Dark Dreams: Australian refugee stories by young writers aged 11-20 years
Edited by Sonja Dechian, Heather Millar and Eva Sallis
Wakefield Press, 2004
$19.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN
Dark Dreams is a fascinating anthology of essays, interviews and short stories written by children and young adults aged 11 to 20 years of age. It gives a remarkable insight into young people's capacity to understand a complex social and political issue and be impassioned and angered by it.
The stories were selected for publication from hundreds collected through an unprecedented nationwide schools' competition in 2002, "Australia Is Refugees!", devised by writer Eva Sallis and run by Australians Against Racism.
In the foreword to the book, Eva Sallis writes: "The young writers were asked to find someone who came to Australia as a refugee and listen to their story. Then they had to imagine it and in a sense make it their own by writing it. Many children had one of these stories living in the memory of a relative and many found strangers who, through storytelling, became friends. Many others told their own or their parents' stories."
There are some very creative and moving pieces of work among them. Dark Dreams is, as Sallis comments, an extraordinary record of young people's literary talent. The essays and stories represent many different countries. Many of them reflect on past refugee movements, from World War II Europe to the 1980s Vietnamese refugees, while some are stories of refugees still living in detention centres in Australia.
Melanie Poole's essay about the Osmani family evokes the dark side of a relatively forgotten period of refugee history in Australia — the temporary safe haven offered to thousands of Kosovar refugees, and their forced return when the Australian government deemed it was safe for them to go back. The Osmani family refused to return, in part because of the poor health of their one-year-old daughter, whose damaged leg had been repeatedly operated on without improvement.
The family of six was held in Port Hedland detention centre for seven months, and Poole describes the horror of their experience. After seven months, they finally won the right to stay in Australia.
Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock congratulated Sallis on the success of the book, but felt compelled to comment on the "inaccuracies" in Poole's essay. In a five-page letter, Ruddock argued that asylum seekers in Australia's immigration detention centres were given the highest standards of care, including culturally appropriate food and a high standard of medical care. Gysele Osmani's accounts, retold in Poole's essay, give a very different picture of the government's treatment of asylum seekers.
A second schools story-writing competition, titled "There is no place like home", is being run at the moment. Entries close on June 30. Young people up to the age of 20 are encouraged to find and interview someone who was driven or torn from their home and forced to begin a new life and make a new home among strangers; to find and tell the stories of refugees or Indigenous Australians, displaced peoples from recent times or from the distant past. The competition encourages the discovery of the meaning and experience of exile or forced dispossession, but participants will also discover how their peers or elders survived and rebuilt their lives.
Australians Against Racism has plans for an "Australia Is Refugees" short film project in 2005, with the aim of redressing the imbalance in the media's portryal of people's lives. It will give young refugees a voice to tell their own story, or a story from their family or the wider community.
The project will provide training and access to video technology to a group of 12 young people aged between 15 and 19. At least half of the participants will be refugees. Participants will write and produce a four-minute documentary about some aspect of the refugee experience. For further information, visit <http://www.australiansagainstracism.org>.
From Green Left Weekly, June 9, 2004.
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