The Good the Bad and the Ugg. What are the happenings behind a migrant story?

The Good the Bad and the Ugg. What are the happenings behind a migrant story?

One of my favourite stories from my first collection of short stories Feelings in Staccato: The Book of Stories is the story The Good the Bad and the Ugg.

I wrote this story on a whim. One day just walking between aisles in Coles, snippets of memory came to me and I remembered my first  ‘arrival’ at a shopping centre, me getting lost on the streets in a hot day, and the confusion at  ‘how are you today’. Do people mean it when they ask it?

I went home that day and started to put the memories on paper. By writing it down I remembered another ‘incident’ and then another one; things that happened to us during our first year in Perth, as ‘fresh’ as they come immigrants!

Then I let the story rest, like you do with the dough for bread, or in Yoga, the final pose Savasana. You allow your body to re-balance and re-assess how it feels after the practice.

Then another day, with my mind roaming while I was out shopping, I found the right tone, and how I wanted the story to sound – funny, moaning, grumbling, and a bit sad. There and then I had to sit in a coffee-lunch place in Park Centre in East Victoria Park. And I let it flow and I wrote it down. Later I pieced it together with the memories and the  ‘Ugg story’, as I affectionately call it, was born. The story was in the making for a good year but when it was finally done its title came naturally.

It was meant to be part of my first book, and so appropriate to define myself as an author, since by coming to Australia I was an author of my own life.

Fun fact, that coffee place in Park Centre, does not exist anymore.

In free translation – The Good the Bad and the Ugg – means the Good things that I found immigrating to Australia, the Bad things that happened to us and the regrets of what we left home, and the Ugg! The word Ugg in itself, could be another story; Ugg boots and the flip flops and all the laid-back-easy-to-wear fashion in Australia. The Ugg is the symbol of new traditions and customs, like Xmas in a hot summer with prawns on barbie, like wearing shorts to the store, and like one of the Aussies saying Slip, Slop, Slap that sounds so brute and yet so healthy.

If you don’t know the meaning of it google it! The sun in Australia is worst than anywhere else and to Slip a shirt, Slop on sunscreen, and Slap a hat on you, it’s a way of life. Whoever came with this slogan was damn smart!

So, if you read this blog and you did not buy my first book yet, bwah, I am sad about it, but here it - a piece of it.

More to the point, the story was also published on the website Immigration Diaries.

Fragment from The Good the Bad and the Ugg – for your enjoyment

‘Coming to Australia was, at most, a dream: one of my first dreams as a young girl, when I was trying to resist the communist regime. We were not allowed to speak, so having these dreams was a rebellious way of saying ‘I detest communism’. I imagined that one day I would defect. I would run away from that life of ration cards, of soap and deodorant purchased on the black market, of restricted news. A life cooped up in the cage of the Communist Party.

I came up with two options: Canada and Australia. Australia was my favourite option because I wanted to go as far away as possible. As a girl I had heard a lot about ships coming from Australia to our Black Sea ports. Early on I became committed to English classes at school, both because of a natural talent for foreign languages and because my instinct was telling me that one day I would need English.

But how was I going to travel to the Black Sea? How could I find an Australian ship to hide on? How much food and water would I need to survive hidden for a few days? How far would the ship need to go before I came out of my hiding place without risking being sent back?

Then life started to take my dreams apart.’