in summer could be the most sociable of any flies in the world.

But we were made most welcome by the locals. The work colleagues were very approachable for assistance and the children also found shopping a new experience with the new varieties and the abundance of different products. All in all, whilst the move to Australia was very hectic, I would not do any thing differently if I was again in the same situation. And although I now live in Queanbeyan, Albury and the surrounding areas is still really home to me and the family.

And having now lived in Australia for over sixteen years, and really immersing in all that the country has to offer, I would not wish to live in any other country. It is good to go for a holiday, but the feeling of relief when you get on the plane to come back home to Australia is one that you can not describe to others, it is personal to your self.

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