In 1963, in the small town of Wrexham near the coalfields of cold northern Wales, my 34-year-old electrician grandfather, Russell Hadley, saw a newspaper advertisement calling for specialised labour at the Port Kembla Steelworks.
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Depicting a sunny antipodean scene, it was part of Australia's Assisted Passage Migration Scheme - also known as the ten-pound passage - through which waves of Europeans travelled to Australia post-war.
A few months later, just after Christmas, he and my grandma, Pamela, had sold their furniture and packed up their lives, said goodbye to their parents, friends and the family dog, and paid £10 to travel to a faraway land they knew little about.
They loaded four young kids - including my nine-year-old mum - onto the Aurelia passenger liner and left Britain behind. After about a month on board, my maternal family first stepped onto Australian turf on my grandparents' 12th wedding anniversary - Australia Day 1964 - stopping first at Fremantle and Melbourne before they finally arrived in Wollongong.
With other British migrants, they moved into the Berkeley migrant hostel, living tightly packed into half a Nissan hut for two years until they could afford to buy their own home.
The family arrived in Australia on Saturday, and by Monday morning, Russell had started work as a leading hand electrician at the steel mill. Alongside him were migrants who had come in waves from all over Europe - especially from Britain, Italy and Macedonia - and I can remember him telling me stories about sharing strange-tasting lunches with these men.
From his life in Wrexham, Port Kembla's looming machines no doubt seemed like a sprawling metropolis, with about 15,000 people making the pilgrimage to work at the labour-intensive plants, day and night.
Russell worked there for 25 years, retiring in the 1990s just before he got sick with Parkinson's disease, and made lifelong friends of many of his colleagues. When he died in 2010, these friends attended his funeral, a testament to how much decades of working at Port Kembla became a part of his identity.
"Most of our friends were men from the steelworks and their wives," Pamela says.
"We used to get together with their families, especially at Christmas, when all the kids and wives would go to a party in a hall at Coniston. They men put money out of their pay each week to pay for it."
In the 50-odd years since that ad caught my grandad's eye, our family has made this region our home, with most of us still living in Wollongong.
Thinking back on Russell's terrifying decision to move to the other side of the world, Pamela says she's never regretted it.
"I think it was the greatest decision he ever made in his life," she says.
With five children and their spouses, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild, there are now four generations of us living here. We are teachers, electricians, boiler-makers, librarians, painters, scientists, nurses, fishermen, salesmen and journalists.
Our story is not remarkable: there are thousands of personal tales about families from around the world who ended up living in Wollongong because of Port Kembla steel.
With the flow-on effects of the plant's closure expected to cost tens of thousands of associated jobs, it's frightening to think that families like mine might have to go elsewhere.
But mostly, as we fight to save our steelworks, I'm struck by the rich migrant heritage that wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the once-thriving industry. And that's worth fighting for.