177 Nations of Tasmania

Grace Nguyen, or to give her her Vietnamese name, Ngoc Thanh Tu Nguyen, is not perhaps your typical Vietnamese accounting graduate.  She came to Tasmania 8 years ago with some music and business studies in Ho Chi Minh City behind her.   In her time in Tasmania she's been a volunteer for the Wilderness Society, sang with the Southern Gospel Choir, played a role in a music with a loca...

When Claudia contacted me about participating in the podcast she told me she met her husband after buying a used car from him in Tasmania almost 20 years ago, and I was instantly intrigued. In fact the full story could easily come out of a romance novel -  Girl from a village in the Swiss Alps with minimal English language meets New Zealand single father after buying used car from him on Bruny Isl...

When Kalana came to Tasmania in October 2019, he was 110kg and feeling a bit lost  after four not-entirely-happy years studying and working in Melbourne.  But in his short time in Hobart he has experienced some dramatic improvements in his physical and mental well-being, mainly through small things that many of us locals would take for granted, such as free music events and many places to relax.  ...

The story of Teodor's life could easily make an intriguing film script, beginning in a small Transylvanian peasant village surrounded by extended family and old men with moustaches who would fascinate him with their ghost stories.  When he was young his father was declared an "enemy of the people" by the Communist regime and throughout the 50s was arrested, imprisoned and tormented....

Prakash and his wife arrived in Hobart in 2009 with the intention to study Accounting, however, after only 6 months he switched to studying Commercial Cookery, though he had no prior experience. It proved a fortuitous choice as it lead to him eventually getting a position at a popular local seafood restaurant where he worked for over 10 years , in the meantime being initiated into the mysteries of...

A common response when I've mentioned Eritrea is "Where is that?" or "I've never heard of that country".  Eritrea is a country on the Horn of Africa, bordering Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibouti, which gained independence from Ethiopia in 1993. Since then it has been a one-party state with, according to Human Rights Watch, one of the worst human right records in the world.  A...

The Pakistani community in Tasmania is one of several South Asian groups that has grown quite noticeably in recent years, partly driven by the Australian Government's Regional visa program.  Many Tasmanians would be unaware of this.... unless they are involved with local cricket, which is where I met Tabish, a big hittting batsman from Islamabad.   Tabish spent 9 years in Sydney bef...

Thanatcha  aka Oil arrived in Launceston in 2018 after meeting her Australian husband at an international school where she was working in her hometown of Pattaya.  She starting teaching piano when she was only 15 and now teaches it from her home in Launceston.    Thanatcha talks about the challenges of settling down in Launceston, a town vastly different from where she came from, how she''...

Bulgarians are probably the least represented of the Balkan peoples in Tasmania and Australia. For many in Australia, Bulgaria is a land of dark mystery more commonly associated with burly Olympic weightlifters than classical concert pianists.  .  In this episode,  find out about how a Bulgarian ends up studying at "the end of the world" and how she sees life in Tasmania and hear ab...

After living the first 32 years of his life on the island of Zanzibar in Tanzania, Eddie Mohammed married a Tasmanian lady and made the decision to leave his old life behind and start anew on the vastly different island of Tasmania.  Settling in was hard,  with the challenges including the weather, finding employment ,adjusting to unfamiliar social customs and no African population to sp...

Aidan Tkay  was born in Uganda to parents of Rwandan heritage.   He grew up in the crowded city of Kampala at a school with many different African nationalities whose families had sought safe haven in Uganda,   In his teens he became passionate about music and performance and he has brought this passion to Tasmania and has performed his Afrobeats-influenced music at n...

Kadir was born in a small city between Ankara and Cappadocia in Turkey.  He arrived in Hobart 19 years ago, the hometown of his wife at the time., who he had met while they were both volunteering in England.  Kadir was a qualified physiotherapist, but faced a hard struggle to get his qualifications recognised and like many new migrants, he had to start life all over again.  After ye...