Sixty years ago, Kent Street, Richmond was a wide paved street, packed footpath to footpath with small houses, workers' cottages about 5 metres wide by 15 metres long. There was no room for trees to be planted, or for gardens to grow, no bare soil to grow vegetables, no creeks or rivers for fishing in. Instead, there were polluting factories amongst the houses, there was the odd small car on the street, the odd "Morris 10", the "Ford Prefect" and such. I was expecting to see vast fields of wheat, fields of corn. I thought there would be orchards and strawberry fields everywhere around us. At four o'clock in the afternoon I was expecting to see a herd of cows with their clanking bells coming down Kent Street for their daily milking. Followed by a flock of sheep bleating behind the cows, and to see the exhausted farmer or a shepherd dragging his tired feet in his muddy boots. I saw none of the above, I saw only rows of houses with presumably people living in them.

Compare the tiny houses of Richmond, made out of wood, others of brick and some out of bluestone, and all of them lined up like soldiers on asphalted streets, to our house in our village, Mala. Picture the open fields surrounding our white-washed house made out of metamorphic rocks that is set on approximately five acres of productive land. We had a livada (hay field) for our animals, an orchard for our fruit needs, a large vegetable garden and a strawberry field for us. All of this was bordered on one side by a creek, bubbling with sparkling spring water.

Our farm animals provided the proteins and the dairy food. The land provided the greens for us to eat. One could instantly see how we were able to live off the land. Over the years I saw and I learned how we milked the sheep and the cows. And how we made cheese and butter from their milk. How once a year we slaughtered our pig and stored its pork in a barrel full of salty brine. We made leek sausages with the pig's intestines and we played soccer with the pig's pumped up blader.

There was life all around the house in summer. In winter the life moved inside the house where we could stay warm by the wood stove that was stoked by firewood that we gathered from the surrounding forests. We told stories, sang songs and at other times we played cards, while we were sipping the wine that we produced from our vineyards. An ideal life, in an idyllic setting. Until it was ruined by that unnecessary Greek Civil War during 1945-1949.

In our small house in Kent Street, Richmond, there was no sign of food production. There was food stored in the fridge. Enough food to feed us for one week at a time, and then what? So I wondered, with good reason, how do those people in their tiny houses in Kent Street survive? Where do they get their food from? Kent Street and the adjacent Buckingham Street have as many houses and therefore as many people living in them as my village in Macedonia had. Yet the life-form that exists here in Kent Street must be surviving on no apparent food or energy. They must be on a different food/energy source, they are in a parallel universe for sure.

From this perspective, to me at least, Richmond if not all of Australia looked like a parallel and a completely different universe to the one that contains Macedonia. But I was wrong to make that original assumption. After closer scrutiny I realised that I found myself in a densely populated suburb of a relatively large city compared to the smaller town of Lerin (Lerin is the closest town to our village Mala in Macedonia). The food must have been grown somewhere else and must have been delivered to those tiny houses, I thought to myself. I was comparing apples with oranges. I wasn't in a parallel universe. I was in a different location on earth, in a different country, in a city that was more developed than our village. Here they have electricity in their homes, they have running water and they have flushing toilets.

Early in the morning when I left our house to complete my morning newspaper round in East Melbourne, I could hear the clip clop of the Clydesdale horse pulling a milk cart that was delivering bottles of milk at the front door of most houses in our street. People do things differently here, they don't milk cows in their mini back yards, they do it somewhere else, I thought to myself. Richmond is more advanced than my village. I didn't step into a parallel universe, I stepped into the future.

In due time, I observed more features around Richmond, features such as electricity poles, letter boxes, and that the houses were numbered in sequential order. Unlike in Mala where the houses were not numbered and the streets didn't have names. And now I felt that I had to explore this new country of ours in greater detail. And this is where the story of getting to know my new country and to meet my fellow country people begins in earnest. I have to use my skills of observation (I love observing and analysing things) to learn how to exist in this new and simultaneously challenging and interesting country; a country full of potential.

It wasn't long before I found the farmers' market in Gleadell Street where residents could buy some of their food and where dad bought vegetables, fruit, chickens, eggs and other household commodities to sustain us for a week. Now, my anxiety about the food supply to Kent Street eased. Dad took me to that farmers' market one Saturday morning to do our shopping. There, as well as buying our weekly needs, I learned that dad had lots of friends and I learned a new word.

Almost everyone at the market called out to dad "Hey mate", "how is it going mate?", "thank you mate", "see you later mate". I asked dad what this new-to-me word "mate" meant. He said it means "friend". But he was quick to point out that if someone doesn't know your name, he will call you mate even though he may not be your friend. Well, a lot of people didn't know dad's name and those who knew it couldn't pronounce it. How could anyone of the locals living in Richmond then know how to pronounce the name "Konstantinos"? Eventually, dad changed his name to "Jim" for convenience's sake, as many other people have done before him. So, everyone who didn't know dad's name called him "mate".

A lot of migrants had pseudo names for the Anglo-Saxon population. The Macedonians went a step further. For example, my father had four names, "Mitre" in Macedonian, "Konstantinos" in Greek, "Jim" for the Aussies and "Mate" for those who didn't know any of his names.

A visit to the farmers' market in Gleadell Street was a regular Saturday shopping day ritual where locals bought their weekly food supplies. But more importantly it was a meeting place for the newly arrived migrants, who started to congregate together into a group of people of the same language and of similar customs. And it wasn't long before Macedonians from nearby suburbs heard about the market's low-priced produce and came for their weekly bargain shopping. They exchanged names and addresses and eventually a subset of a multicultural community was created consisting mainly of Macedonians and other Eastern European migrants like Greeks, Croatians and even one Ukrainian family.

In Kent Street alone, in addition to our family which consisted of dad, mum, twelve-year-old me, my ten-year-old brother and my seven-year-old sister, there was a Macedonian family with two girls and a boy living opposite our house. Diagonally across our house lived uncle Vangel and his family. Next to Vangel's house lived his in-laws who had a widowed daughter. Vangel also had his sister and brother-in-law renting in his house. There was no shortage of people for me to socialize with while I was waiting to start my education in this very different country to the one that I was born in.

During the day when most members of my social group were working, I had free time to explore Richmond and its environs. At 4.00 pm I would be back at home. I would sit on the long bench seat in the passageway near the open front door of our tiny house. I would wait for the school kids and my uncle and my parents to come home. One day at about 4.00 pm an unexpected visitor came through the front door of our house.

Everyone has a story about the girl next door. Well, in my case there were several girls in close proximity to our house. There were three girls in the house on the left of our house. There was a girl in the house on the right. Two directly across the road from our house. And one girl living in the second storey house diagonally across the road from our house.

And then there was the girl who made all the other girls run to the nearest beauty salon for a makeover. This girl lived in another street and she walked past our house once a week on a Wednesday at precisely 4.30 pm. I made a mental note of her cameo appearance that took place every Wednesday at precisely 4.30 pm. She was worth waiting for, outside our house, just to see her walk past me. She wore a long light-blue coat with dignity and poise. Her name was Stephanie, as revealed by her parents. She walked with her parents for safety, because her radiant beauty demanded security from the riff raff in Richmond. I saw Stephanie three times and then she and her parents disappeared. People of means, taste, ambition and in this case, of extraordinary beauty, moved away from Richmond. Richmond was a stepping stone to better places for most migrants.

Back to the other girls. Well, there were sheilas galore around our house.
For me, the theme of the girl next door was played in a reverse order. I was the boy next door. The one who was the unfortunate victim of an older girl who lived in the house to the left of ours. Her hormones were on fire, she was looking for anyone with two legs, and there I was, with both of my legs seated on a long bench seat in our passage-way. The front door was open, as it was a hot day. The open door allowed me to count cars that went past the house (I will explain the reason for counting cars later).

All of a sudden the girl next door came into the house and sat beside me and positioned her considerable bulk on the opposite side of the bench seat's leg. This created a potentially dangerous situation if I were to stand up and to move away. The bench seat would surely topple over, like a see-saw does when one person gets off it. I was a captured victim. And I can tell you it definitely wasn't Stephanie who captured me. This girl wanted to communicate with me, but she didn't speak my language and conversely I didn't know her language. It wasn't like in one of those Tarzan movies where the savage learns English and starts to communicate within minutes. Many minutes went by without any verbal communication between us. I started to feel uncomfortable and I felt threatened. I slowly slid away from the heavy girl. She moved towards me without touching me. Now, the physical language was about to start. We kept this you-move-I-move game going until we were both within the two legs of the bench seat. And therefore it was safe for me to stand up and leave her sitting alone on the bench seat without the seat toppling over. I stood up and I went into the lounge room and waited until she left. I skilfully avoided a potentially embarrassing situation.

That next-door girl had two younger sisters. They were proper blondes with natural honey-coloured straight hair and smooth skin, but they were always in a bad mood and they never looked directly at me. At their moodiest time, I saw them both sitting on top of the low roof of the back of their small house. They were sitting in a way that showed what boys wanted to see. As I was gazing at them they told me to go away in no-uncertain terms. Perhaps the pretty blonde girls didn't share the same father as their older sister who had sat beside me, going by their vastly different physical appearances?

In front of their house there was a big car. A Ford Fairlane that was leaving pools of oil on the footpath and it was constantly under repairs. Eventually the whole family moved away from that neglected and dilapidated house. Then Richmond started to gradually clean its image by virtue of that and other dysfunctional families moving away and those smelly factories closing down and being replaced by apartments. After all, Richmond was boarded by some desirable suburbs such as East Melbourne on its left, by South Yarra on its south and by Kew, Hawthorn and Balwyn on its right. East Melbourne will feature in another chapter as this is where I spent a considerable amount of time working and observing how the elite lived. But, during the first five years in Australia, we lived in a pitiful part of Richmond, as indicated by the dysfunctional family with their broken car next door to us.

Later on, we moved to a bigger house in a better part of Richmond and our living conditions improved enormously. My brother and I had a separate bedroom from our sister for a start. More importantly, the second house had a shed in the backyard with its door facing the back lane. Now we had a workplace to repair and maintain our cars. Most of the dirty work on the cars was carried out in the lane. Dad had room to distill rakia (an alcoholic spirit made from grapes). Mum had a basic kitchen in the shed where she would do her heavy-duty cooking so as not to leave any lingering smells in her main kitchen inside the house. The main kitchen was kept in an immaculate condition for the visitors to admire and for mum to show how well the kitchen and the whole house was maintained. This additional outdoor kitchen is a continuation of a way of life we had back in Macedonia where we cooked most of the meals over an open fire in a specially built kujna (kitchen).

Now, let's go back to the days of the old school yard. Remember the song by Cat Stevens and the lyrics about the school yard? Well, the next chapter will be about the good old days. There, I will describe some interesting events that had taken place during the time I spent in the old school yards.

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