In the mid-1950s, Aline P'nina Tayar's parents put ten thousand miles between themselves and the Mediterranean Jewish communities of their ancestors. As part of Australia's mass subsidized migration scheme, they were intent on creating new identities, liberated not just from the oppressiveness of the extended family but above all from the constraints of religion. What they were to discover was that they had little control over other people's perceptions of who and what they were. In Tayar's father's case, no one had ever heard of Maltese Jews. In her mother's, few Australians could point to Tunisia on the map let alone knew that Jews had lived in North Africa since before the arrival of Islam. Neighbours in their Sydney working- class suburb had never met Southern Europeans who owned The Oxford Book of English Verse and all fifty- four volumes of Great Books of the Western World. ​​​​​​​As they adapted to their new country, what bound Tayar's parents to each other was their sense of adventure. Both were also linguistic magpies and they passed on their passion for languages to their daughter. But their son, in creating and asserting his own separate Australian identity, remained impervious to 'them languages'.