This residency is delivered as part of Brisbane City Council’s BrisAsia Festival 2024, produced by Sounds Across Oceans. Official Media Partner SBS.
MoB’s Artist in Residence program is supported by Tim Fairfax AC.
Dear Reader,
My name is Thanula. I was born in Botswana, which is in Africa, it’s the place of the Tswana people. My parents are Sri Lankan; they’re from Dehiwala, that’s south of Colombo. They moved to Botswana because the country found a lot of diamonds in the ground and then became quite wealthy overnight. Skilled migrants from around the world were invited there, temporarily, to work and upskill folks in professional fields. My parents are both accountants and were married for just over a year before they moved.
Dear Reader,
I was born in 1998 on the Gold Coast. My mum is Chinese and my dad is Korean. My mum came over to Australia in the eighties. She was working as a physics teacher in China. She was really young and she heard a colleague raving about Australia. That it was a great place and beautiful, a land of opportunity. And it piqued my mum’s interest and so she asked my grandad, her father, if she could go. At first he was very adamant that she stay and said, ‘Why would you want to go over there?’ Then after a while, he sort of changed his mind and then gave her the money and she ended up on a plane to Sydney. She enrolled into an English language school to learn to speak English. And during that time she was working part time jobs, like cleaning, seamstressing, things like that. She lived above a KFC shop and still remembers the smell, I think the KFC is still there to this day.
Dear Reader,
I was born in East Ham in London. My dad is Egyptian and my mum’s English, so I grew up with a bit of a cross-cultural kind
of background, I suppose. My dad came to London when he was probably in his early twenties or mid-twenties I think. But I actually grew up in Essex which is a bit further out. I would say it was a reasonably diverse area. Like, where I went to primary school was a very Indian and Pakistani kind of area. And then when I went to secondary school we moved to a different place not far, maybe half an hour away or something. And that was probably more white, more English and a lot of Jews as well. But at school there was enough of a mixture of cultures that I didn’t feel different. They weren’t exclusively white schools or anything like that.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Rockhampton and grew up in Yeppoon. Mum was born in Nueva Ecija, north of Manila in the Philippines and she has six siblings, one sister and five brothers. Her sister, who is older than her, moved to Japan and married a Japanese man. Mum was thinking of staying in the Philippines but then my dad, who is Australian, got in contact via letter. An Australian man with a Filipino wife had set up a matchmaking business in Rockhampton. Dad visited for a couple of weeks and met Mum’s friends and family. He proposed before he went back to Australia but Mum wasn’t sure so she stayed in the Philippines and they continued to be pen pals. A few months later, Mum decided she would take the biggest gamble of her life and join Dad, which is a wild concept to me now that I’m older. She came over to Yeppoon in 1989. She was 24.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Johannesburg. We lived there for two years and then we moved to Cape Town when I was about 15 months old. We were in Cape Town just for a little while before our visas to Australia came through so I have very few memories from that time. But I do remember being little, coming to Australia and getting introduced to the family that we had here. We came in 2007. And I remember going to school for the first time, at kindy and starting primary school and feeling so abnormal. I struggled a lot with the language barrier. When I was in second grade, like in school properly, it was a bit better.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Johannesburg in South Africa and I lived there for most of my time in South Africa. We moved to Cape Town just before we came to Australia as we wanted to get out of Johannesburg. My husband and I were married a few years before we had our daughter, Lieze. And I think when we became parents, things changed quite a bit for us. Because then it’s not just yourself that you worry about. You try to imagine raising a child somewhere. And there were incidents and things happening around because of how things were in South Africa. You know, a hijacking or someone you know was held at gunpoint or those sorts of things. It’s just this ongoing sort of backdrop to your life. And then you think, I need to raise a child in this? And I remember my husband just being like, ‘If something happens to me, I can’t imagine what life would be like for you guys.’ I think it’s natural to want to protect your family. So we made the decision to move here.
Dear Reader,
We are Amelia and James. Amelia is turning nine this year and James is six. We were both born in Sydney. Our mum is Chinese and was born in France and our dad was born in England.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, pre the dismantling of the divisive apartheid. I applied for permanent residency with the Australian High Commission in Cape Town and through a rigorous process I was granted a visa and arrived in Melbourne in April of 1980. At the time I was 24. I was that confident about living in Australia permanently that I actually bought myself a one-way ticket! If you want to make your dreams a reality then you have to manifest it.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Malaysia and I arrived in Australia in 1988. I’ve been here for almost 40 years. I turned 50 recently. I did high school in Malaysia up to year seven and I came here when I was 14 and started year nine in Melbourne. I went to university in Melbourne, then I went overseas to Canada to work for a year. Then after that I went to New Zealand for four years, where I met my husband; came back to Darwin, had my daughter in Darwin; and then from Darwin moved to Brisbane. I’ve been in Brisbane now for nine years.
Dear Reader,
My name is Mikha. Well I suppose it’s my Australian name. My real name is Marichje. I chose a different name to be a bit more approachable, I suppose. And I was born in South Africa in 1996, I’m 27 now. Part of my family moved here in 2017. That included my dad and my mum and my two youngest siblings, my sister and my brother. They all moved here on the 1st of March 2017. And when I finished my studies I moved here on the 12th of March 2019. And then my last sister joined us in December 2019. And so that was the six of my immediate family all together under one roof for the first time since 2017.
Dear Reader,
My name is Susan, which is my English name. Actually, my mum gave this English name to me even though she can’t really speak a word of English. So she doesn’t really know how English name works, but her last name is actually Su. So she thought that it would also be family name first and first name last, like Chinese names. So she thought Su then would incorporate her last name and that would be the first bit of the name as well. And actually for a while, I really hated the name because I started to realise that no one my age was named Susan. Really grandma level. But now I think I’ve made peace with it… mostly.
Dear Reader,
I’m from Barcelona in Catalonia and my first husband and I decided to come to Australia because of the political situation in Spain. We had a military junta, and it was there for 40 years almost, and nothing was changing. I got married with my first husband in 1971 when I was 21, and we decided to come to – or to go any country.
Dear Reader,
My family’s from Vietnam, we’re all from South Vietnam. We left separately during the Vietnam War. I was born in ’81 and my dad left just before I was born, so I never met my dad until I was about five. He got permission to leave the country, so he couldn’t take anyone with him. I don’t really know the exact details, but he left and he came over to Australia to create a new life for himself. We were stuck back in Vietnam, my mum, older brother and older sister and the rest of our extended family.
Dear Reader,
I was born in 1983 in Harare, Zimbabwe and lived there pretty much most of my life. Most of my family lives in the UK by default because of what’s happened politically in Zimbabwe. There was a time when people found a loophole of sorts involving nursing where you could go to the UK without having to apply for a visa and you’d automatically get in. A lot of people went and became nurses. You did your five years and you’d get citizenship.
Dear Reader,
My name is Matt Hsu. I am a Taiwanese-Australian composer and anti-racism activist. My parents were both born in Taiwan and they came to Australia in ‘85. I was born in ‘86. I grew up wholly as an Australian kid, but at home, I spoke Mandarin with my parents. It was like, at home, I was Taiwanese and then I’d leave the house and it’s “Oh, we’re in Australia.” I experienced feelings of conflict between those two worlds all the time, alongside some sharp experiences of racism as a toddler. It’s shaped my identity of who I am and my personal hang-ups and the things I think about and the way I talk to shopkeepers or interact in very white spaces. A lot of my identity has been shaped by looking Asian in a white-dominant culture.
Dear Reader,
I was born in Mexico in this place called Puerto Vallarta. I moved to Australia when I was around eight months old. Mum’s side of the family are actually from Spain, and my Dad’s side is half-Australian, half- Mexican – his Dad was born in Mexico, but his mum was born in Australia and has European roots.
Dear Reader,
My parents moved to Australia from Mexico before I was born. I was born in Brisbane and we were living in Tenerife but I don’t remember that apartment. But then we moved to this house in New Farm. It was really big. It had a verandah at the end, and I remember I had all my toys on one side, and the rooms were in the middle of the house. And then the other side was the kitchen and the dining area, and outside it had a really big garden, but you had to wear shoes because the grass was really spiky and thorny.
Dear Reader,
I was born in a place called Bulawayo in 1983, it’s the second largest city in Zimbabwe. I traveled to the States for about a year and a half, and I did elementary and middle school there. But most of my schooling was in Zimbabwe. Then in 2003, when I finished high school, I moved to Brisbane, Australia.
Dear Reader,
I was born on the Sunny Coast in 1986 and grew up when it was pretty turbulent politically, especially on the Sunshine Coast. It was Pauline Hanson era. From the late 80s to, I’d say, the mid-90s is when racial tension was brewing. Pauline was from Ipswich at the time but her party had a very large and boisterous presence on the Sunny Coast. There were a lot of supporters. But I think, when I was young, I didn’t actually know the extent of it.
Dear Reader,
I was born in the south of Spain, Málaga, in 1944, and in that time, the 50s and 60s, in Spain was very bad because Spain have a civil war, and it start in 1936 and finish 1939. And was all depressed, no work, no school, no nothing for the poor, for the workers.
View Departure at Museum of Brisbane. Open daily, 10am–5pm.
