SANDY DAWS

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

Albus Dumbledore

THE JOURNEY
On the heels of an exhausting 35 hour cross-hemispheric trip in February 2012, Sandilea (Sandi) Daws and her husband came face-to-face with the “flighty temptress” they had long been pursuing. After 22 years of marriage and four children, they deemed it time to “try something different”, to forge a “new beginning”. Upon their arrival at their anticipated starting post, a snow-covered landscape of white pine punctuated by frozen kettle lakes promptly distinguished itself from the temperate urban environs whence they came.

Many of us dream of buying a one-way ticket to our Shangri-la and starting life anew. When Sandi’s husband was offered full-time employment and “decent wages” at Detour Lake Gold Mine north of Cochrane Ontario, it was just the ticket they needed to launch their wanderlust. Or so they thought.

In July, five months after their initial February visit, Sandi’s family (with the exception of the eldest daughter) set out on their Northern Ontario adventure. By October of the same year, the dream came to a grinding halt when Sandi’s husband announced he was seeking a divorce and moving back to Australia because he had “met someone else”: “We thought it was going to be a new beginning but everything just didn’t work out that way. Instead its been a battle . . . four years later I’m still fighting court cases.

THE ARRIVAL
The city of Fairfield, a western suburb of Sydney, is one of the most culturally diverse cities in Australia with more than half of its residents having been born overseas. After World War II many service men and European migrants settled in the area leading to a sizable population increase. Among these immigrants was Sandi’s father David, who in 1964 at nine years of age, arrived by boat with his parents from Bolton, England.

For more than 50,000 years, Aboriginals have lived in Australia. Since colonization in the 18th century, indigenous Australians have been dispossessed of their land, despised for their culture, and marginalized. But the fifteen years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s marked “a time of unusual collaboration between aboriginal and white activists in Australia” (“Collaborating for Indigenous Rights 1957-1973” National Museum of Australia, 2014). Alliances were formed between Aboriginal Australians motivated to help their people and white Australians wanting to redress the injustices suffered by dispossessed peoples in the building of the Australian state.

Befittingly it was in 1973, at his 20th birthday party, that David first met Jan, a 15 year old adolescent of aboriginal ancestry. A year later they gave birth to a baby girl and named her Sandilea.

One of Sandi’s favourite childhood memories is fishing with her mother for fresh water crabs when they were living in Sydney: “I used to fish with my mother for hours and hours in January when it was warmer. With her hands in the water up to her elbows she would grab the crabs and we would scoop them into our eskis (coolers) tied to our waist. At the end of the day we had a bathtub full of crabs.”
At 16 years of age, Sandi moved to Perth with her fiancée, who wanted to move back to the west coast to be closer to his mother. They later married and moved south to the port city of Bunbury where they lived for the next two decades and raised a family: “We lived a pretty normal life . . . I much preferred the bush over the beach. We lived blocks away from the beach but never went there, but we did go camping for Christmas dinner one year right out in the bush.”

THE SETTLEMENT

The residual heartache set in motion by Sandi’s heartbreak of 2012 has taken a heavy toll. Sandi’s eldest son decided to return to Australia with his father, leaving her with her two youngest sons, 18 and 12 years of age. Since January 2016, Sandi’s children have not attended school because their visas and passports expired. Sandi recently lost her health insurance benefits and her ex-husband has defaulted on child support. Moreover, until recently, Sandi has had minimal success with finding assistance and resources: “Its been hard to find people to help until I contacted the multicultural center it was very difficult to deal with all the paper work. I rang numerous people and the consulate and no one helped anywhere”.
Sandi’s “new beginning” started with an unceremoniously crude ending, but it seems no amount of misfortune can make a dent in her conviction that she will prevail. Displaying a wooden carving of a “strong woman” given to her by her mother 18 years ago, Sandi asserts that it “symbolizes the struggles she has overcome” in recent years.

Sandi’s steadfastness may be starting to yield some favourable results and pockets of hope are beginning to wedge their way into her life. Sandi is in the process of applying for permanent residency, which she hopes will bring her one step closer to becoming a Canadian citizen. In 2014, a girl she met in Cochrane introduced Sandi to her father who has since become Sandi’s new companion. In October 2015 she gave birth to a “priceless” baby girl that nevertheless arrived with a price tag: “because I lost my OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) benefits it cost me $7,000 to have a baby.”

For many new immigrants, establishing a connection with their new culture and surroundings can be a challenging proposition, but for Sandi it has proven to be one of the least complicated aspects of her resettlement: “In some ways the culture is no different than back home. It’s one of the best things that have happened. Because my mother is aboriginal I easily associate with the traditions of the aboriginal culture here.” The Toronto Maple Leaf flag and Australian flag hanging side by side in Sandi’s rec room is further evidence of an evolving bicultural affiliation.                                                                                                         
Sandi is not merely tolerating the comparative plunge in annual temperatures, she is embracing it with undaunted poise: “There are only two places in Australia that actually get snow but I actually don’t mind the -40 temperatures. The boys have tried snowboarding which was something different for them.”

Sandi is unburdened by culinary twists such as food term variations (for example, peppers are referred to as capsicums in Australia) and considers the unavailability of certain ingredients such as the Australian staple, laksa paste (used in chicken laksa soup) a minor inconvenience. Sandi has also made a smooth transition from crab fishing to fishing for pike and pickerel and is eager to drop a line through an ice hole one day.

In response to the question “Knowing what you know now would you still have moved to Cochrane? Sandi shares the following: “Its a hard question. If I knew I wasn’t going to lose my marriage and my family yes. Just for the different experience it would have been good for the kids. There was a part of me that wanted to move back to Australia because I had no family here. But I had no money and nowhere to go. At the end of the day I realized I had come here for a reason so why not stick it out and try to get permanent residency which was the original plan to start with.”

A popular Australian Aboriginal proverb tells us, “We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love . . .and then we return home.”

Only time will tell what Sandi’s future holds. For now she is resolute that her purpose in the place known as the “gateway to the north” is “to observe, to learn, to grow, to love.”