Don't Call Me Mate, Mate.

I had been to Australia once before on a mandatory family "recce". It was predictable, safe and clean. It was unintimidating and (I thought) bland. I wondered if the ultra-violet radiation had caused all the colours to fade. A land of freedom where everyone chose to be the same. Ironic, I thought smugly, leaning into my brooding, teenage arrogance.

I drank and danced and drugged my way through the transition into being just another Australian white male. The accent disappeared quickly so I could avoid igniting rivalries over sports I didn't care about. I thought of clever jokes to dismiss the "what school" question asked before any Australian social door is opened. I lived for years on a small patch of common identity built on English vocabulary and American TV but it was only skin deep. In my bones I felt African.

I felt African, but I also felt a fraud. I'd grown up hearing Xhosa, Zulu and Sesotho in my own home and I spoke only a few cursory words. Of the "real" Africa I had heard only hushed rumours (recycled apartheid government tropes) about dangerous, communist banana republics. Jungles and muddy roads, naked children running beside cars and well-dressed men on bicycles. I knew nothing of what lay beyond the northern borders of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe. Those were the borders where young conscripted soldiers like my father had been sent in the eighties to stave off Moscow's threat to our wonderful peace, prosperity and freedom (conditions apply).

As I struggled haphazardly to reclaim my identity, my own call of duty grew gradually louder. I would have to go and see for myself what lay beyond those lines that could not be crossed. To return home with a sense of authenticity. To be just as African as my ethnically African schoolmates from our private Catholic high school (where as a young half-Jew I'd been relegated to the back of the church during mass with my Muslim friends and missed out on Father Francis's waxy white crackers).

For years, I obsessively replayed That Trip: the one to Namibia with my father and grandfather where I'd first seen the pack of wild dirt bikers. They had come riding into our camp in an eruption of dust, noise and good times in their bright, branded clothing. They had travelled all the way from London with a giant Unimog support truck in tow. An awe-struck 13 year-old watched and learned and made himself in their image. The seed was planted.

But this dream, this model of the world and myself in it, existed only in my head. It protected me from the reality of my own insignificance. It was the foundational myth that consoled me, allowing me to feel bigger and better than a speck on a dot in the ever-expanding Universe.

"One day," I'd lie to myself, "I'm going to do that." Years passed. A decade passed. I sunk into my life in Sydney, my career, my friendships. I settled.