Fate and Family Footsteps on ABC1

Unfortunately, Australian television doesn’t usually throw up many surprises with the many foreign shows and copies of foreign show mainly aired or produced. However, while flicking through the channels last Thursday night looking for something/anything to watch, I stumbled upon Family Footsteps.

The show immediately caught my attention and had me hooked for the rest of the hour. Family Footsteps is a documentary series which follows young Australians as they experience a taste of what their life could have been like had their parents not migrated to Australia. Participants in the show are expected to immerse themselves in the life, work and culture of their parents homeland and try to live as they would have lived had fate not taken them to their current situation.

I find the concept of this show very interesting, as a person who believes that our lives are dictated by the decisions other people have made in the past and that fate has delivered us to become what we have become. The fact that I’m in the situation I find myself in now is a direct consequence of the decisions other people have made in the past, people I haven’t even met. There are an infinite amount of possible ways in which peoples lives could end up and this show gives the participants a chance to experience an alternative reality of how their lives could have turned out.

Currently the show is half way through its second series so I wish I’d discovered it at the start of the first series. However I’m sure I’ll be able to download it or get a copy of it from somewhere.

The current series is viewable as a stream on the ABC website (see link below) or through the ABC iView.

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/documentaries/interactive/familyfootsteps/

Also, it is on ABC 1 on Thursday night at 20:30.

Family Footsteps – Uganda: From IT Executive to Ugandan Cook.

Australian Citizenship Test

I am currently studying for my Australian Citizenship Test which I have to pass to be able to apply for Australian Citizenship. I am from an English speaking background and have an interest in Politics, Sociology and History so I am not too concerned about my chances of failing. Most of the things that are likely to come up I probably would already know. However, I am reading through the Becoming an Australian citizen booklet anyway. I think for a person who doesn’t have English as a first language and hasn’t paid much attention to Australian History and Politics, would find it quite hard if they didn’t do the necessary preparation for the test. Having said that after looking at the statistics, the pass rate is very high. I’m hopefully going to take the Test at some point over the next few weeks.

Check-out my immigration story on the following page: Becoming Australian.

Update:

I called the Department of Immigration yesterday to book a time to sit my citizenship test in Brisbane, I received the confirmation email a short time later. However the person I spoke to had managed to book me in to sit the test in Cairns. Not such a great start to the process……. I called them back and managed to reschedule and to sit the test in Brisbane, but I have to wait another six weeks.