Margaret Bako and her husband were the first South Sudanese refugees to arrive in South Australia in 1985. Almost 40 years later, from the comfort of her Salisbury cul-de-sac, Margaret reflects on movement, memories and what home means to her.

I’m from Western Equatoria. It’s sort of like rainforest there.

As a child I really enjoyed it, because everywhere you look it’s green. Mango trees are a common tree for us. The lemons, too. Or the pineapple. I loved my childhood, until the war. Not the one we came here for, but another one.

I’ve been here since 1985. I haven’t moved interstate. I love Adelaide. I don’t think I could live anywhere else. I was 25 when I moved. By that time, I already had four kids. Adelaide is a good place to raise young kids.

When I moved into my first home in Gawler, it was me and my kids and my husband. It felt a bit weird. I didn’t want to leave my friends. I didn’t want to leave the food I love.

I could not see people wandering around, and the neighbours didn’t come to see me to say hello. Back home, your neighbours are like your family. When somebody new comes to the neighbourhood, they all come and say hello. If I don’t have salt, I would just go, ‘Do you have a bit of salt? A bit of onions?’

All the food tasted a bit different. It took a month for me to get used to it. I couldn’t eat meat or fish or chicken because it was flavoured and cooked differently. To me it was tasteless.

My husband came to Adelaide as a student, but that wasn’t the reason we fled. He was involved in politics, and prior to leaving he was about to be arrested. The company he was working for found out so they sent him away to study.

When we were here, my husband got a letter saying ‘Don’t come back. If you come back, you’ll be arrested. You will be killed.’ Then we were granted asylum seeker status.

I found the initial move very challenging, but I made up my mind that I’m going to get my kids get an education. After they went through school, I went to learn English. But I actually learned English through Days of Our Lives. That’s how I learnt to invite people inside and offer them a cup of tea.

We were the first South Sudanese (then Sudan) refugees to Adelaide. The Australian Refugee Association always used to let us know when the new arrivals were coming. We would welcome them at the airport. We would take them shopping. And by the time they came, I would say, ‘You guys are lucky. I couldn’t find lentils when I arrived. There wasn’t any spinach!’

This house, I’ve been here since 2011. See that picture on the wall? That’s from my husband’s village. They’re cattle herders. They keep cattle and grow them. We are sort of agricultural, where they are Nilotic.

You’re smelling incense I bought from an African shop in the area. There’s a lot of shops around like this at the moment. You have West Africa and North East Africa, Central Africa, so everybody wants to sell their own thing in their own shops. It’s good that way.

But the safety of my home [in South Sudan] is not what it used to be. It’s so sad because I loved my home. When I arrived here, I was like, ‘I want to go back home’, but my kids think this is home. For me, I still have two homes. I always hope one day I will go back.

Home is security, where you feel safe with your family, and raise them to have a better future. That’s what I call home. Adelaide has that feel of home too.