This indulgent reconstructed journal is written in the first person. My need to see the physical as a manifestation of history and memory, can be boring. A good friend, am eminent scientist, once told me “Why” is a religious question, belonging to an earlier age. As we were worried about Covid, we spent 2 careful weeks in Paris, before flying to Brindisi on 17 April. That was when I relooked at my photos of my initial voyage to Australia in 1957 and realised it was exactly 65 years to the day our ship had berthed in Brindisi. There it took on board 400 young Italian men bound for Cairns, joining the 200 stateless Hungarians, who had left Hungary on exit visas. We were escaping the repression that followed the 1956 uprising; the young men were escaping the economic hopelessness of the Mezzogiorno.

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