Healing stories
They came to Hobart to live in peace, but met a vicious racist minority. Now some of our young refugee migrants are bridging that divide, by sharing their stories with fellow students
Australian citizen Te Ka Myee Paw understands what it feels like to be different. She grew up stateless in a Thailand refugee camp. When she arrived here on a humanitarian visa as a 10-yearold a decade ago she says she felt like a baby. “I had to learn everything all over again,” she says. It’s frustrating when you can’t understand the conversations happening all around you: “I felt different and I felt lonely.”
She also felt afraid. Only weeks after stepping off the plane into a freezing and howling Hobart wind, her family endured a harrowing racist act. They were walking along a Moonah pathway on the way to visit friends when a group of teenage boys started pelting them with rocks.
Even as they put their arms up to cover their faces, the rocks kept falling. Paw’s mother was holding the hand of her youngest child, a waif of a four-year-old boy.
One of the stones hit her mum hard on her shoulder, but what she felt, Paw says, was more of an emotionally stabbing pain. “It was very difficult for her,” Paw recalls. “Not just the pain of the rock but the pain of what they’d done to us. How they’d made us feel in our new home.
“They were shouting things to us but we didn’t understand. We were all scared and when we got back to our house that night none of us could sleep.”
Paw, now 21 and studying at TasTAFE, was only two when her mother scooped her up into a cloth sling and walked away from the only home she’d ever known in Karen State, Burma. It took her family three days to trek to the safety of Mae La refugee camp on the Thailand border.
Just days before she’d been forced to watch as Burmese soldiers burnt one of her neighbours to death. His terrible crime: being born into a minority group the ruling race wanted to ethnically cleanse.
Her mother and father had already been taken multiple times by Burmese soldiers and used as slaves to carry their heavy things. They had always returned, but neither knew if they would even survive if they were taken again.
The only thing on Paw’s mother’s mind as she fled her home was to find somewhere for her family to live in peace. She waited almost a decade before humanitarian officials decided Hobart would be that safe place.
Tasmania today is more multiculturally diverse than it has ever been. Tasmanians come from 177 different countries and speak at least 159 different languages. Yet more than three quarters of Tasmanians don’t know someone from a different cultural or ethnic background, according to the recent ABC Australia Talks survey.
That is a statistic that a group of TAFE students is trying to change. Members of the Students Against Racism group are studying for their Certificate III in English. They come from both refugee and migrant backgrounds.
They’ve learned how to transform their own stories of strength and courage in the face of discrimination into a powerful tool to teach others about the impacts racism has on people.
Over the past 11 years the Students Against Racism program has trained 12,000 men, women and children in schools, university and TAFE classes — and community groups, including the Tasmanian Police recruiting course. The program won the 2015 Australian Human Rights “Racism — It Stops With Me” award, and now boasts around 220 trained presenters.
They are so good at what they do, a group of them recently returned from Bendigo, Ballarat and Shepparton in Victoria, where they taught other young people from diverse backgrounds so that they could copy the program and reduce racism in their own communities. A few weeks ago they presented to a group of Hobart community leaders at Parliament House.
Gini Ennals has been teaching English to migrant and refugee young adults in Hobart for 12 years. Her students feel safe and, with her support, make what is for many their first meaningful connection with their peers.
She was the teacher of three young students who started the Students Against Racism group in 2008 and she says it’s all about breaking down barriers.
Ennals says the students believe most of the racism they and their families have experienced since moving to Tasmania is a result of ignorance and misinformation.
“So, rather than fight back and creating a further divide, they decided to share their journey and stories and impact of racism on their day-to-day lives and in doing so, connect and educate the greater community,” Ennals says. “They turn this horrible incident that happened to them and made them feel powerless into a positive — it gives them power.”
Each presenter has what is called their “living in-between” story. They share the struggles of blending their birth culture with an Australian way of life and living alongside people who have no idea about their background.
For their first workshop, Ennals took the group to a Hobart primary school with an only-white Australian student population. It was the first time these students had ever met someone from another country.
One of the Sudanese boys in the group reached out his hand to a student and the young boy reached out and held it. “It was such a simple gesture but it was fantastic,” Ennals says. “They looked into each others eyes and they listened to each others stories and they connected.”
Ennals has heard all kinds of stories from her students. Many of them are joyful and inspiring, but she says many are also scary and racist.
“In relation to racism, I have heard stories that I almost cannot believe because I cannot imagine how anyone would do that to another human,” she says.
“For a lot of these young people, even well after the racist incident has occurred, fear remains. They don’t know when the next attack will happen so it makes them on edge.
“They are constantly worrying about it happening again. I can’t imagine living like that.”
She tells the story of a young Sudanese man who had just pulled into a Hobart service station after playing a game of basketball. A car full of locals pulled up beside him and the young men got out of their car, and started to stare him down. One had a baseball bat in his hand and was tapping it up and down as he looked at the Sudanese man.
“When he tells that story,” Ennals says, “his whole body tenses up, but when the audience members tell him that’s so wrong and it’s not okay, you can see an incredible weight lift off his shoulders.”
Or imagine being a new Tasmanian woman, Ennals says, and on a bus in Hobart with your two toddler children. You are wearing a hijab because your religion dictates that you do.
A stranger on the bus starts to verbally abuse you. You are so frightened you get off the bus, juggling a stroller and the children who are also scared, and the man follows you off the bus and keeps his venomous rant going. Now you are afraid but also lost. You wonder how a stranger can hate you so much.
Another bus story (the group members say catching the bus greatly increases their chance of encountering racism) was when a young female student and new Australian walked onto a bus and found a seat.
She was in a uniform and on her way to school. Straight away there was a chant from girls her age sitting directly behind her. “N .... er,” the young girls chanted. At first they said it just loud enough for her to hear, but after she looked around the chants got louder and louder. From then on the girl decided to walk instead.
That is a decision Surjen Magar understands. The 20-year-old Nepalese Australian says that when he was at high school in Hobart he was constantly teased. Other students would spray him with Coke from bottles they would shake in front of him, and they would make fun of his accent mocking his attempts to speak in English.
“They treated me differently and made me feel like I didn’t belong,” Magar says. “They would say ‘go back to your country — you don’t belong here’.”
But after sharing his story multiple times as part of the Students Against Racism program, he says he’s ready to speak up with confidence and let people know racism is not okay.
“Most of the people here are not like that,” Magar says. “Only some people are racist. But when you experience that kind of thing, you can start to feel like everyone is. So that’s why I’m doing what I can, to reduce racism.”