Christine Wilkie Stibb

“The place gives us the strength to live”. What happened on the beach that allowed the children to walk through the door? The novel ‘Refuge’, by Jackie French, is a fictional novel based on the realities of seeking asylum in another country. The thirteen-year-old protagonist, Faris, is a young boy escaping from his country with his grandmother to seek refuge, which is contrasted with the title.

The text chosen for this unit id the book Refuge by prominent Australian writer Jackie French (2013). Refuge follows the story of Faris, a young refugee feeling from his homeland with his grandmother to Australia. On the dangerous boat journey from Indonesia to Australia, they encounter a terrible storm where Faris falls unconscious and wakes up living his dream life in Australia. However, he has no recollection of how he got there. Whilst on the beach, he meets a strange group of children all from different times and places. Faris soon discovers that each child is like him, a migrant who travelled to Australia searching for a better place. Each child is living in their own ‘dream’ Australia and the beach provides a sort of ‘refuge’ from reality for them. Eventually, Faris has to make the decision to either continue living in this dream land or face his reality. This book is interesting as unlike other refugee texts, this novel serves to tell the multicultural history of Australian immigration. French relays the more than 60 000 year old history of people travelling to Australia by boat and makes the statement that all immigrants and refugees need to be treated with empathy and understanding.

Migrant Hostel by Peter Skrzynecki explores the conditions of migrant hostels in the 20th century. Through vivid descriptions, metaphors and similes, Skrzynecki describes the emotions of the migrants living in the migrant hostels. The simile 'like a homing pigeon' suggests that the people in the migrant hostels were insistent on looking for belonging through an almost instinctive process of being drawn to people of the same or similar background. The metaphor 'partitioned off at night by memories of hunger and hate' implies that the people were vulnerable and were separated from the others by their past and their different history. The simile 'loved like birds of passage - always sensing a change in weather' conveys that the migrants were alert

Each year, thousands of Central American immigrants embark on a dangerous journey from Mexico to the United States. Many of these migrants include young children searching for their mothers who abandoned them. In Enrique’s Journey, former Los Angeles Times reporter, Sonia Nazario, recounts the compelling story of Enrique, a young Honduran boy desperate to reunite with his mother. Thanks to her thorough reporting, Nazario gives readers a vivid and detailed account of the hardships faced by these migrant children.

I immgranted to Australia with my family when I was 15. In Year 10 History class, I knew there’s a group of people called the Stolen Genereation. We had one lesson on the Stolen Generation, learned about the timeline and discussed some “Aboriginal Heros” in sports. It was a historical event for me until I heard Ivan’s story. It was a distressed time for me during the lecutre. Before 15-year-old, I lived seperatly with my parents, I can understand how it feels when a child been removed from their parents. Upwards of 50,000 indigenous children were removed from their families. These children were suffered great psychological trauma. They may be able to go home, but they can not return to their childhood; they may be able to reunite with parents and loved ones again, but the time has passed. After the lecture, I realized that they can go home again, but the

Through the novel The Ink bridge, Neil Grant conveys the theme of the impact of war and the effects it has on refugees, as well as the intolerance shown towards refugees. Neil Grant expresses the topic of the impact of war by using descriptive language to help readers visualise, he also mimics feelings of non-fictional refugees to further illustrate his point. The running constant of intolerance throughout the story is presented to readers with characters specifically designed to invoke thought about racial issues in Australia, as well as the hate shown towards asylum seekers and refugees. With these themes, Neil Grant shows us the hardship that refugees (especially children/teenagers) go through, when transitioning to a new country.

Did you know that it’s estimated that about 50% of refugees are under the age of 18? In the autobiography, Of Beetles & Angels by Mawi Asgedom, Mawi and his siblings came to America when they were under the age of 18 fitting the statistic. The book, Of Beetles & Angels is about a young boy’s journey from a refugee camp in Sudan who then comes to America, and then finally goes to Harvard. Mawi overcomes his obstacles and builds a successful life for himself. Growing up as a refugee in America Mawi encountered the obstacles of poverty, bullying and death.

Before introducing any major events, or analysis, it’s important to note that this autobiographical work was only made possible with the aid of written documentation, and tales passed on from the family and the community. This is imperative because a great portion of the piece focuses on events that Edwidge didn’t experience first-hand, so she heavily stresses on the details being re-surfaced through friends and family to complete a holistic emigration story. Family history and the involvement of cherishing family moments is often an overlooked form of communication, but without this, this and many other important minority stories would have never been complied in a way where we can now discuss them in a culturally-reflective academic setting, like this course.

This essay explores how unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) are oppressed in the UK. An unaccompanied asylum seeking child is a person under the age of eighteen who has left their country of origin in order to seek refuge and is ‘separated from both parents and are not being cared for by an adult who, by law or custom has responsibility to do so’ (UNHCR, 1994:121). They are therefore applying for asylum in their own right.

Contentious debate continues to rage in present society opening a floodgate of ethical issues which can have detrimental effects on all parties involved. Ethics vary from each individual and tend to stem from their own belief systems external to that person (Dosen, Harris, Brock, Imariso and Smith 2007:336). These ethics give rise to conflicting arguments in present society. 50 years ago, Indigenous Australians were not entitled to enter a bar, cafe, swimming pool, or a cinema, if that deprivation of basic rights wasn’t enough; they then took children from their mothers later on known as the ‘stolen generation’ (www.creativespirits.2008). The stolen generation, estimated at over 100,000 children were taken from their homes and placed in missions, reserves or dormitories (www.creativespirits.2008). “I feel our childhood has been taken away from us and it has left a big hole in our lives” an Indigenous Australian part of the stolen generation (www.creativespirtis.2008). The loss of ones culture and identity was deemed worse then being poor and living in sub standard living with their families.

Growing up with parents who are immigrants can present many obstacles for the children of those immigrants. There are many problems people face that we do not even realize. Things happen behind closed doors that we might not even be aware of. Writers Sandra Cisneros and Amy Tan help us become aware of these problems. Both of these authors express those hardships in their stories about growing up with foreign parents. Although their most apparent hardships are about different struggles, both of their stories have a similar underlying theme.

There are many different views about refugees in Australian society, where illegal boat people and over flowing detention centres are a controversial problem today. Go Back To Where You Came From is a documentary directed by Ivan O’Mahoney about a social experiment that challenges the dominant views of six Australians about refugees and asylum seekers. These six Australians are taken on a 25 day journey where they are placed into the troubled “worlds” of refugees. For a few of the Australians it is their first time overseas but, for all of them it is the most challenging and confronting experience of their lives. This essay will discuss

UK’s government passed an amendment to allow 3,000 child refugees into UK from Europe. Labour's Lord Dub, who came to UK as a child refugee says raising the number of child refugees that can enter the UK would save children from “Exploitation and abuse”. Opposers to the increase of child refugees state that by allowing the numbers to increase the refugee that

Since the post-war period, migrants and their descendants have also to a greater extent entered the centre of British literature. (Panayi 292) Many of them have worked with their personal experiences of being an immigrant in their writings; generally, they often focus on multiculturalism in Britain and conflicts that have come up in this multicultural society. (292) The topics of conflicting values and racism towards immigrants, which

Published in March 2016, Asylum is a complex, fractured novel that hovers on the border of reality and unreality. It is the most recent work by author John Hughes, whose novel The Idea of Home received the Premier’s Award for Nonfiction in 2005. The tale of Asylum is intriguing, a Kafkaesque allegory that binds the strangeness felt by refugees seeking asylum, with an image of purgatory borrowed from classical works of fiction. It is split into two acts, and within these acts, multiple fragments. The reader encounters excerpts from reports and inquiries as well as ‘Legends’ of both ‘The Doors’ and ‘The Place’. The landscape of the text is split into three places, ‘Sanctuary’, the ‘Doors’, and ‘Place’. Its protagonists are Baba and Ash, and