Growing Up in South Africa

The Start of a 28-Year Journey

I thought I would share some brief thoughts about growing up in a fascinating country: South Africa.

I was eight years old when I left Australia and arrived in South Africa with my family in 1972. At that age, you don't really think about moving countries in the way an adult does. You don't study the economics, worry about employment or wonder whether you've made the right decision. You simply go where your parents take you. You adapt to new ways very quickly.

For me, Australia had been home. Then, quite suddenly, South Africa became home. And it remained home for the next twenty-eight years. I grew up there through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which meant that most of my childhood and virtually all of my teenage years were spent in a country that was changing in ways I couldn't possibly have understood at the time.

As a child, South Africa was simply the place where I lived. The landscape was different from Australia, the weather was different and there were all sorts of things that seemed perfectly ordinary to me which, looking back, were anything but ordinary. I went to school there. I made friends there. I learned to drive there. I received an education there. I went on holidays there. I grew up there.

It was also a fascinating place to grow up because there was always a sense that there was more going on beneath the surface. South Africa had its own character. It was confident, sometimes rather eccentric, and certainly not short of opinions. There was sport, sunshine, big skies and the outdoors, but there was also the complicated reality of apartheid and the divisions that ran through everyday life.

As a child, you absorb these things without necessarily understanding them. You notice who lives where. You notice who does which jobs. You notice that some people have opportunities that others don't. You accept the world around you because, for a child, the world around you is simply the world. It was only later that I began to understand what I had actually been witnessing.

My childhood in South Africa therefore became a mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary. I was doing the same things that children everywhere do, such as going to school, making friends, getting into trouble occasionally and trying to work out what I might do with my life.

But I was doing all of that in a country going through an extraordinary period of history. By the time I eventually left South Africa in 2000, I had spent twenty-eight years there. That is a long time.

I had arrived as an eight-year-old Australian boy with an accent that amused the locals and left as an adult who had spent most of his life in South Africa. In many respects, although Australia was where I had been born, South Africa was where I had grown up. And that distinction has always stayed with me. When I think about Australia, I think about where my story started. When I think about South Africa, I think about where I became the person who would eventually leave it.

I didn't know any of that when I arrived in 1972. I was eight years old and probably far more interested in what was happening around me than in where the next twenty-eight years might take me.

That’s all for now.

Take care,

Greg