Written piece
Between the Stitches
Joany Mizzi
Malta
About this piece
This is a personal memoir exploring identity, migration and belonging through the journey of a Maltese-Australian family. Woven together by the metaphor of thread and stitches, it reflects on discovering that home is not a place, but something carried within us.
Between the Stitches
I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1980 to Maltese parents, but if you ask me where home is, I'm still not sure I can answer.
It's not like I lost myself along the way. I don't think I ever really knew who I was to begin with.
My father had spent most of his childhood in Australia, a child from an orphanage in Perth after being sent there by his parents in search of a better life. "Religious propaganda," he calls it now. Little did they know how horrific life in an orphanage would be, and that perhaps life in poor little Malta would have been kinder.
Years later, on a trip back to the island, he met my mother. She followed him halfway across the world, married him, and together they built a life in Australia.
I was their second child. Mamma's baby girl. The one who was always sick, always getting into trouble, yet somehow always getting away with it.
As far as I can remember, my childhood was a happy one.
Friends were always coming over after school. Sundays meant adventures with my father—picnics, flying kites, tennis, fairs, farms, days at the beach. Dad loved adventure, so life was never boring when he was around.
He also loved a gamble.
Sometimes he'd take me to the TAB to bet on the horses. There weren't many little girls there, but I was a tomboy and didn't mind. While he studied the form guide, I'd choose horses at random or play with the betting slips scattered across the floor. Looking back, maybe that's where my love of taking chances began.
Granny, though not by blood but by bond, lived across the road with her bachelor son and his dog. In my memory she was always old, always coughing, always smoking and always playing bingo. I'd sit beside her at the kitchen table, surrounded by bingo cards while she fed me biscuits and milk.
Come to think of it, perhaps she had something to do with that too.
That was my world.
It was the only world I knew.
Then, at ten years old, just as I was beginning to become my own person, everything changed.
My parents decided we were moving to Malta.
Well… not even Malta.
Gozo.
The smaller island.
The only time I'd ever heard anyone mention it was when my father happened to catch the Maltese news on television.
"She's Gozitan!" he'd say excitedly whenever someone from Gozo appeared on the screen, as though that meant everything.
To me, it meant nothing.
We knew we were Maltese—or "wogs" as we jokingly called ourselves—but Australia was home.
The house was sold, the bags were packed, and we travelled halfway across the world.
I remember it like yesterday.
The smell of canned tuna on the plane.
Stepping out into a wall of heat.
Landing on an island that looked completely orange.
Dust everywhere.
"The rock," we called it after that.
And a dusty rock at that.
The car bounced down uneven roads while every house seemed to be carved from the very same stone.
For me, summer was, and still is, the best time of the year in Malta.
It was during that first summer that my aunt taught me to swim by simply throwing me into the sea. There was no lesson. No encouragement. Just sink or swim.
It was the summer of village feasts where everyone wore their best clothes, bands marched through streets decorated with flags and lights, and children ran wild because there were no cars. Fireworks lit up the sky every weekend. Beautiful to watch, terrifying to hear.
It was also the summer I met relatives I never knew I had.
Some became friends.
Others barely noticed me.
After all, I was the outsider who had suddenly arrived and taken up some of Nanna's time.
School, however, was another story.
School was horrible.
Only one or two girls tried to be kind, but even they would snicker behind my back, especially when I didn't understand what was happening. I was the innocent one, the odd one out, looked at as though I had two heads. I never seemed to know what everyone else already understood.
How I longed for the school I had loved back home.
My mother would often say that in Australia I cried when I was too sick to go to school. In Gozo, I cried because I had to.
But I learnt to suck it up and trudge on.
And I learnt.
I learnt the language.
I learnt to keep my emotions hidden.
Life went on as though everything was all right, even when it wasn't.
I was bullied because of my short hair, my Australian accent and because I couldn't speak Maltese. Even the teacher joined in, calling me names and making me sit with what he called "the dumb kids" at the back of the classroom.
I hated every minute of it.
So I escaped into my imagination.
I'd sit at my desk pretending I wasn't really a student but an undercover police officer sent to expose everything wrong with the school.
Those daydreams got me through.
At home I made a decision.
I refused to speak English.
And that's how I learnt Maltese.
Fast forward to today.
Life has changed yet again.
I am still a fish out of water, surrounded by so many other fish.
The island has grown dramatically. It is barely recognisable. Construction cranes fill the skyline, traffic clogs the roads, and the quiet island life I eventually learnt to love feels as though it is disappearing.
Just as I had finally become comfortable calling Gozo home, Gozo itself began to change.
Sometimes I watch reruns of Neighbours from the 1980s and, for half an hour, I'm that little girl again.
Then the credits roll.
I'm back on the rock.
Older.
Still trying to work out where I belong.
For years I thought I was searching for one place to call home.
Now I wonder if that was never the point.
My father carried one thread from Malta to Australia.
My mother carried another back again.
I inherited both.
After leaving so much behind, perhaps the one thing that is uniquely mine is my accent.
It belongs neither here nor there.
It carries traces of Australia, echoes of Malta and the years that shaped me in between. It keeps people wondering where I'm from and, perhaps fittingly, I have spent a lifetime wondering the same thing.
Perhaps home isn't where the stitches begin or where they end.
Perhaps home is what we find between them.
And perhaps that is my thread.