October is the middle month of autumn in the northern hemisphere, which includes Macedonia, where I was born. The climate is as calm and steady as the Mediterranean Sea. You can rest assured that there won't be a sudden gust of wind or unexpected rain, until the blistering winds bring the snow to our land towards the end of November. The temperature during the autumn days is warm without being uncomfortably hot and it stays like that until the annual harvest is picked, packed and stored away for the long winter.

Autumn is the best season of the year, mainly because that's when our land rewards us for our hard work during the growing seasons. Our land gives us the grains, the corn, the vegetables and feeds our animals all year round, except in winter. The levada (hayfield) provides the hay which we store in our mud-brick shed to feed it to the animals in winter. The threshed wheat and barley are poured into the umberry (silos).

The corn cobs are peeled and laid bare on the natural slate in our back yard to dry. The dry corn kernels are separated from the cob and are milled into fine corn flour that provides a good meal for our pig and supplements our meals when needed. I remember eating Kachamak, a chunky flour meal that looks like mashed potatoes but is yellow, like baked pumpkin, and it tastes like corn.

The grapes have been picked, crushed and the grape juice is poured into wooden barrels so that it will ferment into wine. The wine will be rationed throughout the long winter and each sip will remind us of the value of hard work during spring and summer. Those people who have a distillery and the knowhow will distill the comeety (crushed grape skins) into rakia (clear alcoholic drink).

Finally, the delicate farm produce is sorted. The different fruit, cucumbers and green tomatoes are pickled and placed in sealed jars. The excess apples are not pickled, they are left to dry on shelves, together with the nuts and pumpkin seeds, in our easber (cellar). The bountiful strawberries are picked with their stems intact, placed in wooden crates amongst loose straw and transported to Germany in a refrigerated van.

Few wealthy families in Germany will savour the exotic Mediterranean fruit in exchange for a few dollars. We would exchange the money from our strawberries for rice and kerosine; the things we can't grow or make.

I, as a young carefree child, thought that we lived in the Garden of Eden. The image of the Garden of Eden was further reinforced in my mind when I was wandering in the V-shaped narrow trench between two rows of our strawberry field. The water stream that was watering the strawberries was diverted a long time ago, leaving fine dry soil in the trench. As I was walking barefoot along the trench I could feel and see puffs of fine soil between my toes. Every now and then I would bend over and pluck a juicy strawberry and put it in my mouth as if it were a lollipop. I didn't know then and I couldn't envisage that I, too, would be plucked from our village in a similar way that our strawberries were plucked.

The Garden of Eden was small and it got even smaller when the Greek Government stole some of our land and gifted it to the Greek migrants from Turkey. Now, the reduced land couldn't possibly feed four families if my grandfather stayed on his plot of land and if his three sons had married and if they all had families of their own. And if all of them stayed there, hoping to live like Adam and Eve, they would have been bitterly disappointed. The five-acre plot would have been depleted in no time at all.

Something had to be done! The government didn't help and it didn't want to help. In fact, the Greek government wanted to get rid of us after that horrible Greek Civil War. The Macedonians, passive as they are, have suffered the most of all the people living in the Balkans region throughout the Ottoman occupation and beyond. Our people are still suffering and hence they have learned from that suffering how to survive, no matter what. The solution to their survival and hopefully the path to prosperity was: MIGRATION.

My father migrated to Australia in 1952 with assistance from his older brother, who had come here a few years earlier. With a lot of hardship, dad established a starting base for a new life for his family in a new country, in this different part of the world.

In October of 1959 my grandfather arranged for our strawberries to be transported to a new, but similar country in the same hemisphere. Early February in 1960 my father plucked his family, like he was plucking strawberries from the small subsistence-style land, and arranged the transport of his "strawberries" to a different country in the opposite hemisphere.

Putting aside the gradual changes to the landscape that I saw on route to Australia, the visual impact on arrival in Melbourne was surreal. There was a stark difference between our village, situated in a picturesque rural setting, to the industrial compact suburb of Richmond in Melbourne. I instantly thought that this is what a parallel universe would look like.

I still mentally revisit the moment when I first set eyes on our tiny house in Kent Street, Richmond. The houses were identical and were packed next to each other on what appeared to be an infinite street. The sort of infinite image one sees in a mirror that is facing another mirror.

Now, with the advantage of hindsight and sixty years of accumulated knowledge behind me, is the time to take you back to that time and place in Richmond, and to tell you my story. My story is the same story as that of many other migrants who have gone through a "transition". A geographical transition, an environmental transition, an industrial transition, and most importantly who are still undergoing a cultural transition. Every migrant's story is the same, only the details are different. I hope you will find my details interesting.

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