Humans of UniSA: Harrison Davies

Everyone has a story. A defining moment of their existence that makes them the person they are today. For Humans of UniSA, we delve into the depths of human nature and speak with some students to discover a slice of their personal history.

Harrison Davies

Bachelor of Journalism & Professional Writing
Bachelor of Arts (International Relations)

I moved to Australia when I was six-years-old. I was born in a city called San Diego, California, which is right on the border of Mexico. We lived in a bit of a party area in San Diego. A lot of college students live there and, for people our age now, it’s a great area to live with lots of interesting people, cool restaurants, bars, and cafes right next to the beach but, as a young family, it’s not a great place to live. So we were going to move out of the area anyway and my dad, who’s Australian, wanted me to live in Australia for a little while at the very least. He suggested we move here and we just never left.

It’s actually a funny story how my parents met. My dad, who’s a civil engineer, was on long service leave for a year. He travelled the whole world. He went to over thirty different countries. He became an adult at the end of the whole flower power era so he was still kind of living out this hippie fantasy of being really earthy and travelling the world meeting all kinds of different people. He’d been all around; Europe, Germany during the collapse of the Berlin Wall, South America, Asia and India. He knew a bunch of people from America through work and was visiting them and staying with my mum’s neighbour. On the second to last day of his long service leave, before he went back to Australia, they were all going out to a bar. My mum’s neighbour pressured her into coming out with them and that’s when they met.

They had their ‘night of romance,’ as mum describes it, and did long distance over the phone until they both had a $1000 phone bill which, in the ‘90s, was one dollar per minute. After about two and a half months, my dad kind of half-proposed over the phone and my mum said ‘if you show up with a ring, I’ll consider it’ and so, two weeks later, he showed up with a ring. They’ve been married for twenty five years. I actually calculated it and 1000 minutes is about 24 hours so, realistically, they had spoken for about 48 hours before deciding to get engaged. They’re a bit of an odd couple. They don’t have a whole lot in common other than fine wine and ‘70s rock music, but I guess that’s a good basis for a relationship.

Interview conducted by Geena Ho

Photography by Oliver White

This piece was originally published in Edition 28