11thNovember 2018

Sadly another incident in our beautiful city of Melbourne brings out the very worst of hysteria from sections of our community calling for death to all Muslims and an end to migration etc etc.

I think it’s important for all people who generally start sentences with, “I’m not racist..but” to consider something please. People who commit atrocities such as last Friday are doing it not because of some extremist faith or because they are black. They are doing it because they are SICK. They are PSYCHOTIC. If you don’t believe me then let’s take a journey down memory lane and you can tick off how many of these mass murderers in Australia were black, muslim extremists:

  • Eric Cooke, the last man hanged in Fremantle Prison. English immigrant who committed 8 murders, mostly women and 14 attempted murders between 1959-1963. A father of 7 children, his story was told in the brilliant book “Broken Lives” by Walkley Award winning journalist Estelle Blackburn.
  • On August 7 1987, failed Duntroon Army Officer and Anglo Saxon, Julian Knight shot and killed 7 people on Hoddle Street and seriously injured 19 others.
  • On December 8 1987, Frank Vitkovic, a law student of Croatian/Italian extraction shot and killed 9 people, injuring 5 more in the Telecom building in Queen St.
  • On 28-29thApril 1996, Anglo Saxon Martin Bryant committed what was up until recently in Las Vegas, the worst mass murder in history, taking 35 lives and injuring another 23.

Even more recently we’ve had the shocking Bourke St incident in January  2017 which was committed by a man of Greek extraction. It doesn’t matter where they are from, they’re all psychotic. Please, let’s look in our own back yard first before vilifying others.

I’d like to share a good news story just to change the scenery a bit. It relates to a letter writing program that was introduced eight years ago or so. I was living with my best mate Greg, a clinical psychologist in West Footscray. Greg was doing some volunteer work for the Asylum Seeker Refuge Centre in Footscray and he came home one night and asked if I’d be interested in writing to a random refugee held in detention.

With Abbott and Morrison coming on board, the detention centres quickly became prisons and the welfare of those detainees was of international concern. The letter writing project was nothing more than an A4 page describing your life in our supposed lucky country and some simple reassurance that the majority of Australians weren’t actually like Abbott and Morrison.

A couple of months later an Afghan refugee Hamid Amiri wrote back from the Curtin Detention Centre near Dampier in far north west WA. Immediately through his writing you could sense his humility and gratefulness that someone had taken the time to connect. Hamid fled the Taliban and put his family in a safehouse whilst he tried to get to Australia.

He made it to Curtin Detention Centre in May 2010 via two weeks on Christmas Island and spent six months waiting for a visa because the Abbott/Morrison policy towards asylum seekers had changed. He had a room-mate who was very good at karate so they would work out together every day for an hour which helped him mentally and physically.

Six months later however his asylum claim was refused again and Hamid spent a lot of time in his room depressed and taking pills for the anxiety. The inability to contact his wife and children and the unknown finally wore him down.

When writing back to Hamid I asked if he needed anything and he said he had no shoes, just the prison thongs so I bought him some nice sneakers on Ebay along with a CD Rom to accelerate his English for when he got out and to help others as Hamid taught English in the centre.

After 18 months in detention Hamid was finally released on 23rdSeptember 2011 and sent to Perth where he worked six days a week on a farm and as a machinery operator in a Fremantle brewery. He also managed to study Electrical Engineering at TAFE part time.

In 2013 Hamid’s wife and kids arrived and he worked as a support worker helping new migrants settle into Perth. In 2016 Hamid became share holder and Managing Director of a car wrecking company which is growing and he proudly states that he has employed many more workers and has a strong multi-cultural workplace.

I think it was 2012 when Hamid emailed me to say he was coming to Melbourne to visit some friends in Sunshine in Melbourne’s West, so one lunchtime at work I drove from Dandenong to Sunshine to meet him in person. It was quite a moving 30 minutes or so for someone like me not prone to emotion!

His attitude to life is depicted clearly in his smile and he is nothing short of an inspiration to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a little epilogue to our catch up. I drove back to work which is about an hour from Sunshine and I got a call from our receptionist an hour later that there is someone there to see me. I troddled out and there is Hamid with a box under his arm. I sat him down and he said that he had forgotten to give me this gift. I opened it and it was a pair of business shoes. I didn’t know what to say. I bid him farewell, went back to my office and lo and behold, some salty discharge (as Seinfeld would say) dropped from my eyes.

It is impossible for us comfortable Australians to understand the courage that people like Hamid have. The question for me always comes back to “would you do the same in their circumstances?” Absolutely. Unfortunately what Hamid and hundreds of other refugees weren’t prepared for was the treatment in the detention centres.

To get a true and authentic picture of what it’s like to get on a boat and end up on Manus Island there is an incredible book released this year by award winning Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani called “No friend but the Mountains”.

I guess Abbott and Morrison didn’t expect someone like Behrouz would end up in one of their prison camps. Behrouz is an internationally recognised, multi award winning writer with a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. So when this man had access to a cell phone he was able to transcribe his journey via text to his friends in Australia to translate. It’s truly an extraordinary achievement.

Boochani’s descriptions of his ill-fated time at sea had me feeling “woozy”. The starvation and the inevitable sinking of the boat, the dead, it’s genuinely scary.

“On one occasion during the trip I was so dazed with hunger that I got up and began threatening other passengers randomly. I recall the exact phrase I blurted, “ look here, I’m hungry and it’s completely natural for me to raid anyone with food….I’m about to do it!” A logical statement. Perhaps even philosophical. But uttered at a time when starvation and fear of death had impaired my equilibrium. Thinking back, the essence of this performance was a parody of power. Just imagine my behaviour, imagine my gestures, imagine me making that pronouncement. Imagine me, whose ribs are protruding from his body. Imagine me, a man whose ribs are so visible you could count them. Imagine me in this state, trying to assert myself in this way. What a ridiculous scene.”

I can feel it in me

I can feel everything

I can feel how my digestive system functions

I can feel it with precision

My body is on the verge of collapse

I can feel my bones

My body has become a bone structure

I am a skeleton covered in layers of sunburnt skin

The book then moves to his time in Christmas Island and Manus where he still is today! 5 years this man has been a refugee. The Australian Government has done everything to suppress the reality of these detention centres which are far worse than any mainstream prison. It can be best summed up by our own Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan:

“Reading this book is difficult for any Australian. We pride ourselves on decency, kindness, generosity and a fair go. None of these qualities are evident in Boochani’s account of hunger, squalor, beatings, suicide and murder.”

“I was painfully reminded in his descriptions of the Australian official’s behaviour on Manus of my father’s descriptions of the Japanese commanders’ behaviour in the POW camps where he and fellow Australian POW’s suffered so much.”

“What has become of us when it is we who now commit such crimes?”

Boochani’s book is the gateway to the truth about our government and I would urge any Australian with a heart to read it. The letter writing project that hooked me up with Hameed was shut down by the Abbott administration as his and Morrison’s level of cruelty to refugees increased. There is however a terrific website you can access which is doing what it can to help those still in detention. It’s http://writingthroughfences.org

Let’s just be kind to one another and maybe, just maybe the politicians will catch on.