Compass: The Artist, the QC and the Refugee
Produced by Marcus Gillezeau
Screening on ABC, Sunday, July 24, 10.05pm

The Artist, the QC and the Refugee tells the story of an apparently conservative QC, Julian Burnside, and artist Kate Durham, who against the tide of public opinion made a moral choice to help asylum seekers, including Australia’s most famous refugee Aladdin Sisalem.

A former Liberal voter, Burnside found himself in conflict with the Coalition government’s policy when the Norwegian freighter, the MV Tampa, and its boatload of rescued asylum seekers were refused entry to Australia. He headed to the High Court of Victoria and began a consuming four-year saga.

Durham, Burnside’s wife, also became deeply involved with the refugee and asylum seeker issue. Eventually, her activism took over from her first passion and work as an artist. She flew to Nauru, posing as a concerned housewife, and secretly filmed the atrocious conditions that the children, mothers and fathers were living in. It was three years before she was reunited with some of these families.

Around that time, Sisalem arrived in Jakarta after an incredible journey from Kuwait. After more than a year of trying to gain asylum through legal channels, he gave up and eventually headed across the Torres Strait with a fisher and made landfall just inside the territorial waters of Australia. He was picked up by Australian immigration and taken to the detention centre on PNG’s Manus Island.

As the artist’s, the QC’s and the refugee’s stories collide, this documentary explores how far people will go to take a stand for moral beliefs.

From Green Left Weekly, July 20, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

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