Five decades later, my UK hometown still plucks at my heartstrings

Ian Warden

Canberra Times

0
19.02.2026

I met my love by the gasworks wall

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Dreamed a dream by the old canal

I kissed my girl by the factory wall

- Ewan McColl's classic song about hating/loving one's hometown

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The subject of immigration is frothing and bubbling in the cauldron of Australia's public conversation. The new federal Liberal leader is growling (and what a manly growl he has!) that Australia admits far too many migrants and that far too many of them come from unacceptably foreign and unAustralian places.

So for the purposes of informed consumption of what the Liberals and other xenophobia-mongers are up to now with their immigration utterances, it's timely to remind ourselves that at the last count (in April 2025) there were 8.6 million people living in Australia who were born elsewhere. The 8.6 million of us (I say "us" because your columnist was born in England and was lured to Australia as a teenager) constitute 31.5 per cent of Australia's total population of 27.2 million.

So there I was this week thinking feverishly about migrants and migrations, about the hopes and fears and extreme upheavals of the migrant experience. Suddenly, coincidentally, into my inbox there alighted a thoughtful, thought-triggering new essay about our hometowns and our often complicated relationships with them.

Emanuela Anechoum's A Self Divided: What It Means To Leave Your Hometown, decorates the latest online Literary Hub.

We divide ourselves, Anechoum divines, when we leave 'home' and make another 'home' somewhere else. Powerful emotions, including 50 shades of homesickness, can emerge and can haunt us.

And it is not only that international migrations usually involves migrants leaving a familiar place - perhaps a hometown. Our relocations within our home nation involve the forsaking of somewhere we had previously thought of as home. This paradisiacal federal capital, Canberra, has an understandably irresistible allure. "Canberra leads as Australia's relocation hotspot" The Canberra Times has reported, with statistical proofs galore of this truth.

And so teeming tens of thousands of Canberrans are Ms Anechoum's divided selves, with a previous and well-remembered hometown somewhere in Australia or in the wider world. Those of you who have always stayed put where you have always been, grazing like contented cows, can know nothing of what goes on in the hearts and minds of those of us who are leading the upheaved, divided life.

In my case, God help me, I am emotionally divided between the dirty, old, mouldering English seaside town where I grew up and the antiseptically clean and modern city, Canberra, where I have lived for the last 50 years. My yearnings for my English hometown are shirtfrontingly, distressingly strong. Their only saving grace is that they enable me to put myself in the shoes of all migrants and relocators, who, hankering, now wish one could somehow live in two places at one time.

"I never knew a time in my life when I believed I would remain in the town where I was born ... [and] in The Moon and the Bonfires, Cesare Pavese wrote that everyone needs a hometown, even just for the pleasure of leaving it," Anechoum reflects.

"And I am the product of a migratory tradition. My father is Berber and arrived in Italy from Morocco in the 1980s ... he has a visceral love for the Casablanca neighbourhood where he grew up and won't hear a word against it. Sometimes I think that if he could have stayed, he would have never left; I also know that if he could go back tomorrow, he wouldn't. He is no longer fully part of that world. And he will never fully belong to this one either: he exists in two places at once, and for that reason his identity is fractured."

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Five decades later, my UK hometown still plucks at my heartstrings

Ian Warden

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