Inevitably at first, all is strange in this vast land. Having lived in a European city where all social life is concentrated in the Vital city centres, Magda Bozic finds the Australian decentralized suburban life of the late 1940s somewhat bland and depressing. Yet in a characteristic move, she counterbalances her feelings of disappointment, with a positive, compensating Australian alternative to her European expectations – ‘One day a random bus driver made me see that there was a magic to Sydney only it was different in kind to the magic of European cities’. After a trip through the ‘nondescript suburbs’ she discovers Bondi beach – ‘the glory that was also a part of Sydney’.

 The other side of migrant’s dilemma in reconciling her European identity with the Australian reality is the attitude of the native population toward migrant. While our awareness of such the problem has been heightened over recent years as a result of heated immigration debates and emphasis on multiculturalism, the stigma attached to being a New Australian in this post-war period, meant enduring many unconscious prejudices and assumptions about the migrant’s obligation to ‘assimilate’. One of Magda Bozic's recollections from her first job as a typist captures this disturbing atmosphere of misunderstanding.

... it was a slightly unnerving experience to rap away on a typewriter with two fingers at a slow speed while the rest of the pool left me for dead. In a vague sort of way, they connected my slow typing with me being a foreigner when in fact it was because I could not type.

There is no bitterness in this simply told, often poignant story. While memories of her ‘home’ country are cherished and contrasted with the present, nostalgic impulses are checked by a realistic appreciation of the irrevocable nature of the past. She has come from a country where ‘a big neighbouring country’ has, since the second world war, decided that nation’s destiny. By never actually naming her ‘small European’ country of origin, the writer reinforces her prime concern with the cultural ‘otherness’ of the migrant, rather than the specific nationality.