Calling Australia home: after 50 years, it’s a golden g’day

Mary and Alfred Micallef have long called Australia home but it has taken them 50 years to make it ­official.

Maltese immigrants Alfred and Mary Micallef (with Bella) have lived in Australia for more than 50 years. Picture: Aaron Francis

Mary and Alfred Micallef have long called Australia home but it has taken them 50 years to make it ­official.

After watching their two children and five grandchildren grow up in Melbourne, the Maltese-born couple will become Australian citizens on Sunday.

Ms Micallef said Australia long ago replaced Malta in her heart as her home country. “It was always on our minds to do it but I think we were lazy because we should have done it a long time ago,” said the 68-year-old.

“We’re going to stay here and die here, so better become Aus­tralians as well.”

She remembers coming to Australia on a Qantas flight as a 19-year-old with her six-month-old daughter. Her husband had arrived seven months earlier after the couple, who had been married for about a year, realised they wanted more out of life than their birth country could offer. “It was hard; we had been married over a year and then being separated wasn’t very good,” she said.

The pair both worked in factories that have since closed, with Ms Micallef working at the Kinnears Rope Works on Ballarat Road in the inner-west suburb of Footscray for 25 years.

She was among 150 workers retrenched when the factory shut in 2002 and the couple has seen Melbourne transform over the decades.

“When we came 50 years ago there was not this traffic around,” Ms Micallef said. “But everything is changing all over the world.”

The Micallefs are retired and living in Delahey in Melbourne’s northwest, where every Sunday they gather their children and grandchildren for a family dinner.

“This is our country now, this our home,” she said.

“We have been here so long and have all the family here. It’s a beautiful country, we can’t complain, we have everything.”

Ms Micallef’s father still lives in Malta and when she visits him, she gets homesick for Australia.

“I don’t want to stay there, I want to come back here,” she said.

“I want to come home because this is my home [and] your home is your home, it doesn't matter where you go.”