ScAussie

I call myself a ScAussie. Scottish by birth, Australian through and through. It took me a long time to be able to say that cleanly, because for most of my childhood I didn’t quite belong anywhere — and that’s a strange, lonely thing to carry when you’re a kid.

Almost one of them

On the surface, I fit. I looked Australian. I spoke broad Australian. My food was close enough. But my mum and dad opened their mouths and out came Dundee, and in a certain kind of Australian schoolyard, that was enough to mark you. You were almost one of us — which, in some ways, is a harder place to stand than being obviously from somewhere else.

They’d tell me to go and play wog ball. The same kids who were my mates on the weekend would close ranks the second they were back in their pack at school, and mimic my parents’ accent to my face. Weekend friends, Monday strangers. If you’ve ever been the kid on the outer of a group you thought you belonged to, you’ll know the particular kind of bruise that leaves.

I had it easy, and that matters too

I’ll be honest, because honesty’s the whole game on this site: I had it easy compared to some. I looked like them and I sounded like them. The kids who were Asian, or Eastern European, who turned up with the food their family actually ate at home — they copped it far worse than I ever did. I was on the edge of the in-group. They weren’t allowed near it.

It taught me something uncomfortable about the country I love. Australians can be among the warmest people on earth, and also some of the quickest to turn on you for not being quite like them. Both of those are true at once, and pretending only the first one is true doesn’t help a soul.

I stopped waiting to be let in

So how does a kid who got mimicked and shut out end up loving this place with his whole chest? Because somewhere along the line I stopped waiting to be let in, and just chose it. I made Australia mine.

I learned the anthem at primary school in Sydney — we sang it every single day — and to this day, every time I hear it, I stand, and I sing, and I mean it. Not because anyone’s watching. Because this country, for all its rough edges, gave my family a life the old one couldn’t, and I refuse to be casual about that.

Belonging is built from both ends

That’s where I’ve landed on the whole question of migration, and I earned the opinion the hard way: belonging isn’t something a place owes you the day you arrive. It’s something you build — and it’s built from both ends. A country opens the door; you walk through it and make yourself part of the place: its language, its rhythms, its team. My parents did that. I did that. It’s work, and it’s worth it.

And the reward, eventually, is that the in-between stops hurting and starts being a kind of richness. I get to be Scottish and Australian — the bagpipes and the beach — and claim both with a clear heart.

I haven’t got a tidy bow for the racism. It was real, it shaped me, and the country’s still got work to do on it. But I came out the far side certain of exactly who I am, which is more than that kid being told to go and play wog ball could ever have said. Scottish-born. Australian to the bone. A ScAussie — and prouder of this sunburnt, contradictory, big-hearted country than of almost anything I’ve got.