The suburb of Richmond was a small demographic sample of the multicultural Aussie population. Besides that, it was full of migrants. If I was serious about finding the true blue Aussie, I had to increase my search area. In the school yard of North Richmond Primary school, I serendipitously met Russell Morris, my first quintessential Aussie friend. He and I went on to Richmond Tech, but because of his different interests and the formation of separate groups of friends, we sort of drifted apart. In my area of interests there were ample opportunities to find the true blue Aussie.

At Richmond Tech I met Richard Bader, he looked like a typical Aussie, but he had a slightly strange accent. We ran training laps around the school oval together; he ran faster than I could run because he had longer legs. The physical education teacher thought that he had the potential to represent Australia at the Olympics. If he stopped smoking and if he trained harder, that is. The nicotine-stained fingers on his right hand said otherwise, he was addicted to smoking and that put an end to his Olympic dreams. For a moment there I thought that I found the typical Aussie, the outdoor type with blonde hair, long legs and smoking like a chimney. But no, he turned out to have a Dutch background, which explained his strange accent and his long legs.

Then I made friends with Jack MacDonald, because I drove him to a surf beach one day somewhere past Geelong in my trusty Volkswagen Beetle. Jack was grateful to me for driving him to the surf beach, so he gave me one of his surfboards in gratitude. Jack had lots of surfboards; he was rich. He was one of those well-to-do people who lived on Richmond Hill. I was fortunate to have met Jack, and that was because of his father's decision to enroll Jack at Richmond Tech. He had just recently moved to Richmond Tech from a private school, and that was because Jack's father found out that Jack didn't like academic subjects and that he was better with his hands than he was with his brain, like I was. Jack wasn't the full true blue Aussie that I was looking for, he was an import. He told me that his family immigrated from Scotland when he was a baby, so Jack was not a true blue Aussie, despite looking like an Aussie with that surfie-induced sun tan.

And then along came John Bentley as the next candidate for a true blue Aussie. A well-groomed young man, very quiet, well-mannered and very polite. When he spoke to me, he sounded like the Queen of England was speaking. That is when she spoke during her Christmas messages to her Commonwealth subjects. John Bentley behaved and looked like he was an exchange student from an English private school. I also lost contact with John, because he didn't follow me to Swinburne College of Advanced Education, as it was called then. Now it is named Swinburne University. I suspected John could have gone back to "Eton", in England to complete his year 12.
While I was searching for the true blue Aussie by looking for the stereotypical traits of an Aussie, an unusually friendly, well-dressed boy found me. I would not have picked him for an Aussie at first sight, he wasn't eating a pie, he wasn't wearing a footy guernsey and he didn't call me "mate", he hardly spoke to anyone. He was the silent type, but he spoke enough to tell me his name.

"Ray Noble is my name," he said.

A real cool individual, he was sure of himself and he liked hanging around with me. We went to the movies together; he taught me ice-skating at St Moritz in St Kilda. He played ice hockey for the Victorian under 16s ice hockey team and he introduced me to Porsche motor cars at his uncle's sports car dealership (Dutton's Motors).

And one day we spent the whole day exploring the green environs of Richmond that I didn't know existed until now, even though they were within a few kilometres from Kent Street. We walked along Victoria Street, the street separating industrial Richmond from the fully industrial Abbotsford. We went past the skipping girl vinegar sign, we turned left at the end of the industrial part of Abbotsford, we then crossed a footbridge over the Yarra River, which I saw for the first time.
We found ourselves in a totally natural landscape, full of gum trees and low green bushes. We kept walking along the curvy and fenced road that Ray called The Boulevard (Kew Boulevard) until we came to an opening in the fence. We walked through the opening and found ourselves in the very rugged Australian bushland, very steep, almost vertical, like a cliff. As we were walking downwards, we were holding on to branches of low bushes and descending towards the Yarra River deep below us.

Ray spoke quietly. "Nobody knows this place."

Ray found the hollow place that he was looking for; it was a cave, dug into the vertical clay wall. A cave that can house about five fully grown men. But it wasn't dug out recently, one could tell that by the worn and smoked walls of the cave. This was an ancient cave.

Ray spoke again, this time with a hushed tone in his voice. "Aboriginals lived here before the British came to Australia."

I instantly thought to myself, the original Aussies have gone. Just then I felt a tinge of sadness.

Ray was a source of early Australian historical information. Later in the afternoon he took me to Dights Falls where we could still see the remains of the flour mill that was powered by the low waterfall in the Yarra River. A few years later I went rowing in a boat there with my girlfriend Lyn, just above the falls. And the Kew Boulevard behind the fenced area became our private racing track, later on. All within the land of the first true Australians, the Aboriginals. Now I am starting to realise that the "true blue Aussie" is a recent label that the locals want to be identified by.

So now, instead of searching for the true blue Aussie, I am trying to find a proper and fitting description of what defines the present inhabitants of modern Australia.

A jingle that included the words "Football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" was very popular many years ago as an overall description of the true Aussie. "Vegemite" could be another mandatory requirement, but I didn't include Vegemite in my list of Aussie prerequisites because I have this requirement well and truly covered. I like Vegemite by the way, but I found that it needs more salt. So I have it on toast with feta cheese on it. I have multi-culturalized Vegemite.

The search for the true blue Aussie has now been redefined to the search for the definition of a true blue Aussie.

Swinburne promised a greater probability of finding a definition of a true blue Aussie because it attracted students from a greater geographic area, it has a greater catchment area than Richmond Tech. I was right in assuming that at Swinburne there would be a greater chance of finding what defines a true blue Aussie. But I found more than I expected, I found more ethnics at Swinburne than I imagined there would be, along with a sprinkling of a few Aussies. There were students from Hong Kong, from Malaysia, from India, from China and there was me, from Macedonia.

And then I met an interesting looking student by the name of Henry Moore (not Henry Moore, the British sculptor). The Aussie Henry Moore stood out amongst the global ethnics groups - he had the physical features of a typical Aussie, long legs and freckles on his face and when he spoke he would shorten most words and he would add an "O" to a lot of other words.

"What are you doing this arvo?" he would ask me in a distinct Aussie accent.

And he was from the elite Melbourne suburb by the name of Balwyn. We became friends and we stayed friends for the four years that I was at Swinburne.

One day at lunch time Henry invited me to his parents' house for lunch, he wanted to introduce me to his mum. His mum prepared a nice meal of lamb cutlets with mash potatoes and peas. I was led to their well-set-out dining room by Henry while his mum was watching at a respectable distance behind us with a curious amazement. I had the feeling that people in Balwyn had not met or seen too many foreign people before. As I sat down on the dining table I turned around and I caught a glimpse of Henry's mother with her eyes wide open and her mouth in the shape of a long horizontal rectangle - putting on an embarrassed smile because she was caught spying on me. I can only assume that she wanted to see if I would use the cutlery, or if I would eat with my fingers. By the way, that was the first time that I ate lamb cutlets and peas. We ate lamb stew, roast lamb and BBQed lamb on a spit, we didn't cook lamb cutlets and we had our mash potatoes with garlic. I used the fork to eat the mash potatoes and I scooped up the peas with the fork as well, knowing too well that it's pretty difficult to stab a pea with a fork.

It was a pleasant lunch and an amicable meeting with Henry's mum. On the way out of the dining room we walked along the passage of the house, past a bedroom with its door slightly ajar. Then Henry told me not to look into the bedroom because his sister was in there with her boyfriend and they were "at it". Whatever that meant?

In casual conversation Henry told me that his parents were very conservative and that they came from England as "ten-pound poms", another term that I didn't understand. Conservative? With their daughter and her boyfriend in the bedroom? Was this an example of an oxymoron? By now I was starting to be disillusioned with the idea of finding a definition of a true blue Aussie.

By the way, my time at Swinburne wasn't completely wasted by the task of searching for the true blue Aussie definition because I met other young people. People like David Poon, who helped me pass a practical report on "thermocouples". Intuitively I knew the lecturer was wrong and I wanted to write my "correct" answer on the report. David then gave me "Confucius-like" advice.

"Sometimes the wrong answer is the correct answer. In other words, " he said "Tell the lecturer what he wants to hear and you will pass."

I told the lecturer what he wanted to hear and I did pass.

Another useful student I met at Swinburne was Cheong Lee. He invited me into his rented flat in Hawthorn for lunch one day and there he taught me how to cook fried rice. I still cook that meal today but in a slightly modified way. I use angel-hair pasta instead of rice and I add Kransky sausage to it and call it "sweet and sour Kransky". It's a multicultural dish and my daughter still loves it.

My parents on the other hand started to think that I was turning into an Aussie. With good reason because I was mixing with boys of different backgrounds, I was studying something they didn't understand and every now and then I would go surfing or snow skiing, depending on the season - activities that were foreign to my parents.

My parents thought I was shunning our Macedonian culture. They had different plans for us kids; they were thinking of and saving money for our weddings. They were hoping that I would be working full time by now. They didn't know what college I was going to and they didn't know what I was studying.

Dad would say to me: "Look at your cousin, he is two years younger than you and he is a motor mechanic, already earning money."

I felt like I was straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the ridge was getting wider. The two cultures were pulling me apart, like the two tectonic plates were pulling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge apart. I was a skip at home and I was a foreigner outside the house.

Now the task at hand was for me to look and act like an Aussie in the general community and to please my parents at home by adhering to the Macedonian way of life, particularly for dad, with whom I had a telepathic understanding.

One warm evening in December when mum's brother came over from Perth for a family visit, dad put on the show that Macedonians like to see. It was past midnight, dad and my uncle were still chatting away on the front veranda when I pulled up in my trusty Beetle. Dad put on a convincing act for my uncle.

"Do you know what time it is? I told you to come back before 12 o'clock. You can sleep in the car now."

Telepathically he told me to stay in the car until my uncle goes to bed, then I can come into the house. Sure enough, at about 20 minutes past midnight there was a knock on the car's window. We put on a convincing act for mum's brother that evening.

It was virtually impossible to please mum because she was very religious and set in her ways of thinking. She wanted me to become a priest, of all things. I thought to myself "Oh my God, how can I do that?" We compromised. I told mum that I would take her to church on Sundays (whenever I could), and I did that until mum met Peter Daicos's aunty in church one Sunday - Yes, Peter Daicos, the Collingwood AFL football player - and she took over my duties of driving mum to church in her late model Mercedes Benz.

By now I knew that for me to fit the definition of an Aussie I must act like an Aussie. I had to follow footy, show interest in kangaroos (not the footy team), eat meat pies and drive a Holden motor car. And that is what I tried to do.

I chose to follow the Melbourne football club, mainly because of Ron Barassi, who was playing for them and he had a name that stood out and it was easy for me to remember.

For the kangaroo requirement, I liked watching the television series "Skippy the Bush Kangaroo". Skippy was very smart. I was amazed how it understood Sonny's instructions and, with a clicking sound from its mouth, Skippy would run off and do something that your everyday grey kangaroo couldn't do.

Owning and hence driving a Holden motor car was out of the question for me - I had my trusty Volkswagen Beetle.

So, I had to come good with eating meat pies. Until now, six years in Australia, I had not tasted a pie, let alone eaten a meat pie, not even the coveted "Four'N Twenty" variety.

One Saturday afternoon on my way to the MCG, where I sold footy records for pocket money and to buy my sports car, I met another young businessman also going to the MCG, to sell meat pies.

Wow, I thought to myself, this is my chance to buy and eat a pie. I bought a pie from him, but he told me that the pie was cold. So, what? I have eaten cold zelnik (Macedonian pastry) before without any drama.

Well, there was drama, a big drama. I don't think the piece of pie that I ate touched the bottom of my stomach before it was out again, together with the rest of my stomach's contents. The drama lasted for about four years. That is how long it took me before I attempted to eat another pie.
The first time I ate a pie after the cold-pie rejection was on a day trip to Rutherglen. This time it was a hot pie with tomato sauce that I squeezed out of a small plastic cube. It tasted delicious. Then and there I made a mental note to myself that I will always eat a hot meat pie when I am out in the countryside.

It takes a long time to become a true blue Aussie, as explained by Bill Peach, who in one of his current affairs programs was interviewing two old Aussies from Echuca. They were the archetypal true blue Aussies, wearing the signature blue singlets and all that.

Bill asked them If they were mates, one of them answered: "After working together for thirty years, I guess we can call ourselves mates."

From that statement I inferred that it might take me thirty or more years to become a true blue Aussie. So I dropped my quest of behaving like a true blue Aussie. I figured I was already some sort of an Aussie. Maybe a Macedonian Aussie who eats his Vegemite with feta cheese. And that was good enough for me.

Now I wanted to be a cool-looking Macedonian Aussie, nearly as cool as James Dean. Not only was he cool, he drove a cool car. James Dean drove a Porsche 550 for a while (before his untimely death in his own Porsche) and I nearly bought a Porsche myself; a cheaper model than Dean's Porsche.

Failing to buy the Porsche Speedster, I bought a duffle coat one day because it looked cool on an Aussie who was wearing one in Victoria Street, Richmond. I wore that duffle coat in Victoria Street one day and tried to look cool, just like that cool-looking Aussie did. The duffle coat didn't do the trick. I was reassured of that fact when I overheard someone say: "What is that stupid looking wog doing in a duffle coat?"

From then on I stuck to my favourite thing - cars. I will devote a whole chapter on cars.

I still eat Vegemite with feta cheese, like a multicultural Aussie does. But before that, the Vietnam War got in the way, as you will find out in the next chapter where the multicultural Aussie also scored some brownie points.

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