It was in Geelong, in an English class for new arrivals, that she met my father. A Romanian refugee. A mechanic. He had taken a different road out of a different broken country to end up in the same room in the same regional Victorian town. 

I was born not long after. 

The early years were a moving target. Government housing in Geelong as a baby. A move to Brisbane at four. Sydney at eight, where Mum and I spent three months at the Lewisham refugee shelter waiting for the housing commission application to come through. When it was approved, we moved to Yennora, a working class suburb in Sydney’s west. 

The Salvation Army turned up with food, clothes, and the furniture to start a life there. They had been turning up for the family across all three states. 

Mum was independent. Strong willed. Determined. The discipline was strict, sometimes too strict, but the lessons were permanent. The work ethic. The refusal to be a victim. The quiet certainty that you build your own way out. 

I just did not use any of it for a while. 

By fourteen, gone. 

A teenage gang member on the streets of Cabramatta in its hardest years. Saw things no teenager should see. Did things I am not proud of. Inside gun shootouts. In the middle of knife fights. Drinking heavily. Selling drugs and getting caught, a few weeks spent in Minda Juvenile Justice followed a charge for extortion of a business in Canley Vale, before the charges were eventually dropped. 

What I never did, even then, was use. 

The heroin wave that defined the suburb in those years swept past hundreds of young men I knew. Some did not survive it. There was a line I would not cross, even at fourteen, even on the streets, even when no one was watching. 

That same line is what eventually pulled me back. 

Days before my eighteenth birthday, my first son was born. 

That was the moment. 

The change was not clean, but somewhere in the years after he arrived, a decision began to form. Become what some of my friends had already become, in jail, or already gone. Or become the father he deserved. 

I chose the second path. 

At twenty one, walked into Granville TAFE to finish Year 12 alongside other adults the system had long since written off. The Red Cross helped me buy textbooks. A spot in Optometry School followed. Then the Maki Shiobara Optometry Scholarship after my first year of uni. First class honours at the end. 

A street kid had become an eye doctor. 

It should have been the end of the story. 

It was barely the beginning. 

I then came out of uni believing what every young optometrist is told. Become excellent at the clinical work, and the rest will look after itself.