Tag: Wagga Wagga

Refugee documentaries – preaching to the converted

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Still from Nowhere Line, an animated Refugee documentary by Lukas Schrank

As it is Refugee Week, I’ve been reflecting on how my support for refugees and asylum seekers is shamefully passive. I was reminded of this after attending a viewing last Saturday of Julian Burnside’s refugee documentary, Border Politics. Then on Monday I was one of 67 people who devoted the evening to a public viewing in Buderim of the refugee film, Constance on the Edge.

‘Constance on the Edge’ charts the struggles of a mother and her six children on a journey from war-torn South Sudan, via a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp, before being settled in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Constance suffers culture shock, adding to existing (and so-far untreated), post-traumatic stress. She has difficulties fitting in to a rural town, encountering unexpected racism. She also voices frustration that the help refugees receive, well-meaning as it may be, is not always what they want or need.

During question time someone asked how we could ensure more people get to more refugee documentaries like ‘Constance on the Edge’ and develop some empathy for refugees. As he said, the 67 people in the room already know about the issues and how much work needs to be done.

The debate about Australia’s asylum seeker policies resides within disparate echo chambers. First there’s the chamber of humanitarian outrage, where we gather to watch refugee documentaries, drop gold coins in the donations bucket and froth about our disappointing government. Then there are those who do have compassion but feel/believe that the government is right to take a hard line with asylum seekers. Perhaps they have never asked themselves why, merely trusting in their political masters to do the right thing.

While I fully support the expatriation of refugees from offshore detention, an increase in the refugee intake and a more relaxed attitude in general, a few hundred people protesting in King George Square or waving banners outside Peter Dutton’s electorate office is not going to make much difference. Many people who are bothered by the government’s attitude to refugees thought things would change when Labor won the election. Not only did Labor not win, the party’s position on refugees is quite similar to that of the LNP, with the exception that Labor would have entertained New Zealand’s offer to resettle people from Manus and Nauru.

Today I’m asking myself the same question I put to you – how many refugees do you actually know? Had anyone over to lunch recently or for a sleepover? I know a few local people who have opened their homes to refugees, linking up with local support groups like Buddies and Welcome to Maleny. The latter organised the viewing of Border Politics, part of the Sunshine Coast Refugee Action Network’s film festival. This film, co-produced by BBC Scotland, owes a bit to the style of outspoken US film maker Michael Moore in that it tells its story regardless of another point of view. The opposing stance is depicted in carefully chosen media clips of Donald Trump and others defending their position (John Howard is shown stating: “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come”.

This much-used quote comes from a long election campaign speech in 2001 amid the Tampa affair and the ‘children overboard’ claims.

Human rights barrister Julian Burnside certainly got around the place making this film. It revealed some things about refugees I did not know, namely the decision by outlying Scottish shires like the island of Bute to welcome as many refugees as was practical. Burnside also visited the Greek island of Lesbos, which at one stage in 2015 was literally awash with refugees arriving ad hoc from mainland Turkey. Many locals just reacted as they would if one of their own had been tossed out of a boat and was in danger of drowning. They gave food and shelter and helped them find their feet, all in the name of humanitarianism.

The problem with Border Politics, as is the case with many of the refugee-based documentaries doing the rounds, is that it preaches to the converted. It simmers with outrage and absolutely ignores the opportunity to engage in a debate with intelligent but conservative people who are wedded to the government line that an open door policy is an invitation to terrorists to set up camp and destabilise from within.

Some refugee documentaries, like Orban Wallace’s ‘Another News Story’, try for another angle. ‘Another News Story’ turns the camera on the news crew and film-makers. They, after all, are the ones who capture stark images like the photo shown in Burnside’s documentary of a toddler lying dead on a Mediterranean beach. As The Guardian’s Charlie Phillips wrote: “Film crews are shown asking refugees the same things over and over, then moving on to the next story. Their intentions may be honourable, but the scrum to get the most emotional pictures feels unpleasant and desensitising.”

Phillips lists documentaries which have real shock power, notably Gianfranco Rosi’s Oscar-nominated ‘Fire at Sea’ and Daphne Maziaraki’s ‘4.1 miles’, a 28-minute documentary which shows coastguards rescuing refugees arriving on Lesbos.

Australia’s ‘Island of the Hungry Ghosts’ gets an honourable mention. I have seen this film, which deals with the personal struggle of a trauma counsellor working at Christmas Island’s high-security detention centre. Christmas Island counsellor Po-Lin is herself traumatised by the experience of counselling traumatised refugees while battling the indifference of centre management.

The documentary has a twin purpose – to chronicle the annual migration of red crabs from the jungle on one side of the island to the open sea on the other. The analogy is not wasted. h

Documentaries like those mentioned involve us in a passive way, while actually making a decision to go and work with refugees, as many volunteers do, is probably more effective. Many of these films are in limited distribution, tagged on to film festival programmes or being shown to like-minded people who have donated money to make the viewing affordable. But some can be found and viewed for nothing via YouTube or Vimeo or streamed for a small fee.

Some refugee documentaries are hard work: ‘Border Politics’ is harrowing and so too Ai Weiwei’s ‘Human Flow’, a three-hour tour of all the world’s refugee hotspots. Here’s the trailer – the movie is available for streaming or download through Amazon.

Some use comedy to get the message out, for example, ‘The Merger’, (a struggling rural AFL club recruits African refugees to bolster the team’s efforts). When the proportion of refugees living among us is less than 0.25% of the population, we need insights like these to remind us that people escaping wars and persecution are settling here. They need our help, even the small things (like the CWA lady in Wagga teaching one of the African women how to knit).

While Refugee Week (an Australian initiative now in its 20th year) ends tomorrow, I recommend tracking down at least one of the movies mentioned here. They give voice to important stories which are not in general circulation, and that in itself is commendable.

Further reading/viewing:

FOMM back pages

https://www.unhcr.org/innovation/7-videos-guaranteed-to-change-the-way-you-see-refugees/

https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/seeking-refuge-animation-film-series.html

‘Nowhere Line’, Lukas Schrank’s 15-minute award-winning animated documentary about Manus Island.

“Get the Kids off Nauru Now”, a song I wrote and a video made in October last year

 

 

 

Refugees settling in despite funding cuts

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Multiculturalism: Toowoomba’s Mayayali Association (Kerala province south India) participates in the city’s annual Carnival of Flowers parade. Photo by Bob Wilson.

While refugees and migrants have been welcomed into Australia’s rural communities, successive Budget cuts have made life difficult for refugee support services. Although not attracting too many headlines, a $50 million cut in the 2018-19 Budget, and another $77.9 million over four years in the 2019-20 Budget, means that organisations trying to help refugees with the transition to a new country, a new culture and a new language are left scrambling.

The Refugee Council of Australia pointed out that the Budget found $62 million extra for Operation Sovereign Borders, while spending $50 million less on refugee support services.

“The Government has savagely cut its allocation for financial support for people seeking asylum by more than 60% in just two years, from $139.8 million in 2017-18 to $52.6 million in 2019-20”.

The 2018 cuts were particularly bad for organisations like Toowoomba Refugee and Migrants Services (TRAMS), because the government also stopped funding translation services, which means TRAMS and other networks throughout Australia have to fund their own.

Over the past 15 years, more than 4,000 families have settled in Toowoomba,130 kms west of Brisbane. They came from conflict-torn homelands of Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and South Sudan.

TRAMS director Kate Venables told regional ABC that Federal funding was cut from $390,000 to $240,000 in late 2018, taking the organisation by surprise.

“Part of that funding now goes towards an interpreting service that was previously government funded. So really our funding was reduced to $160,000, a massive reduction for us.”

About 400 TRAMS clients are Yazadi, a persecuted religious minority from Iraq. The Yazadi follow their own religion and speak the little-known dialect of Kurdish-Kurmanji.

According to the 2016 Census, 3,657 people living in Toowoomba spoke a language other than English at home. They included Mandarin (934), Arabic (879), Tagalog (482), Dinka (474) and Afrikaans (444). Tagalog is the language of Filipino natives while Dinka is spoken by South Sudanese ethnic groups.  Most of the Yazadi refugees arrived after the Census was taken.

Toowoomba’s population has more than doubled from 73,390 in 1986 to 160,799 in 2016. In a provincial city settled mainly by people of Anglo-Saxon or German descent, that is considerable growth and diversity of population. The city also has significant communities of migrants from India and the Philippines.

When we visited last September for the Carnival of Flowers, I was taken with the way the traditional street parade had become a celebration of multiculturalism and diversity. If you want to know how multicultural Toowoomba has become, the weekend we were there, more than 2,000 South Sudanese people attended a funeral for a local Anglican priest. Some of these people came from out of town, but such was the show of support they had to hire a high school hall for the service.

According to a survey of 155 newly arrived adult refugees and 59 children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who settled in suburban Brisbane, Logan and Toowoomba, those who settled in Toowoomba had the easiest time integrating and feeling a part of their local communities.

The survey by Professor Jock Collins, Professor of Social Economics, UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney and Professor Carol Read, Professor, Western Sydney University, was funded by the Australian Research Council. The findings are the first to emerge from a three-year study of settlement outcomes of recently arrived refugees in NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

Nearly all refugees surveyed in Brisbane and Logan are Christians – a consequence of the Turnbull government favouring mainly Christian refugees from Syria and Iraq. As well as settling Yazidi refugees, Toowoomba also welcomed a smaller number of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan.

I recall checking out an Afghan takeaway and grocery shop in Toowoomba’s Margaret Street. We chatted to the young man behind the counter who said that while he liked Toowoomba well enough, he found it very quiet after the constant hubbub of Kabul (population 4.65 million).

One key issue related to immigrant and refugee settlement in regional and rural Australia relates to the warmth of the welcome. Collins and Read said 68% of the refugees in Queensland overall – and 81% in Toowoomba reported that it was “very easy” or “easy” to make friends in Australia. About 60% found it “very easy” or “easy” to talk to their Australian neighbours.

“When we revisit these families in 2019 and 2020, we expect the numbers will even be higher,” the survey authors said.

Syrian refugee Yousef Roumieh, a bi-cultural support worker with TRAMS, helps Yazadi refugees with day-to-day tasks, such as booking appointments and reading mail and text messages.

He learned to speak Kurdish-Kurmanji during a five-year stay in an Iraqi refugee camp.

“There is not enough funding to pay for the supports, this is a big problem,” Mr Roumieh, formerly a pharmacist from Damascus, told the ABC.

The Department of Social Services made it clear the onus was (now) on refugee support services to provide their own interpreting services. The department said the previous arrangement was ‘contrary to the intent of the Free Interpreting Service program’.

You may recall the Australian Story episode Field of Dreams in 2016, which told of the positive outcomes flowing from settling African refugees in the New South Wales border town of Mingaloo. It’s not difficult to find similar stories, particularly in rural Victoria and NSW. The Economist published a story in January about the 400 Yazadi refugees resettled in the NSW regional town of Wagga Wagga.  The primary school in the town had to hire interpreters to communicate with families (a fifth of its students are refugees) and the local college is busy with parents learning English and new trades. As the article observed “Few locals seem fussed about the changes and to those fresh from war zones, ‘Wagga’ is an idyll.”

Many grassroots organisations and charities have weighed in to help refugees make the transition to new towns in Australia. Rural Australians for Refugees (RAR) said resettlements had occurred in Hamilton, Swan Reach, Kerang, Nhill, Bendigo, Castlemaine, Shepparton, Albury/Wodonga, Wagga, Griffith, Leeton, Armidale, Mingoola and Townsville – “to name a few”.

In the tiny Victorian town of Nhill (pop 2,184), 160 refugees from Myanmar helped boost the town’s economy by taking jobs with a local poultry farm.

Funding for refugee support services is often derived from a variety of sources. The Nhill initiative was co-funded by the Federal government, Hindmarsh Shire and the poultry farm, Luv-a-Duck.

A report published by Deloitte Access Economics and settlement agency AMES Australia said the initiative has added more than $40 million and 70 jobs to the local economy between 2010 and 2015.

At its annual conference in December, the Labor Party made a commitment to increase community-sponsored refugee programmes up to 5,000 places per year, and boost funding for regional processing and resettlement. The unequivocal promise of support is in stark contrast to the $50 million cut to refugee services by the Coalition. Coincidentally, this is the exact sum set aside for the redevelopment of the site at Botany Bay where the British explorer and his crew first set foot on Australian soil in 1770.

That’s what elections are all about, really; you vote for the party that spends (or doesn’t spend) money on things you care about.

FOMM back pages:

Errata: Last week I somewhat underestimated the cost of a political bill board, which an informed reader told me was $10,000 a month.