Away.

I’m on holiday. I’ve gone away. To Broome, as it happens. A very long way away. Well over 2300 kilometres. On the plane it took 2½ hours to fly from Perth. This a journey within one state and not even from one extremity to the other. Like I said, a long way away.

Why do we do this? Why travel great distances to some other place from where we normally live? Many reasons. Often more than one applies to a particular situation. As it does this time. I’ve come away to have some respite, a change from the usual. To relax without the burden of the everyday urgency of living which always seems so present in our normal biding. In addition, spending time with loved relations, my brother-in-law and his wife. So, definitely a complexity of reasons.

Being away implies some notion of a base, somewhere that isn’t away. Although I’ve spent around two thirds of my life mostly in various locations around the city of Perth, it doesn’t yet feel like my home. But if you ask me where that would be, I would still be hard up for an answer.  Most people unhesitatingly ascribe a city, a town, a suburb, as their home. Not me. I was born in Sydney. I lived in the city for the first three years of my life and then the next eleven within a radius of less than 100 kms. That was a long time ago.  Since then I’ve only visited the city for brief periods. Those early years and the collection of short subsequent visits are not enough for Sydney to qualify as my home. And if that doesn’t count, nowhere else is going to fare any better.

But I’m not stateless. I’m still in the country in which I was born. I have an unequivocal right to go on  living here, in Australia. Whether I can specify somewhere in the country as my home town or not is irrelevant to the political fact that Australia counts officially as my home. I have somewhere to live. I’m not threatened by anything more than politicians who want me to believe they’re always acting in my best interests, and business people who assure me “your call is important to us”.

According to an item on SBS News this evening, there are 15 million refugees in the world right now. People who are away. People who are not at home. People who no longer have a home. Or if they can identify a place which they call home, they cannot live there, cannot go back there. These are people who are away not from choice but because they’ve been driven from their homes by war, murder, rape, torture, starvation, terrorism, or some other hideous provocation from a long list of possibilities.

In the meantime I live in a country in which I can freely choose to go away. I also live in a country whose politicians — there’s no distinction in this case between government and opposition members — pretend that we are somehow seriously threatened by a few hundred refugees , virtually all of them bona fide, who arrive on our shores, or at least in our territories, by boat. These illegal immigrants, so-called boat people, who have come away in order to save their lives, are apparently a dire danger whereas the thousands who come by air and overstay their visitor visas pose no problem.

I would like to extend the hospitality of my home, my country Australia, to these homeless people, these people who have come away from their forbidding homelands . But my government, those politicians elected to represent my wishes and to act on them, has chosen to ignore me and deny any welcome to this particular category of refugees. And I cannot get away from this despicable policy and its inhumane application. Even if I go away from the country, which, as I’ve already said,  I can freely choose to do, I cannot get away from the shame. There is nowhere away from this.

 

IMMIGRANT

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

Soon it will lie beyond memory.

 

I came here on that vagrant boat,

Though I would as gladly come

On the back of a great bird in the sky,

Or carried in a chariot of the gods.

 

On this voyage there was no fantasy,

Only a mundane and miserable passage,

Dragged across wilful currents and tides;

I should not have hoped for more.

 

Yet I dreamt of a different journey,

And for a time the dream was real,

Fragments remain, vaguely calling me;

I still hope, long for them to be true.

 

The boat rides on, over the harbour,

Pushing beyond the headland,

Soon it will sail over the horizon;

But I have come to stay.

Ruari Jack Hughes

The Things You Don’t See

I went to the Ozconcert last night. This is an annual event held in Perth to celebrate multiculturalism. It’s been going for 25 years and takes the form of a series of performances in music and dance by a variety of individuals and groups representing many different ethnic and national bodies. This year’s concert included, for example, singers from Australian Aboriginal, PNG, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern backgrounds and dancers from China, Indonesia, Aboriginal Australia, Croatia, Egypt among others. There were also groups and bands, sometimes playing traditional material and at others, fascinating fusions of Western and non-Western music, several with a jazz underlay.

On a beautiful early Autumn evening in the grounds of the equally beautiful Government House, some seven thousand people spread blankets or sat on low chairs with picnic dinners and drinks of choice set before them, to share in this musical reminder of our hugely varied backgrounds.

We also had a reminder from Dr Eric Tan, the originator of Ozconcert, about his vision in setting it up, of a nation which could move away from historical resistance to others (i.e. non-British) which had often been expressed in outright racism. Ozconcert began in 1989, the year after the bicentenary of European (settlement, occupation, invasion, choose your own denominator) of Australia.

Both these reminders aimed to demonstrate the positive qualities of multiculturalism. The recognition of what each different ethnic group or nation has contributed to the overall mix that is contemporary Australia; the realisation that it’s only complexion and sometimes facial configuration that distinguishes second and third generation Australians from each other since spoken accents and lifestyle behaviours are mostly quite congruent.

Yet, as I looked around me, it was obvious that the audience was frequently composed in smaller groups which represented specific ethnicities and that there weren’t many groups made up of a haphazard mixing of people from obviously different backgrounds.

And also, although I didn’t go into the city last night after the concert, I know that had I done so, I would soon have been confronted by more examples than I cared to see (because one would be too many) of bigotry and racial intolerance. Police patrols which can too easily pick out aboriginal kids and harass them; gangs of particular ethnicities antagonising each other; taunting comments thrown at those who are deemed different and therefore less.

When I turn from the streetscape, there are immediately attitudes (such as “Turn back the boat people”; “Put foreign workers last in the job queue”)   by governments and politicians, business interests and  media pundits, those who like to be heard on radio talk-back programs, and a plenitude of other sources, all telling me that I must be wrong, that multiculturalism is just an idea, style without substance, like so much more in our 21st century Australia.

I enjoyed the concert last night. I went home feeling pretty good about it. I’d like to believe that the concert was a good picture of where we’ve got to in Australia in 2013. If it had that impact on me, perhaps it did also on the rest of the seven thousand who were there, and perhaps that can become the dominant view of who we are as a people.

Here’s another way to see the picture:

There was a time when…

There was a time when dragons flew in the skies,

Ice castles shone in the bright sunshine

Of fabulous tropical lands,

Birds called to each other in descants,

And animals spoke in poetry.

 

A time when people tall as houses

Walked the town roads, the country lanes,

And tiny ones, little men and women,

Stood easily on their giant neighbours’ palms.

 

All these things were quite ordinary,

Though you might be amazed to hear it.

If you had been there, you would not have wondered

For it was not something to wonder.

 

There was a time when people similar to us,

With skins of many different colours

Lived together in the towns,

Where people wore veils shielding their faces,

And their uncovered neighbours smiled.

 

A time when people worshipped their God

In church, synagogue, temple and mosque,

And everyone, children, men and women,

Were freely welcome in each other’s lands.

 

All these things were quite ordinary,

Though you are amazed to hear it.

If you had been there, surely you would not have wondered,

Surely it should not be something to wonder.

 Ruari Jack Hughes

Letter to New Prime Minister 2010

Prime Minister,
Welcome. As a woman, I look to you to bring into being some of the things that have not received adequate care. As a person who has always supported the Labor party, I want to see some traditional values upheld..”.a fair go” might be a good start…
1) We need to give our environment “a fair go”. Action has to be taken to care for our environment, to cut pollution and to look for alternatives to fossil fuel..that do not hold the future to ransom. Nuclear energy is not an alternative.
2) We have to give Refugees a” fair go”Refugees however they come should be treated with courtesy and prompt action. Many Australians have offered spare rooms..look and listen…there are many Australians who welcome “new Australians” Under no circumstances should families be separated and put in prison..
3) We have to give those who are struggling with Mental Health a “fair go” There is no way, in our prosperous Australia people should be homeless because they can’t hold a job, fill in all the forms,etc because they are mentally ill. They have slipped through the cracks. We have to provide a safety net
4) We have to allow information access a “fair go” Internet filtering that copies China and Korea is inappropriate, expensive and without adequate safeguards. Extend systems that allow people to choose the amount of filtering for their own families, allied with proper blocking of sites judged by the people who censor books and videos.(not iSPS!)..but with lists available
4) We need to give our indigenous brothers and sisters a “fair go” Apply the same rules to white sexual offenders as you do to indigenous people in NT. Have you taken over the communities in Victoria where sexual offenders live? Infrastructure you supply to mining towns might be pleasant in indigenous communities. If you can’t pay compensation, at least supply teachers and doctors. Best of all…ask.

I hope you read this and understand my heart cries out to see a government that cares.