Australian show tells stories of immigrants

SYDNEY — “Never judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes” is an old saying. Now, Sydney residents have the chance to literally try on other people’s shoes and listen to their stories.

The Australian National Maritime Museum is partnering with the Empathy Museum in Britain to bring the highly acclaimed exhibition, A Mile in My Shoes, to the harbor city.

“It’s been to 35 venues around the world. And now it’s Sydney’s turn,” says curator of the Australian National Maritime Museum Kim Tao. “So what you do is you come down to the museum, tell us your shoe size and actually take a walk for a mile in someone else’s shoes while you listen to their migration story.”

Originally created by artist Clare Patey, the exhibition in Sydney features 35 new stories of Australian immigrants. Among the storytellers are a Catholic refugee who fled Vietnam on a 7-meter-long fishing boat crowded with 99 passengers and an Estonian woman who was born in Sweden and lived in Australia, returning to her motherland to trace her parents’ experience after they died.

“Empathy is often described as being able to walk in somebody else’s shoes … Once you put on those shoes, you immerse yourself and you hear that person’s voice telling you their stories. I think it’s a very powerful, very intimate experience,” Tao says.

As a country with more than 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry, there are also many engaging stories about Chinese immigrants.

“Chinese immigrants have been one of the major immigrant groups to Australia throughout history, so what I’ve tried to do with the Chinese stories is to show that depth and breadth throughout the history,” Tao says.

Among the stories are a Chinese artist talking about the challenges of being adopted and raised by a white family in New Zealand; a volunteer firefighter in Victoria who was always intrigued by his olive skin and found through family-history research that his great-grandfather came from China in the 1850s for the gold rush; and a woman who arrived in 1964 and was subjected to the White Australia policy and eventually became an advocate for Chinese Australians.

As an art event staged amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Tao says he hopes the exhibition can help people have better understanding of others and find the human connection and the shared humanity against racism, isolation and discrimination.