BORN: CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
I was born in 1930 on my mother’s birthday. My mother always said I was the best birthday present she ever had until I was three months old and then she thought, “Dear God, what do we have here?”
I came to Australia in 1955 to run away from the South Africa political nonsense. I met my husband Jerry and we’ve been married for 40 years. But come Christmas, I do get homesick for South Africa. I miss my family terribly. I love my family.
I am going to visit family now. We will gather in Cape Town. And I’ll be crying on the plane all the way home to Tasmania, Australia.
When I fly into Cape Town and I see Table Mountain, the tears come. It’s funny. I think, after all this time you silly old woman, at your age, don’t start getting emotional. But I do. I get terribly emotional. I’m 85 years old and I still get emotional about Table Mountain. Even when I see it on television, I point and say to Jerry, ‘We had lunch there; we did this there and we did that there…’ I get so worked up over it.
I don’t get these feelings coming back to Australia. I think this is where you live. My sense of home is South Africa, where I live is Australia.
Here we are, now, in this airport in Tasmania. When we got older, I said to Jerry, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And he said, ‘I want to go to Tassie.’ That was 14 years ago. Here we stay. Here, in Tasmania, it’s fantastic. I’m happy. But Cape Town is in my heart.
—Roma Zingeh
I was born in 1930 on my mother’s birthday. My mother always said I was the best birthday present she ever had until I was three months old and then she thought, “Dear God, what do we have here?”
I came to Australia in 1955 to run away from the South Africa political nonsense. I met my husband Jerry and we’ve been married for 40 years. But come Christmas, I do get homesick for South Africa. I miss my family terribly. I love my family.
I am going to visit family now. We will gather in Cape Town. And I’ll be crying on the plane all the way home to Tasmania, Australia.
When I fly into Cape Town and I see Table Mountain, the tears come. It’s funny. I think, after all this time you silly old woman, at your age, don’t start getting emotional. But I do. I get terribly emotional. I’m 85 years old and I still get emotional about Table Mountain. Even when I see it on television, I point and say to Jerry, ‘We had lunch there; we did this there and we did that there…’ I get so worked up over it.
I don’t get these feelings coming back to Australia. I think this is where you live. My sense of home is South Africa, where I live is Australia.
Here we are, now, in this airport in Tasmania. When we got older, I said to Jerry, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And he said, ‘I want to go to Tassie.’ That was 14 years ago. Here we stay. Here, in Tasmania, it’s fantastic. I’m happy. But Cape Town is in my heart.
—Roma Zingeh