Another anniversary

Today is the anniversary of my arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant on November 9 1969. (In mid December I brought the rest of the family over to join me). It's a date that often passes by unnoticed and would have again this year had it not been for a reminder on the radio that it's an anniversary for somebody or something else - I missed the information but heard  the word anniversary, and that reminded me. When Wendy and I decided to come to Ottawa instead of staying on in Edinburgh where we were so happy and I was so professionally well placed, we saw the move as a stepping-stone on our route home to either Australia or New Zealand; we didn't mind which but we did feel quite strongly that we belonged in one or other southern hemisphere country. But when we got to Ottawa, many opportunities opened up for me professionally, Wendy settled in easily, and our kids all did very well in ways that mattered - Jonathan most of all, successfully having complex open heart surgery without which he would not have lived beyond about age 10, paid for in full by the Ontario Health Insurance Program even though the operation was done in Auckland, New Zealand (the best centre in the world at the time). Clearly it was the right decision. As the years passed and success piled on top of success the rightness of our choice - Wendy's as much as mine - became increasingly apparent. By the time the absolutely perfect professional opening materialized for me in Sydney, as professor of public health sciences and editor of the Medical Journal of Australia, it was too late. All of us had put down such deep roots in Canada we simply couldn't uproot and resettle in what by then had become a foreign country. Wendy and I realized then, in 1987, that without either of us noticing we had become Canadians, part of that demographic of 40% or thereabouts of Canadians who had been born in another country.

Wendy and kids on Parliament Hill,
January 1970

Jonathan outside our rented temporary home
331 Island Park Drive, just after returning from open heart surgery in Auckland New Zealand, August 1970