One of the people who first agreed to help Ali Khan when he arrived in Australia was a refugee advocate. Her name was Marjorie Devlin – ‘Mrs Marj’ – and I’ve met her a couple of times since the siege. I probably don’t need to describe her for you. She’s earnest. That probably covers it. Grey-haired, earnest, a little bit angry.
Mrs Marj didn’t start out in refugee advocacy but it was always going to be where she ended up. She started out on the Left of politics and now she’s on the far Left. She was active in women’s rights. She’s still got an ‘It’s Time’ badge from when she was campaigning for Whitlam. She carries a hessian shopping bag to the supermarket and, when she sees the person in front of her taking plastic shopping bags, she adopts a slightly superior air.
Marj votes Green. I know that because when I met her she told me that she met Bob Brown back when they were both trying to stop the damming of the Franklin, ‘and I couldn’t actually vote for him because he was standing in Tasmania, but I’ve always voted for the party. The other parties are both the same.’
I’m trying not to sound cynical. There probably are some people who get into helping refugees because they honestly want to help refugees. I got the feeling that Marj got involved because she’s always got to be involved in something, and if it’s on the Left, it’s for her.
Back to Ali Khan for a minute: pretty much as soon as Cate got him on the list of people waiting to be allocated a place in one of the few countries that takes genuine refugees (there’s us, there’s the US, there’s Canada and England and maybe some others, but that covers the bulk of them), he was picked up by the Australians. I don’t doubt that Cate had a bit to do with that, too: she was getting ready to leave the camp and, she told me, ‘I wasn’t going to leave him behind, to have God knows what happen to him.’
So Ali Khan’s name was on a list of twenty-two people scheduled for ‘immediate resettlement’ in Australia. Most of the others knew each other. They looked very different from Ali Khan. They had very black skin, and they were lean and tall, with pink tips on their fingers. They were married to each other or they were brothers, uncles and cousins, with kinship links that went back hundreds of years. They were coming out to Australia together.
Ali Khan was an off-grey colour. He was small for his age, mute, with a hole in his head.
The others in the group couldn’t stop staring at him. They wouldn’t touch him or speak to him, but they couldn’t stop staring. Cate had prepared Ali Khan for the flight. She told him: there will be people who offer you food and you should take it because the flight will be very long. They might offer you alcohol and you shouldn’t take it because you are not allowed and it will confuse your brain. You must sit in the seat they give you. You cannot crouch on the floor.
‘There was no way of knowing whether he understood or not,’ she told me. ‘He just went along with whatever anyone told him to do. I was smiling and nodding at him, trying to find people who would interpret what I was saying, and he would sit and look at me with those bloodhound eyes.’
Cate was tempted to go with him – to board the same plane and supervise – but, you know, l’amore! She’d met a man – a fellow aid worker, from France – and they had fallen in love. Their plans did not include flying home to Australia. They were due to fly to Paris, to meet his parents. So, in the end, Cate escorted Ali Khan to the airport – he had no baggage, not even a change of clothes – and she put him on the plane with that group of others, and that was the last time she saw him, for many years.
The plane – for the record, the refugees fly Qantas – touched down in September 2006, a year before the Howard government was dismissed from office.
The flight had taken thirty-six hours and from the moment Ali Khan put a foot down on Australian soil, he was in trouble, in that nobody knew exactly what to do with him. The families he’d been travelling with – the group of black Sudanese – were greeted by members of the Sudanese Refugee Association. They took one look at Ali Khan and refused to give him a seat on their minibus. It would be too disruptive, they’d said. He was albino. He had the ju-ju. He’d have to be placed elsewhere. It wasn’t a polite refusal. It was an hysterical refusal, with women in the group throwing themselves against the walls rather than get close to him.
The only other option – or the only one that DIMIA seemed able to come up with when put on the spot like that – was to put Ali Khan into what’s called ‘home stay’.
Home stay was a new program – meaning, it was new then and now it’s bigger than ever. It basically calls on Australian citizens to open their homes to new arrivals, to give them a room and a bed and three meals a day, to teach them some basic English phrases, introduce them to Centrelink, help them open a bank account, show them how to flush a toilet – all of which can be pretty daunting for people who have lived for years in a tent with a dirt floor, behind cyclone wire in the middle of the desert.
They’re also supposed to help new arrivals enrol in a range of courses, and help them get jobs. The idea is, after six months or so, the new arrivals will be resettled, working or studying, well on the way to making their contribution, and able to move into homes of their own.
All good on paper. Not so good in practice.
A friend of mine who was a school teacher in Sydney’s west says her school took thirty Sudanese kids in 2006. None spoke English. They had what was probably post-traumatic stress syndrome. A plane would fly over and they’d hit the ground or run screaming from the classrooms. They were behind in all their subjects and it took an enormous amount of resources to bring them up to speed.
I didn’t say it didn’t come good. It did come good. But there were not enough resources, and the individuals who were in charge of helping people integrate often had no idea what they were doing.
The home stay program was a bit like that. The government brought it in basically because of pressure from the electorate to get asylum seekers out of detention. This was after Howard had said, ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come!’ People were being taken off boats and put into detention centres, children included.
It was refugee advocates, and maybe the churches, that put pressure on the government to at least let the children live in the community. You can’t have children locked in detention forever. Volunteers were lining up to help. Most were what I call the ‘Howard-haters’ – people like Marjorie Devlin, who had already spent years writing letters to the editor, and taking part in street protests against the Howard government.
Ali Khan qualified for the program by nature of being underage (or, at least, it was assumed that he was underage). He was also a genuine refugee, not an asylum seeker, which again made him a perfect candidate for the new program.
That said, it was only by chance that Ali Khan ended up with Marjorie. It wasn’t like they were matched up on the basis of their compatability.
I met Marjorie at her place in Glebe, not long after the siege at Surf City. She told me she had signed up for home stay after seeing an ad for the program in The Sydney Morning Herald. ‘I had a Not Happy John bumper sticker on my car pretty much the day they came out. I hated that man,’ she said.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. I tend not to give mine.
‘I signed up for home stay because I would have done anything to get children out of detention,’ she said.
After seeing the ad in the paper, Marjorie had phoned straight away.
‘I was so angry about Howard’s dog-whistling on refugees – and the racism! – I felt I had to act,’ she said.
From what I gathered talking to Marjorie, she’d always been fairly combative. She was combative even with me.
‘I don’t like organised religion,’ she said, by way of greeting (she’d come to the door, a large woman, leaning heavily to the left, on an aluminum cane). ‘I’m only seeing you because of what happened to that boy.’
Her house was quite small, made of fibro and timber. At some point, she
’d taken out the nature strip and planted a struggling vegetable garden. There was an empty ice-cream bucket near the gutter with a few old zucchinis in it, and a sign on a garden stake saying, ‘Please take only a FAIR SHARE and Leave Some For Others.’
We sat together on Marjorie’s old couch, the cushions covered over with a batik bedspread from Bali, circa 1985, itself covered in cat hair. Marjorie was wearing pale, crimplene pants and a blousy shirt. I could see her at a Palm Sunday rally in that outfit, maybe with a straw hat. I could see her at a town hall meeting, decrying the Howard government’s treatment of asylum seekers.
‘I signed up for home stay because I’ve been at war with authority since I was a girl!’ she told me, triumphantly.
‘I don’t have to tell you this. My mother would have told you: “Marj had to question everything!” And that’s true. I did have to question everything. But my eyes are open to what really goes on in this world. Some people are blind to it, but not me. My mother never worked a day in her life – never wanted to! I’d say, “Mum, can’t you see how patriarchy keeps you in your place?” She’d say, “Oh, there’s always two sides to a story, Marj.” I’d say, “You’ve been kept in your place so long you can’t even see how powerless you are.” She’d say, “Oh, Marj, you’re so passionate,” like that was a bad thing.’
Marjorie was active in student politics at university. She had worked in the public service, as one of the clerks who sorts out the mess that is public housing, most of her life, until she’d had to exit on sick pay.
‘Workplace bullying,’ she told me. ‘They started moving my shifts around without asking me. I knew why they were doing it. There’s a section of the Housing Department – that’s where was I working – that is essentially fatist. They won’t say it out loud. But I’d say I need an office not too far from the bathrooms and the escalators on account of the difficulty I have walking, and that was a problem for them. How is that not fatist? And it’s because of the discrimination I’ve suffered that I feel so strongly about the way we, as a society, discriminate against others.
‘That’s why I took Ali Khan. He wasn’t what I expected. The ad said they were looking for people who would take families – women and children – out of detention. I was very interested in that. I wanted to help refugees from that pointless war in Iraq or else girls from Aghanistan, but that’s not who I got. They sent me an African instead.’
Was Marjorie the right choice for Ali Khan? I don’t think she was. Marjorie signed up for home stay, not to make a difference but to make a point. At age sixteen, or thereabouts, alone in Australia, with a range of medical problems and probably psychological problems as well, Ali Khan was too young and vulnerable to be a pawn in a political game.
What he needed, I’m guessing, was somebody with more of a genuine humanitarian touch.
Chapter Sixteen
‘You know how this started, I suppose?’ Marjorie said. She’d offered me tea and I’d accepted. We’d moved from the couch to her garden, mainly because the sun had come out and Marjorie had a habit of sprinkling seeds for visiting rosellas at a certain time of day. I was sitting in a metal chair in the paved courtyard. Marjorie was on the other side of the table in one of those metal garden swings with the faded cushions. It seemed to have been fixed somehow so it did not swing.
She produced a dog-eared pamphlet from a pile of manila folders I’d carried out for her. Marjorie couldn’t carry them herself, not while opening the door and leaning on the cane.
‘Have a look,’ she said.
It was a pamphlet advertising home stay for students.
‘That’s how I got into this,’ she said. ‘I started out with students. I was on sick leave and then I took a package from the Department. They gave me a tidy sum of money. I had already inherited this house from my mother. I had paid into super all my working life. All of that means I didn’t qualify for a pension.
‘I have to live on what I’ve got. It’s not enough. I was thinking of taking in a boarder.
‘Then I spotted that ad,’ Marjorie said. ‘I thought, well, why not? I have a spare room. Two spare rooms. The students pay $200 a week. That is for room and board. I grow a lot of my own vegetables. I thought, where the students come from, they probably eat a lot of vegetables – curries and the like. Indians are mostly vegetarian, you know.’
‘The students are mostly from India?’ I said.
‘Mostly from India, and that was the problem,’ Marjorie said. ‘They spoke English. No problems there. They could understand exactly what I was saying. But they all seemed to have the same problem: they could not follow the rules.’
‘The rules – you mean the rules of the home stay program?’
‘My rules,’ said Marjorie. ‘I would explain to them, on the very first day they arrived, so there would be no confusion: you are the guest, I am the landlady. I make the rules. You follow the rules. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a meddler. I understand that young people need their space. But this is my home. I’m happy to open the doors to my home – but I won’t be taken for granted. I won’t have the place treated like it’s a hotel. But each and every time, my hospitality was taken for granted and I’d have to ask the student to leave.’
It took me a minute to get what Marjorie meant: not one of her student placements had worked out.
‘Here I was, opening my home, putting up strangers, showing them some hospitality, just as the Good Samaritan said to do, Father. And yes, there’s a small stipend, but it was to cover costs as well as to compensate me for lack of privacy and so forth – and not one of the students that came through that front door ever showed any gratitude. Not one,’ she said. ‘I went to some lengths to create an environment that was relaxed. That’s what the brochure goes on about: you need to be flexible, relaxed – but it was like they expected that there would be no rules at all.’
I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask, ‘What kind of rules did you put in place, Marjorie?’
‘I had in mind setting aside certain times – say, one hour on a Saturday evening, after the chores had been done – for the student and I to exchange information about our different cultures. Isn’t that what the program is about? Hospitality? Exchange? And here’s what would happen: I would be sitting, ready, and the first week, they’d be there. We would talk. I would describe the problems that we have in Australia: the greenhouse gases, the reliance on coal, the failure to support renewable energy projects. They would tell me a bit about their country. Then, the next week, they would say, “Oh, Mrs Devlin, I need to go out socialising,” and there would be no more time to sit with me.’
I hadn’t been sitting with Marjorie for much more than half an hour but, I have to say, I had some sympathy for those students.
‘I would try again the next week but it wouldn’t be a priority for them. Something else would always get in the way. Then it would be breaking one rule after another,’ she said. ‘I followed the rules. I was given a package of information that told me exactly what I had to supply and I made sure that all of those things were in their room: they needed a bed, a desk, a chair, a study light and space in the cupboard. I’ve collected quite a few things over my life. I needed some space in the cupboard, too. I kept my things to one side and I kept that side locked. One student wanted to know if that side of the cupboard could be unlocked, so he could put his own things in there. I explained to him that it could not be unlocked because that side of the cupboard was mine, and the next thing I knew he had complained to what he called his support worker at the university. I could hardly believe it. They came out to my home.
‘They said, “He needs to have privacy. The point isn’t really that you have things in the cupboard, it’s that you are going in and out of his room. It means he has no privacy.” I said, “I can’t let him lock me out of a room in my own house!” And I knew why he wanted privacy. I had seen him on his computer. He wasn’t studying. He was looking for Australian girls to marry! All weekend he’d be on those sites. I
asked him to leave.’
I wasn’t surprised to hear that the student had been looking for a bride. There were quite a few foreign students in the neighbourhood when I worked in Sydney’s west. They were paying up to $30,000 a year for a degree. They didn’t try to fool me about why they were doing it. They wanted to find a girl here, and be allowed to stay. Some were offering to pay Australians to go through with a wedding ceremony.
I had wondered how bad things must be for them at home, given what I’d seen them put up with in Sydney’s west. Marjorie might have been taking only one at a time and actually giving them a room of their own, but I’d heard of students who were paying $300 a week to live in a lean-to on the side of the house, with red-back spiders nesting in the old floorboards. There might be a bed but it would have a stained mattress, no sheets; there would be no window, it would get to forty degrees in the summer and the so-called hosts wouldn’t provide so much as a fan. Or they wouldn’t let their student inside to heat a can of beans in the microwave.
The hosts were supposed to provide three meals a day. The students would get days-old bread with a slice of processed cheese, wrapped in Glad Wrap. I’d heard of students turning up at Sydney Airport – arriving in Australia on their own – and no one would be there to meet them. Having never left India before, they’d be told to get a bus from the airport, and then another bus. They’d be without parents for the first time. They’d be dazed and confused, jet-lagged to hell, and all alone.
Maybe you’re thinking, oh well, they are university students. Imagine if it was your daughter, arriving in a foreign country, and there was nobody to meet them?
Marjorie was one of those who thought going out to the airport was asking a bit much and for Marjorie it probably was a bit much. She didn’t drive. She believes in public transport. She would have to lean on the cane. She also didn’t like the fact that the first thing the students wanted to do when they finally got to her dingy little house was use the phone.
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