The fly like a bird is completely human behaviour

That lovely idea, testifying to our species' urge to move and to wander, crops up in Sonia Shah's new book The Next Great Migration - The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, and in assorted informed and appreciative reviews of it.

The idea of us as Homo migratio bristles with plausibility here in migration-shaped Australia where the 2021 census showed that for the first time Australia has become "a majority migrant nation", meaning that more than 50 per cent of residents were born overseas or have an immigrant parent.

Some 30 per cent of Australians were born overseas (your English-born columnist is one of them) and by June 2020 there were over 7.6 million migrants, of the wanderlust-driven species Homo migratio, living in Australia.

And Sonia Shah's book about migrations, and the excitement her ideas are causing among thinking folk is given a little added pertinence for Australians by the way in which in recent days immigration matters have festooned the news. Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil has declared our immigration system "broken". That system is in urgent repair at a time when Australia needs and is shopping for immigrants galore to relieve our chronic shortage of workers.

I have no room here in this small (but exquisitely formed) column space to discuss the biggest of the big pictures addressed by Sonia Shah. That big picture is the way in which today is being added, to our species' age-old reasons for migrating, human refugees now fleeing from places and lives made uninhabitable and wretched by climate change and its famines and impoverishments.

Some thinkers imagine there being, by 2050, more than 200 million and perhaps even a billion souls "on the move" with ramifications for everyone and everywhere on Earth.

Meanwhile (to put that catastrophic scenario aside for a moment and to pretend it doesn't exist) Sonia Shah is beautifully, thought-stokingly readable when she argues that human migrations owe a lot to our species' instinctive appetite for wanderings, and when she shows that it is something that we, Homo migratio, have in common with so many creatures including hundreds of species of birds and butterflies.

In her book Ms Shah spends lots of time with migrating birds and butterflies, seeing in the sometimes climate-change-driven changes in their migrating behaviours some parallels in her parents' and in her own migrations.

"Shah confesses to a certain kinship with those migrations," reviewer Tim Adams writes for The Guardian.

"Her parents ... moved from India 50 years ago to fulfil a need for doctors in New York City, in the first wave of legal migration from the subcontinent. That migration instilled in Shah 'an acute feeling of being somehow out of place' despite having been born American, 'I didn't consider myself as being 'from' that place, even though I'd borne both of my children there'.

"For a few years, she and her husband left to live in Australia and became doubly 'alien'. These feelings prompted questions in Shah: where did that concept of home originate? And was that a learned or an innate understanding?

"[In her book] her compulsive investigation into these questions becomes a political history of the human urge to move from one place to another. It begins with the 'mitochondrial Eve' identified as the African ancestor of all human societies - the prime mover of a species hardwired to migrate ..."

Thinking migrants are often baffled, later in life, by their decision to migrate. Sometimes both baffled and unnerved, too, emotionally, sentimentally torn between love of where are from and where they are now.

Your columnist is one of those torn souls. If a man could be two places at one time I would simultaneously be in both idyllic, liveable Canberra and 20,000 kilometres away in my home town in England's bucolic East Anglia.

Being a migrant can play with and dumbfungle the mind, leaving one feeling, like Ms Shah in her aforementioned testimony, alien and even doubly alien.

So for example in recent days I have been marvelling at the pro-Pakistan and pro-India fervour of Pakistani-Australian and Indian-Australian cricket fans, praying that they are never prey to migrants' confusions and alienations.

But back to the migrating impulse.

I am 77 now and, leaving England for Australia in my teens, have always been baffled by my migration until now, until Ms Shah's enlightenments shed this light.

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None of the commonplace, unsatisfactory explanations for my hunger to get out of dear England (my corner of it was especially green and pleasant and was even beside the seaside, beside the sea) has ever properly explained the matter.

No, not even the Australian governments' tantalising bribe of free travel from London to Sydney aboard a BOAC Boeing 707. No, not even the glossy propaganda booklets from Australia House targeting my impressionable post-pubescence by depicting absolutely every Australian woman as a voluptuous tanned jezebel on a perfect beach in a scant bikini.

Now at last I find beguilingly plausible (how about you, too, thou people of this "majority migrant nation") to at last be able to semi-explain my migration as my being gripped by a hardwired instinct, and an instinct shared, so poetically, with the butterflies and the birds.