What significant event will happen today in one corner of the world that will have repercussions for me, my friends or my family?  Will I find myself caught up in the crossfire? How will we choose to respond, and what will follow as we try and move forward? 

History has taught us that whatever it is, we will surely be caught up in often foreseeable as well as sometimes unforeseeable implications and we may be lucky to walk away unharmed.  

It was a weeknight in the 1990s. My mother came home visibly distressed. My sisters and I, school kids then, would hear later about the attack our mother had suffered at the hands of a violent and racist fellow passenger on the public transport route home. In front of a carriage of silent onlookers, our mother had been verbally abused, shoved and punched.

My mother went back to work the next day, in her role as a volunteer at a not for profit organisation.

It was not that long after the incident on the tram, that I remember walking along with my sister on one of our junk mail routes in our local neighbourhood. I would have been 5, Suds would have been 13. It was getting dark when we reached this one particular house on the corner of a street we knew well. The old man was waiting for us. We offered him the material rather than putting it into his mailbox.

He shoved the rolled papers firmly back at my sister.

“Sorry we didn’t see the no advertising material sign on your letterbox” offered my sister in her best grown up voice.

“No, I don’t want this and I don’t want you people coming here and taking all our jobs”.

I remember the look on my sister’s face.

The job she had just been accused of ‘stealing’ was delivering junk mail. The money we would be paid would go towards supporting our family.  My sister would rather have been at home doing school homework or watching TV like most kids her age. But the look on my sister’s face wasn’t one of frustration, it was one of sadness.

She would say to me as we turned the corner: “What a sad old man, maybe he is lonely”.   

What happened to my mother on the tram, or what happened to my sister on our paper round, were not isolated experiences. My three sisters, parents and I can recall many other incidents where we had been subject to everything from violent racism to unconscious bias. Worse has happened to friends or other members in our community. But for every experience of racism we can recall, my family also can recall ten other very different memories of our early life in Victoria.

Like the time the lady from the local Uniting Church drove around to our place and delivered white goods and furniture; there was a TV that came with it all… “to keep the kids busy”.

There was a time that a neighbour cut the grass for us when we had not been able to afford our own lawn mower. There was a time that we had food vouchers brought to us. There was the time both my father as well as my mother, had jobs.

As a family new to Australia, we remembered the goodness too. In an important sense, while the negative experiences have hurt it is the goodness that seeded our journey here in Australia.  

When I was three years old my family and I were privately sponsored as humanitarian refugees by Suriyan and Alison. 

One of the earliest memories I have of my life links back to that hot steamy summer day we arrived at the Melbourne airport. An old white man tried to put a seat belt on a screaming four year old, me, to keep me safe as he drove us to our new home from the airport. The old man was Alison’s father, and a member of a generous family that not only brought us to Australia but helped us find our feet in this new place of refuge.

My mother’s bruises from the assault on the tram healed and she chose to return to that work place that recognised her abilities, provided her with meaningful paid work and a lifelong career that she will cherish forever.

My sister ignored the old man on the street corner, and she threw herself into her legal studies and works tirelessly today in the field of youth justice in Victoria.

Not all bruises heal, and not all hateful words can be ignored. Racism can leave scars and sometimes whether we like it or not the memories linger. This is why every day, many migrants and refugees face challenges in what are still for many of us unpredictable spaces where acceptance and welcome still does not come easily.

But perhaps instead of waiting for yet another global or national event to take place that will shape or influence our local lives, perhaps we need to reconsider how we can become leaders of our own destiny?

 In the uncertain realms that are our neighbourhoods, twe still have the agency and choice of deciding what kind of community we want to live in, what sort of community led initiatives we want to be a part of in our new home.

It is up to us to define the community that we want to call home; a home and a future that responds with goodness to its challenges, as well as its opportunities. 

Whether you live in Bendigo or Townsville, if you look past the hurtful ignorance and impoverishing fear of some of your neighbours, you will find many other neighbours who will enthusiastically meet you on the long road to unlocking the welcome. It is in partnership with some of these friends that we might move from waiting to respond, and starting to lead.

*Shankar Kasynathan is a newly appointed Commissioner for the Victorian Multicultural Commission and an adviser to Welcoming Australia.

Shankar Kasynathan, Campaign Coordinator with Amnesty International

It’s a Friday evening in Sydney’s outer western suburb of Lidcombe. One by one, a dozen university students gather in the lounge room of a well-known family in the Tamil community. In between their end of year exams, they lean against each other and sit quietly, waiting to hear from Dorothy Tran, the NSW organiser of Amnesty’s ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign. For many of the young second generation migrants gathered, this will be the first social change movement they have ever been involved with. Many of them have come to Australia seeking refuge with their parents and have now settled into one of the high-rise apartment buildings that lined the streets of Sydney’s west.

’It’s our time to get involved’ offers 21-year-old law student, Ananth Kumaralingam who was raised in Homebush, Sydney.

They want to get involved because they know what being included means. They want to offer welcome and share the benefits of their new home. ‘My New Neighbour’ is focused on unlocking the welcoming spirit that exists within these communities. Beyond brutal refugee policies, Australia remains a welcoming country.

My New Neighbour is calling on our government to expand and improve its refugee sponsorship program. The program is currently small and poorly structured, failing to allow refugees to contribute to our country as so many have done before. The significance of the ‘Community Support Program’ is not lost on the young Tamil Australians. That night participants learnt about tangible ways to assist family, friends or community members who were left behind in Sri Lanka. Many of their relatives and friends have been waiting for years, not knowing when they will be assessed and win the lottery of a place in Australia’s humanitarian intake program. It’s a guilt that weighs on the conscience of many of us who have come and found safety here. Many of our people didn’t. There is interest here. It’s personal.   

Ali Noori spent years in Indonesia, waiting to know when he could come to Australia. When he finally arrived in Canberra, Ali found friends waiting for him and generous offers of practical assistance extended by strangers. Ali experienced first-hand, the power of community-led and neighbourhood driven efforts to make his life in his new home more comfortable. Now, through ‘My New Neighbour’ Ali speaks to Australian audiences about the power of goodness. When Ali shares his story with local residents in regional towns like Braidwood, New South Wales, people are moved to tears.

In Wagga Wagga where Amnesty’s ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign launched in March 2018, political refugee from Zimbabwe, Felix Machiridza reflects on the fond memories of community support and love he received from his neighbours upon arrival.

’Community organisations worked with me, not for me, to make it possible for me to reunite with my children. I was creating my own destiny, but their help supported rather than drove my own work,’ reflects Felix.

Sponsoring his own children to reunite with him cost many thousands of dollars: ‘I couldn’t do it without them, but I must stress that the journey was mine to walk—but they walked it with me’, Felix says.

For many refugees joining more than sixteen thousand Australians to call on the Australian Government for an expansion and improvement of the refugee community sponsorship, the outcome is as important as the movement it is building. For several of us, it’s the first time we are harnessing the strength of our personal stories to advocate for ourselves and others like us. It’s happening with us, not for us or to us. 

Reclaiming campaigns executed in our name is crucial. It ensures the messages are right, and the messengers are us. It’s important because it reframes how we identify ourselves.

We are your neighbours; we are your teammates. We are your friends and colleagues. Stand with us and help us claim back this movement for change in our lives. 

In a café in Canberra, a South Sudanese refugee by the name of Abraham puts it like this:

‘We are not victims, we are survivors. We are people who have come here to this place, and we are playing a role in building community here.’

The world has seen the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US, where the campaign is led by the people directly affected by the issue. The ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign is just one example of how this can work in Australia.

From the former refugees turned advocates and social change activists now advising Amnesty’s refugee campaign, to the community groups getting on board at a grassroots level, this is an effort that is being designed, led and implemented by people with lived experience.

We’re at the start of something significant. We have had some wins, but there’s a lot more work to be done. We will need help of those who are not refugees but people for whom the experience of displacement is shared. We are seeing second, third and even fourth generation migrants get behind us as they too were once new neighbours in Australia.

Earlier in 2018, the Chair of the Ethnic Community Council of Victoria and Mayor of Whittlesea, Kris Pavilidis didn’t even hesitate to lead the way when meeting to discuss the campaign over a coffee at her local café.

Later that very day, Whittlesea would become the first city council to make the call to the Federal Government to expand and improve refugee community sponsorship. Earlier in 2018 the Western Bulldogs became the first major sporting team to throw their weight behind the campaign.

Movement building requires a lot of work, and as refugees we can’t do it alone. As people with lived experience we need allies everywhere to help us—companies, institutions, governments and friends in the community. People who respect the need for us to lead this work but will walk alongside us.

Allies can work in different ways, across communities where different strengths live, and feed into a body of work across the country. Over the past 6 months, as the campaign has just started, 29 local governments across WA, NSW, Tasmania, Queensland, SA and Victoria have joined the ‘My New Neighbour’ movement.

Regional centres like Albury-Wodonga and Wagga Wagga, urban fringe areas and suburbs like Whittlesea, Monash and Maribyrnong as well as inner city areas are all contributing. Local councils operate in landscapes with several examples of social change initiatives, shifting the attitudes of people to their new neighbours. The efforts of Victoria’s Darebin Council’s in Melbourne’s inner north reflected the groundswell of support coming from refugee and migrant diaspora communities.

Suriyan Nalliah, local resident of Darebin, refugee advocate and chair of the Darebin Ethnic Community Council heard about the ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign and is working with his group to call on his Council to lead a motion, joining the several others that had already done so.

Abdi Aden, a Somalian refugee, published author, and adviser to the ‘My New Neighbour’ campaign, spoke about what sharing his story meant to him.

‘I was once a new neighbour but these days I am interested in building neighbourhoods. Community led solutions to help our new neighbours, like community sponsorship, is something that can make a big difference to a lot of our people. How we tell that story is important and who listens, is also important.’

Community leaders like Akec Chuot, AFL player in the women’s team of Carlton Football Club embraces the actual wording and framing of the campaign.

‘I hate that word refugee. It is being misused and I dislike the box it puts me in. I am your new neighbour. I was sponsored and others can be sponsored also’.

The importance and integrity of refugee led campaigns is not lost on Farid Ashgari. In Melbourne’s inner east, Camberwell Grammar School offered a scholarship to Farid who arrived in Australia by boat, as an unaccompanied minor from Afghanistan. Farid approached his school asking them to come on board ‘My New Neighbour’ and the school students, through their ‘InterAct club’, responded warmly, becoming the first school in Australia to join Amnesty’s campaign.

‘The school listened to us. They supported us. They got behind us. The students donated generously to a resettlement program immediately… I felt like we had a voice, and it was being listened to, and making an impact. My community was coming with me, rather than just using me when my story was convenient’.

Now, in 2019, we are making change happen, and refugees are now more than ever turning to our political leaders to show us that our voices are being heard—‘we’ being those of us who have the most to gain from social change, and our friends who stand with us.