Michael and Mandy Schoeman’s first visit to the Kyabram supermarket left them staring at each other in amazement as they passed a parked car, which was still running, on their way into the store.
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“If that had been in Cape Town it would have been gone in two seconds flat,” Mandy said, reflecting on one of the reasons she pushed hard for her family to relocate from the picturesque South African coastal city to Australia.
Tomorrow, Michael, Mandy and Matthew will become Australian citizens and they are still struggling to shake the habits that they developed in a lifetime of living in their homeland.
Among the first purchases that Michael made when he and Mandy first bought the Webb Rd property they now call home was an video camera security system.
It is now sitting under a number of boxes in the garage as it didn’t take the pair long to realise it may not have been the priority they thought it was.
“There wasn’t even a lock on the front door when we arrived,” Michael said, from the kitchen of the house he is renovating with his wife to become their long-term home.
The Schoeman family said many people who emigrated to Australia did so because of safety concerns.
“The rule of law doesn't really apply in South Africa. The whole place is on edge,” Michael said.
“In six months there we had three attempted break-ins, while we were inside the house.”
And the former professional soldier is not easily startled, in fact, anyone who has watched the Tom Hanks movie Captain Phillips will have an understanding of how he spent much of his professional life.
Michael worked in anti-piracy (just like the movie) with a maritime security company and was in the private military for 20 years.
He said when the Schoemans first arrived in the Kyabram area they were amazed to see houses without security systems or high fences.
“A lot of them don’t even have fences,” he said.
Mandy said when she begin to feel like a prisoner in her own home she knew it was time to leave.
The last straw was when the eldest of the three boys, now living and working in Vietnam as an English teacher, and his fiancée were held at gun point in their Cape Town home.
“We almost lost him that night. It is when I decided we had to get out,” Mandy said.
Middle son Matthew also travelled with little brother Marshall and his parents to Australia. He would also have been completing his citizenship, but is in Melbourne.
It was September 2016 that the family decided to come to Australia.
Mandy had visited Australia several times, her great-uncle was famous German-born artist Hans Heyson.
He became a household name for his watercolours of monumental Australian gum trees and, although he died in 1968, he remains one of Australia’s best known landscape painters.
She said Australia offered a new life to her family, one she is now fully embracing.
“I knew that from a country perspective we wouldn’t be able to have the lifestyle we have now,” she said.
Michael and Marshall stayed behind in Cape Town for six months, packing up the house and selling everything while Mandy and middle son Matthew arrived in Melbourne.
“We landed in February 2017 and moved to Ringwood. Marshall was eight and Matthew was 17 when we arrived,” Mandy said.
Six weeks after Mandy arrived the immigration rules changed, meaning the then 46-year-old had to seek an exemption to remain in Australia.
“As long as I completed my two years with a company I could stay, but not long after starting with the first I had to find another and start the two years starts all over again,” she said.
The family eventually arrived on Webb Rd in Kyabram on December 23, 2021, Michael explaining the family had left with $100,000 and arrived with about $30,000 due to moving and immigration costs.
“That’s how much it costs to pick up your lives and move from South Africa to Australia,” he said.
Marshall started at Kyabram P-12, Michael is launching his own organic wastewater purification business and Mandy is also starting her own company.
Bunnings has become the family’s best friend in its bid to renovate the home, on a 55-acre property where they plan to start cropping and run Angus beef.
Marshall has his own cow, Daisy, the family his its first Australian dog — a kelpie named May, and Australia is now well and truly home.
“I am not going back,” Michael said.
He has a brother still living in south Africa and another brother in New Zealand.
“I would rather look forward. This is by far the most difficult thing you could ever do. Everything you knew before then is gone and in August last year it was five years since we left,” he said.
“When you make a move like this it is not for you but the kids. Come Thursday we are Australians, officially.”
Barbecue, or Braai in South African terminology, is one thing the family did not have to be sold on. The same can be said of one of our national sports, cricket.
Michael is playing with Cooma and has shone with his adopted Australian club, doing much better than the Test team in fact, having claimed three bags of three wickets at an average of 6.27 this season.
He did remind me that Marnus Labuschagne, the world’s best batsman, was South African born.
The family plans to give up its South African citizenship.
“Because we were born in SA we will never lose our residency. We will be Australian South Africans,” he said.
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