Migration
The migration experience
of Mike Nahan
From Trucks
By Maria Bergwitz,
Freelance Journalist
M
Photo by: Andrew-Knox Kaniki
ike Nahan, 64, has come a long way since his early days
as one of 13 children growing up on a dysfunctional
hobby farm in Michigan, United States of America. From
seeing his trucking company in the US go bankrupt when he was
just 21, to working for the World Bank across Asia, Mr Nahan
made the decision to give his professional career a fair go. He is
now the Treasurer of Western Australia as well as the state’s Minister for Energy, and for Citizenship and Multicultural Interests.
“It was an exercising chaos, and if we would have had to live off
the proceedings of the farm we would have all starved,” he says,
recollecting memories from his childhood.
Mr Nahan’s father had left the farming up to his eight young
sons, who were unenthusiastic about the industry. The result was
delayed harvesting, over due ploughing, loose horses, and fights
for the food at dinnertime.
The latter taught Mr Nahan a lesson he has kept for life.
“You do not own anything until you possess it,” he says. He
then ventured off to study economics.
Two degrees later, a bachelor from Michigan and a master’s
from Hawaii, Mr Nahan arrived in Canberra in 1978 with a scholarship to the Australia National University. There he completed a
PhD in economics before letting love bring him to Perth in 1982.
When his wife Nyuk Nahan, also holding a PhD from ANU, received a job offer at the University of Western Australia the duo
decided to see what life in Western Australia was like. Mr Nahan’s
uncertainty about his length of time in WA, however, soon dissipated with the realisation of Perth’s sunshine.
“Remember, I grew up in Michigan,” he says, sounding not
much different to any other unexpectedly long-term visitor who
grew up in the cold.
With a climate accommodating his liking for the outdoor lifestyle, Mr Nahan did not find many difficulties integrating into the
then big country town.
“I am the same ethnic base as the dominant migrant,” he says,
pointing out that, in Perth, everyone is a migrant. “Some are just
longer standing migrants,” he adds. “And so if they look at me,
they can not tell that I am not from here.”
The scene has since changed with multiculturalism blossoming
across WA. Mr Nahan says a radical diversification of the state’s
ethnic base has diminished much of the tension held by older gener ][ۜ˂