Day 1
Off the plane from Spain. Exhausted and broken-hearted about leaving Spain. But now we have to get from the airport to Rosebud, which is a suburb almost as far as it is possible to go from the airport and still be in Melbourne.
Melbourne airport is not served well by public transport. The city planners never conceived that people would not drive to and from the airport, so it has no public transport infrastructure. We miss the direct bus to the Rosebud area, and the next one is not for two hours. We take the bus to the centre.
On the bus, an announcement pays respects to the traditional owners of the land we are travelling on. It goes much further than I expect.The effect of the message is that the traditional owners never granted white people permission to be in Australia.
I’m surprised. Can things actually be changing in Australia? Could white people actually be owning the genocide they perpetrated?
We take the metro to the closest station to Rosebud (Fankston), which is still thirty kilometres away from our destination. There, my sister-in-law kindly meets us with our new van. It is a very expensive diesel van, passed down from within the family. Yes, diesel. My mother, who used to own it, is actually very keen on going electric, but it is almost impossible to buy an electric car in Australia. Australia is at least five years behind Europe.
I want to sell the van soon and go without a car, but arriving in Australia with no private transport seemed like an incredible hardship, so now we have a diesel van.
We get in the van. O is frazzled. He must drive on the wrong side of the road for the first time in three years after spending 24 hours on planes.
We make it to Rosebud without incident.