The morning after arriving in Australia from Finland, my family went for a walk from our new home at the migrant Midway hostel in Maribyrnong. I suppose we wanted to see this strange new country we had landed in, to step out into it for ourselves and try to make some sense of where life had suddenly brought us. We walked along the side of the road like ducklings following their mother, all in a row, close together, as if staying near one another might somehow make this foreign place feel less overwhelming. We must have made a peculiar sight, a newly arrived migrant family wandering the suburban streets of Melbourne, carrying all the uncertainty of a new life in our steps.

It was not long before we came upon a car yard. I still remember how amusing the ‘AUTO’ stickers in the car windows looked to us. In Finnish, auto simply means car, but at the time we did not know that here it was also short for automatic. I do not think we had ever even seen an automatic car before. To us, cars were manual. That was what was familiar. That was what belonged to the world we had come from.

So on that very first morning in our new country, we were introduced to Holden cars. My dad explained to us that we had arrived in a land where distances were vast, where a car was not really a luxury at all, but a necessity. My mum, whose English was the strongest out of all of us, became the negotiator. I can still picture her in that little white portable office at the back of the car yard, doing her best in a language that was not her own, carrying the weight of all of us in that moment far more than I understood then. The salesman kept repeating one question: “You have lived in Australia for less than 24 hours?” We all nodded our heads in unison. I suppose he thought we had not understood him, but we had. It was just as astonishing to us as it was to him.

About an hour later, I was sitting in the back seat of our newly acquired Holden Belmont. I do not pretend to understand much about cars. All I knew was that it was white, that my mum had somehow managed to sign all the papers, and that my dad had pulled a huge stack of cash from his back pocket and placed it on the desk. What lay under the bonnet was a mystery I happily left to my dad and my brothers. I only knew that something important had happened. Something practical, yes, but also something much bigger. We were no longer only passing through. We were beginning.

Then we drove out of the car yard.

Within moments, my dad was knocking down the grey round rubbish bins lined along the side of the road, while my mum’s high-pitched frightened scream filled the car. My dad had never driven on the left side of the road before, and it took him a little while to work out exactly where the middle of the road was meant to be. In reply to my mum’s alarm, he made some comment about the side of the road being a silly place to store rubbish bins. Little did we understand at the time that Friday morning must have been rubbish collection day in the Maribyrnong neighbourhood. We would learn those sorts of things later, one small unfamiliar detail at a time.

I turned my head and looked through the back window. I can still see the car dealer standing there, shaking his head. I can only imagine what he must have been thinking as he watched us disappear down the road — that this confused migrant family, barely a day in Australia and already flattening rubbish bins, would surely not last long Down Under.

But life is strange that way. The people who look least likely to belong are often the ones who end up weaving themselves into a place with all their heart.

Our family had arrived in Melbourne at the end of September, right in the middle of the great footy finals fever. We had no understanding of that either. We simply wondered why every second person seemed to be wearing white and tender light blue, while the other half wore brown and gold. Everything around us felt foreign, full of codes and passions and loyalties we could not yet read. And yet, even then, I think something in us was willing. We were ready, in the only way migrants ever really are — uncertain, homesick, bewildered, but open. Open to whatever this unfamiliar and often bizarre new country might hold.

Strangely enough, those two very teams would later become part of my own story. For the first twenty years, I barracked for North Melbourne, perhaps because their blue and white felt so familiar to me, echoing the colours of the Finnish flag, and because the kangaroo somehow seemed to tie it all together. Since then, I have barracked for Hawthorn, the team that won the grand final in the very month we arrived. How strange and lovely that the colours I first noticed in confusion would, in time, become colours I would claim as my own.

It was the late 1970s, and the television was filled with that unforgettable jingle: We love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars. Adapted from the American line about baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet, the Australian version gave us kangaroos, koalas, meat pies and a cheerful vision of a laid-back, sun-drenched nation. To my young mind, the message seemed simple enough: if you did not love football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars, then perhaps you were not truly Australian.

Well, at least now we had a Holden car. It felt like a beginning. A small and slightly comical beginning, perhaps, but a beginning all the same.

Forty-four years later, I sit here in my Melbourne home, eating breakfast and watching the pre-game coverage on television. In all these years, I have well and truly been introduced to all four — Holden cars, kangaroos, football and meat pies. Once again, footy fever has taken hold of this beautiful city. Once again, there is that unmistakable hum in the air, that sense of a whole city leaning in the same direction, watching, hoping, celebrating.

And as I sit here now, I find myself thinking of that first morning. Of our family walking the streets of Maribyrnong like ducklings. Of my mother, brave and determined, carrying us forward with her English and her courage. Of my father, driving into a row of rubbish bins in a country where even the side of the road felt wrong. Of all that we did not know. Of all that waited for us.

And somewhere deep inside me, that newly arrived Finnish girl is still there, still watching, still trying to make sense of this strange new land she had been brought to. She could not have known then that one day its rhythms would become her rhythms, that its seasons, sounds and traditions would weave themselves into the fabric of her life. She could not have known that what first felt foreign would one day feel familiar, and that what once felt so far from home would, slowly and quietly, become home itself.

Perhaps that is one of the tender miracles of migration. A place that first greets you with strangeness can, over time, become the very place that holds your life. Your memories. Your children and grandchildren. Your laughter, your traditions, your everyday ordinary moments. Your heart.

And so here I am, all these years later, making my meat pies, listening to Mike Brady, watching the footy with my nephew by my side, and feeling the city come alive around me. And I think of that first morning in Maribyrnong, of our family walking behind one another, not knowing what lay ahead.

We did not yet know the language of this land, or its game, or its ways. But somehow, over the years, this place came to know us, and we came to know it too. And that bewildering first morning, which began with uncertainty, laughter, and a row of fallen rubbish bins, was in its own small way the beginning of belonging.