In the Australian steel city of Wollongong—colloquially known as “The Gong”—during the bustling 1970s, a young girl in a regional suburb became captivated by a singular curiosity: the unusual family name, Bargallie. That girl was me—Debbie Bargallie. The name Bargallie stood out among the common surnames of my classmates, drawing attention with its unique exoticness compared to the usual Anderson, Bell, Smith, Brown, White, and Johnson. Its distinctive quality sparked endless questions from teachers about its origins—“Where are you from? Are you Italian? What’s the story behind that name?”—inviting me to explain and explore my roots from an early age. I frequently had to repeat and spell out my surname for others, and I still do. I vividly remember standing next to my father in a clothing store on Wollongong’s main street, as he arranged alterations for a new pair of trousers. The shop assistant kept stumbling over his name, forcing him to spell it out while enduring a string of mispronunciations. Growing increasingly frustrated, my father carefully enunciated each letter—B-A-R-G-A-L-L-I-E—with deliberate clarity before remarking, his anger barely concealed, “You spell it as it sounds, and you say it the way it’s spelled!”