Purely from a lay point of view I've always been intrigued why some migrants seem to pine for their motherland even though many have lived and worked in Australia for decades, raised families and even married people of different nationalities from their own. They say home is where your heart is. If seeing television programs of your motherland makes you want to pack up and go back does this mean the years you invested in building your new home were a failure?

What must people go through in their heart and soul who feel like this? I must say I felt this way when I came to Australia as a nine year-old child! I didn't like it and wanted to go back. Back where? To a displaced people's camp in Italy? That's where we (mother, brother and sister) were after we skipped from our motherland Croatia that in those days was a state within the now non-existent, Yugoslavia. 

I eventually learned to replace my big continental bread rolls full of salami, cheese, dill pickles and mustard with the more demure sliced bread sandwiches (cut in quarters and with crusts sliced off) of vegemite and cheese. And something that initially made me throw up, canned spaghetti in a bread roll. That was my initial cultural shift.

As much as I fought it the years have erased my homesickness and I've developed a sense of being Australian, albeit one not of British extraction but of central European (some would say Balkan) extraction. November 4 this year marked 47 years that my family arrived in Sydney. But seeing pictures of Croatia, especially the coast of Croatia where we came from (ie: city of Split) it still made me sigh wanting to be back, if only for an extended holiday.

My mother on the other hand, and like many migrant mothers (and fathers for that matter) deep down have never quite managed to feel totally at "home" in Australia. They were very loyal Australians and were always grateful to the country for taking them in, but alas, the needs of the heart, for some, were not always satisfied by migration. Just look at the statistics of migrants leaving Australia permanently to go back to their motherland.  

What an adopted country can do is to provide things like newspaper articles and television programs or even radio stations that can link migrants to their motherland and culture so they don't feel totally isolated thus helping them to integrate more easily in their adopted country. That's one of the reasons why SBS was set up. The transition for older migrants  is a little harder to make as they not only have to cope with being completely uprooted from their life and friends in the motherland but then having to start all over again, usually from scratch with family in tow, in a new country that may seem very alien to them.

My dear mother Tania who, as a single mum, risked everything to bring her three children to Australia and a better life, died in July this year. She would have been 84 this month. I am just sorry that she wasn't here to see a program that would have touched her heart and just made the pain of being far away from her motherland that much easier to bear.