The address of the first house I can remember living in was 19 Curtis Road, Chester Hill. Sydney. Western Suburbs, I guess. It was a very old house on a corner. Across the road in the next block of Curtis Road, lived the Hallstroms. Kitty. I can’t remember her husband’s name. They raised a fine family there filled with strapping Scandinavian tennis playing daughters. Then there was old Mrs Ashworth’s place. She was English and sometimes gave my brothers and me biscuits and weak tea in proper cups. She made us sit straight in a dining room chair while we partook of her bounty. What a treat!

The suburban house blocks were big back then so those two old houses took us all the way down to the t-intersection with Miller Road, a street that I remember as being particularly wide and busy. But that’s possibly an optical illusion caused by me being a particularly small and nervous child. Miller Road was also the boundary between the suburbs of Chester Hill and Villawood.

One of my very clear memories of early childhood is of playing in my front yard with my younger brother. We were almost certainly playing some variation of the Lost In Space game. He was Will Robinson and I was Penny. Sometimes my awful big brother would make an unscheduled appearance as the Robot Gone Mad and chase us around the yard waving his arms and yelling robotically – DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!

I recall looking down the block and seeing Paul Reganzani waiting to cross that fearsome obstacle called Miller Road. Paul lived in the house behind us in Larkview Avenue. It was a huge brick monstrosity. It needed to be. There were seven Reganzani boys, if I recall correctly. Paul used to torment Butch our dog through the fence. And he used to torment me too. He was a talented torment was Paul. Actually he was a rotten kid. But then, he was the youngest of seven brothers in a huge extended Italian family. He needed to be.

Anyway, this particular day, I watched Paul standing there and hoped he wouldn’t be too nasty as he passed our place on his way home. I watched him step out onto the road. Then I watched a dark green Volkswagon run him down.

Drama often becomes comical later, so long as everyone survives. I ran inside yelling, ‘Mum! Mum! Paul’s been hit.’ And I am pretty sure she thought, ‘Well, it’s about time!’ Most of the neighbourhood thought he needed a good clip under the ear. When she realised what I was saying, she ran… Yes, I’m not kidding! … I never saw it happen again but my mother RAN down the block to his aid.

Some of the occupants of the Villawood Migrant Hostel came out of their homes to help as well. That’s what it was called back then. The Villawood Migrant Hostel. The occupants of the Villawood Migrant Hostel lived in old Air Force barracks; great big half cylinders made of corrugated iron. They came from all over the world just like, as you may have noticed, the rest of the families in my neighbourhood did.

My family left Sydney when I was a young teenager. In subsequent visits, I have never returned to Chester Hill. Everyone tells me I wouldn’t even know the place. I must admit I find it almost impossible to believe that what was known to us throughout my childhood as The Hostel, is now the Villawood Detention Centre.

The kids from The Hostel went to school with us. I don’t know how many of these conversations were held in my house when I was a child:

‘Can I go to Friedrich / Fraulka’s place?’

‘Where do they live?’ my mother would ask.

‘At The Hostel,’ my brother or I would say.

I remember I adored one girl named Fraulka. When I was eight I wanted nothing more from life than to have Fraulka as my sister and to never be parted from her. She was Bavarian or something similarly east European and her mother always dressed her in the national costume. She came to my house to play one day complete with velvet skirts and lace petticoats and a hand embroidered head scarf. She brought my mother a gift to say ‘thank you for having me’. And what a gift it was! Forever after… well, till I grew up and learned different anyhow… I always thought it was some exotic thing made only in Bavaria or somewhere similarly east European probably from the spit of dying Bavarian Romany grandmothers. I definitely believed, wherever it was made and whomever it was made by, that they were wearing hand embroidered head scarves at the time.

It was a little bottle of 4711 Eau De Cologne that you could buy from the local supermarket. I can’t help it. It still seems exotic to me.

There were so many child migrants at my school. Many couldn’t speak English yet. Many brought packed lunches that seemed to the rest of us to be straight out of a horror movie. Some were blonde and blue eyed and Teutonic. Others were swarthy and black eyed and Arabic. Some played Lost in Space with my little brother and me and some played soccer with my older brother.

I wonder now whether they were refugees or whether their parents stood patiently in that much mentioned but seldom actually seen immigration queue. I wonder where they are now. I wonder if the rules of my childhood game would have changed if we were children there now.

Instead of being about the noble Space Family Robinson striking out for Alpha Centauri for the good of the humanity, perhaps we would now be space refugees. My older brother could make his unscheduled appearance as an intergalactic immigration bureaucrat waving his arms and shouting, ‘Get in the queue! Get in the queue!’ And we could shout back ‘But there is no queue!’ And then he could shout, ‘That’s no excuse! Go away!’ And then we could plead, ‘But our hull has a hole in it!’ And he could shout, ‘Yes, that’s why you must go at least ten miles out into space. Otherwise it might become our responsibility to help.’

Or maybe he would swap stories for a moment and simply say, ‘There’s no room at the inn.’

Christine or Clang is a film maker, who lives in Australia.