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dollars and several wasted hours earlier. We filled it at the local pharmacy. When Mum saw the astronomical price of the drug, she gave a mordant laugh. ‘Give me that receipt,’ she said. ‘I’m going to keep it, otherwise no one in Australia will believe me.’
    â€˜Well, Mum,’ I said. ‘ Someone has to pay the costs of these medicines, even in Australia.’
    â€˜Yes,’ she shot back. ‘In Australia we all do. And those who’ve got more, pay more.’
    I realised then that I’d been away from my homeplace too long. I’d started to forget the lessons of Bland Street.
    They were not just my mother’s lessons, but lessons instilled by my father as well. Born and raised in California, he’d become an Australian by accident. He’d come here on tour as lead singer with a dance band of the great music hall era, and had found himself stranded and penniless in Adelaide when the tour promoter absconded with the band’s pay. To earn his fare back to the United States, he joined an Australian band, and swiftly fell in love with the country and its egalitarian ethos. He was playing a gig the night news came that Paris had fallen to the Nazis. After the show, he and the band members went out drinking. ‘Gunna bloody well enlist,’ one of the musicians slurringly declared, and, in the morning, they all did, my father included. He was, possibly, the only American citizen serving in the AIF. When his unit returned to Sydney after tours in New Guinea and the Middle East, he just stayed on. No bureaucrat had decided the circumstances under which he stayed. He was, I suppose, an illegal immigrant. He didn’t get around to regularising his citizenship until prompted to do so by a government official whofinally noted that a septuagenarian American named Lawrie Brooks had been voting in every election since the 1940s and was collecting an old age pension. But it didn’t take an oath or a sheaf of paperwork to make my father an Aussie. Nobody could have been a more authentic and enthusiastic Australian than my American dad. I know that his Australian heart would break, if he were alive today to see how far we have strayed from our bedrock values in the treatment of refugees.
    It was just the kind of issue that engaged him. If my mother’s activism was directed at the plight of the people around her, my father’s was often more global in scope. While she made phone calls, he wrote letters. Impassioned, eloquent, angry. Letters to the editor. To our prime minister. To other people’s prime ministers. To Churchill, Einstein, Rupert Murdoch. More often than not, he got a considered reply. More often than not, the newspapers published them. Sometimes, I would watch my mother reading Dad’s latest published rant, her expression a combination of pride and dismay.
    â€˜You really shouldn’t call the prime minister a liar, darling.’
    â€˜Why not? He bloody well is one.’
    I can only imagine the letters my father would write today. I think he would be appalled that a Labor prime minister embraces so fully the shallow rhetoric of ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’. An avid student of Australian history, he would be swift to point out that the Aboriginal inhabitants of this place were denied that luxury when the boatloads of England’s despised poor — who most certainly had not decided the circumstances under which they came — were dumped out on the fatal shore. I think he would say that, since we cannot, on this thin-soiled, fragile continent, take everyone, we might well look at who we were in deciding who we will welcome. The most authentically Australian immigration policy would be the one that takes not the rich entrepreneurs or the talented and skilled, but the poorest and most desperate; the outcasts, in short, who most resemble the underestimated underclass