The latest came via, not surprisingly an ABC program, One Plus One, professionally delivered per usual by journalist Jane Hutcheon, a favourite of mine.

It was not a new story but the first time my wife and I had heard Markus Zusak, author of the best-selling novel (and now movie) The Book Thief and its successor, the acclaimed Bridge of Clay.

Having grown up in Wagga during the great post-war migration era it was always exciting to gradually piece together how many young kids and their families ended up in our city then through the start of the migrant camp at Uranquinty and, of course, the wonderful Snowy Scheme that provided the opportunity for so many migrants to find, broaden and expand their new life in regional Australia obviously helped in my view.

I recall two Hungarian brothers arriving at South Wagga Primary School in the late 1940s and teacher Jack Gersback and a few students trying to teach them the game of cricket.

They had trouble for a week or two getting the idea that the ball needed to be bowled not chucked which made life traumatic for playtime and lunchtime batsmen without pads.

Zusak’s Austrian father, Helmut, and German mother, Lisa, emmigrated separately in the 1950s and set about creating their new life.

Zusak’s future Mum and Dad did not speak English when they arrived but met, married, built a house at Engadine, raised four kids who Lisa insisted all learned a musical instrument (Marcus played piano and flute).

Hutcheon’s interview exposed his trauma but how the love and encouragement of wife, Dominika, and his agent got him back on the rails when it looked like The Book Thief might never hit the press.

Just a few months ago Frank Lowy, arguably Australia’s best-known migrant of the post-WW2 period, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald: “Australia needs more courageous people to call it home, not less. When I arrived in Australia I felt this country regarded me as a future citizen”.

“There is a rising crescendo of opinion from columnists and politicians saying we should reduce our migration intake, and in the past year that intake has fallen. We have gone from migration targets to migration caps. But we are moving in the wrong direction. The act of migration is an act of ambition, imagination and bravery”.

Former PM, Paul Keating, said recently: “I think Australia has to be a country where the ‘welcome’ sign is out; anyone who thinks it’s smart to cut migration is sentencing us to poverty”.

Businessman and writer, Harold Mitchell, wrote in March that another PM, Malcolm Fraser, should be acknowledged for his part in migration for, against popular opinion at the time (not too dissimilar to the current time), Fraser realised we had a special responsibility for the part we played in the disastrous Vietnam War.

“Fraser didn’t stop the boats, he welcomed them; and, thousands of Vietnamese migrants have become great Australian citizens as a result,” Mitchell wrote.

South Australia’s current governor since 2014, Hieu Vau Le, arrived on a refugee boat in Darwin in 1977 and is the only state governor appointed of Asian birth.

More recently, a Daily Advertiser letters contributor, C J Buckland, wrote that skilled migrants should be sent to the backbone of regional areas outside of Sydney for their first two years where we are suffering shortages in nursing, building and trades so they could properly experience the “real” side of Australia.  

In recent years the column has devoted a number of articles to the wonderful creation by Joseph Assaf, who left Lebanon in 1967 as a migrant to Australia, of the annual Australian Ethnic Business Awards in 1988, an absolute showcase of so many successful businesses founded and continually operated by migrants.

There is so much to repeat in our nation that needs the thrust migration and migrants can give us, as emphasised by what Australian post-war governments achieved in the first great migration wave.

Foremost amongst those projects, as John Kjeldsen writing in The Daily Advertiser recently and Max Petrie of Palm Beach, in The Sydney Morning Herald, both emphasised was the implementation of the projects still needed in our nation - more water projects for the great agricultural industry we can expand upon.

It does not end there, of course.

As Lowy said in his recent article: “If you believe in immigration, you have to build infrastructure”, and that does not mean football stadiums and it certainly does not mean making metropolitan cities endlessly bigger”.