Swapping Los Angeles for Silver Sands
I am going to make a somewhat scandalous admission for someone writing for this magazine. When I first returned to the Fleurieu from Melbourne, I wasn’t particularly overjoyed.
On a holiday fuelled high, our family made the snap decision to swap our inner-city Melbourne home for acreage, sea views and grandparents. However, once the excitement wore off, I struggled to adjust, believing that there was little new to discover about the region I had grown up in. To my chagrin and ultimate delight, I found an antidote to my homecoming malaise through a string of out-oftowners who saw the Fleurieu through a fresh set of eyes.
It turns out that my inability to appreciate hometown opportunities is a common error in perception. Immigrants tend to see opportunities to which long-term residents are blind. For example, despite comprising just thirteen per cent of the population, immigrant founders started over fifty per cent of all Silicon Valley start-ups between 1995 and 2005. In fact, it was an immigrant who introduced me
