Raising our Voices

I was only able to say goodbye to my mother and father after I’d fled my home country of Iran and arrived in Indonesia. I had escaped with my girlfriend, pretending we were tourists. When we got to Indonesia, I called my parents to say I was going to find an opportunity for a better life. My mum was in tears, asking why I hadn’t said goodbye. That was ten years ago now and I haven’t seen her since.

A few days earlier, some people had come to my restaurant to arrest me. I knew that if I went with them, they would either lock me up forever or hang me. Unknown to my girlfriend and family, I had become an atheist and joined a group which was against the Iranian government. Fortunately, I was able to convince the people trying to arrest me to have a meeting the following week instead.

In Indonesia, my girlfriend and I boarded an overcrowded fishing boat destined for Christmas Island. I told her: “I feel it would be better to be killed by a shark in this ocean, rather than by the Iranian government.” But I also said to her: “You have the option to stay.” She told me if she was going to die, it had better be with me.

The captain of that boat was a very young boy, only 13 or 14 years old. We thought it was crazy that he was put in charge, but he was so experienced.

It was my mother who taught me to cook and that has shaped my life. I loved watching her as a child and, to me, it always seemed like she effortlessly did great and surprising things. Even little things, like putting orange zest in a cake, would excite me.

When I was 19 and moved out with friends, I offered to cook in exchange for not paying the rent. I would call my mum and she would explain the dishes to me, step by step, always with her own creative tips. I became the head of the kitchen at a modern restaurant in Tehran and then opened my own café.

But when I finally got permission to work in Australia, I went to 50 or 60 restaurants and the only job I was offered paid $8 an hour. Instead, I volunteered at an asylum seeker charity. It was during that time I discovered many people in Australia hadn’t tried Persian food and I decided that was going to be my future.

I began teaching cooking classes at a not-for-profit organisation supporting asylum seekers and refugees. People also started to get to know me through Instagram, and would ask about catering and home cooking classes.

At first, I did it by myself. But then I started employing my friends who also came by boat. I wanted to give job opportunities to people stuck at home with nothing to do. They’d say: “I don’t know how to speak English. It’s hard for me. I don’t know anyone.”

People then began asking if there was a place they could come to eat, so I started Salamatea House and we now have about 14 people working there. It’s a not-for-profit because I don’t want to do business for myself – I just want to give job opportunities.

I’ve seen big changes in the people who have worked for me. I have seen them become part of the community, become successful in their lives, and find careers beyond the cafe. They’ve come to life.

I come from a country that no longer exists. The first time I became a refugee was in 1993 during the Croatian War of Independence. It was a very brutal civil war. We’re talking neighbours killing neighbours, cousins killing cousins.

The second time was during the Kosovo War. I spent my childhood going from one war zone to another, transiting through refugee camps in Eastern Europe, working as a child labourer to survive.

We ended up living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kosovo. It was a large sewing factory. They removed the sewing machines and put down mattresses on the floor. That’s where we lived for about five years with 800 people sharing one bathroom and one hot plate. It was a really difficult situation.

We were lucky that there was an Australian Embassy in Belgrade. My mother put in an application to get as far away from Europe as possible. I didn’t know anything about Australian culture – just Blinky Bill, the anthropomorphic koala.

I resettled in Adelaide in 1999 with my mother, my twin brother and an older brother. I was 12 and didn’t speak any English. After some initial difficulties in adjusting to a new culture, we thrived in Australia.

After school, I began a journalism degree. I wanted to be Christiane Amanpour. Then I went to a model UN conference in Sydney, and I was impressed by how the law students got up and spoke about international conventions and treaties, about war crimes and crimes against humanity – about things I lived through, but they only understood in the narrow abstract. Upon my return to Adelaide, I enrolled at Adelaide Law School. I wanted to use the law to contribute to causes I care about.

Now, I practise employment law and industrial relations for a large blue-collar union. I have stuck with law for almost 13 years now, and I really love it. In my line of work, we get to set precedent for employment law in this country. To develop case law and legislative amendments through our law reform work – this is exciting for me.

Coming into daily contact with people who had never met refugees, but had negative views about them, made me reflect on my experience as a child refugee. I started telling my story to educate the Australian public about the issues refugees face. I’ve had my writing published in The Guardian and The Age and in three books, including New Humans of Australia. I’m also the Deputy Chair of the Forcibly Displaced People Network – Australia’s first LGBTIQ+ refugee network – and I sit on the steering committee of the National Refugee-led Advocacy and Advisory Group.

For a long time, I didn’t want to be labelled as a refugee. I used to wish I could advocate for refugees anonymously, from the shadows – like an advocate version of Sia. With my back to the audience. A mask concealing my face.

I felt that way because the perception people have of refugees is of depravity and risk. Refugees are seen as a burden. I was not a burden. I was a 12-year-old child in need of protection. I want to change that perception.

Refugees contribute so much more than we cost. Our stories, our lives, shouldn’t be controversial. We need to hear the stories of success. That’s why I’m speaking up – to own this space for us.

My childhood was spent in a country where we never really belonged. I was born in Rakhine State in what was then Burma, but my family fled to Malaysia when I was very young. The persecution facing Rohingya people in Myanmar today has existed for a long time and we now have relatives in every part of the world because they also fled.

My family’s journey from Burma to Malaysia was very dangerous. We passed through multiple countries, walking most of the way. We were tired, hungry and terrified. Fortunately, I didn’t have to live in the refugee camps like Rohingya people do now, but we faced other challenges once we reached Malaysia.

We couldn’t get citizenship or even permanent residency. So, for many years, we had to live as illegal immigrants, always moving, to prevent police and immigration from catching up with us. My siblings and I were living only to survive. We were very different from the other children in Malaysia, who could live without fear and enjoy their lives.

We had escaped our country, but we were still searching for a place to belong. If you don’t have documents, you don’t have a future. That’s why we came to Australia.

UNHCR helped us with supporting documents which allowed us to get out of Malaysia. I was around 19 when we arrived. It really was a new chapter, a new beginning. The worry that we would be arrested lifted straight away. It was just wonderful.

My siblings and I were accepted into high school and completed our HSC. Now I am a high school teacher myself. I also work at SBS Rohingya. For me it’s about keeping our language alive and introducing our stories to Australia. It’s also a very important way for our community to feel like they belong and their voice is heard.

I’ve been very active in helping refugees in other ways too, whether that’s as a cultural support person helping my fellow Rohingya navigate the public health system, or as part of the Rohingya Women Network group. I am passionate about inspiring young Rohingya girls to pursue careers and break cultural stigmas.

I also have a dream of doing more to help refugee women living in Bangladesh, particularly with education. I would love to dedicate time weekly, or even daily, to provide lessons online. I believe that if we can educate women we can educate the whole family.

My desire to help is probably born out of the fact that I missed a lot of things in my own childhood. I want to prevent other people from missing out as well. There also wasn’t much support available back then, so I stood up and thought: “I should be the person to inform them because I don’t see many other people wanting to do it.”

When I hear about terrible situations in other countries, I feel sad. I think: “Once upon a time, I was in their position.” Maybe it wasn’t as severe, but I can still relate. I was running in search of a place that I could call home, but these people are running to find safety in their own country.

I’m waiting for the day there will be peace in this world, but I don’t know when it’s going to happen.

Two hours before we reached Christmas Island by boat, my youngest daughter stopped breathing. She was 18 months old and hadn’t eaten in four days and four nights.

My wife and I, along with our two daughters, had boarded the boat in Indonesia, less than a week after fleeing our home country of Iran. I didn’t know anything about Australia or how we’d get there. We travelled to Indonesia on fake passports and, when the people smuggler there told us to prepare for the boat trip, I asked if there was any other option. It seemed a long way by boat between Australia and Indonesia, but he told me that was the only way.

As my daughter began turning blue, other people on the boat leapt into action. They performed CPR on her small body and, fortunately, she began to breathe again.

There are different stages of trauma an asylum seeker goes through. That boat trip was the second trauma I faced. The first was fearing the government in Iran.

I had been working as a mental health scholar for the government when I was called in, twice, to speak with Tehran’s intelligence service about my attitude and opinions. I was scared for my family’s safety. We knew we had to get out.

When we finally arrived on Christmas Island in 2013, I felt happy because we’d managed to escape Iran without being caught or hurt. But I was also shocked because I didn’t know about detention centres. That was the next trauma – finding out that the reality of the place we’d sought safety in was very different from what we had imagined.

After a couple of years living in various types of detention, I was given a temporary visa without work or education rights. We still don’t have any certainty whether we will get permission to stay here permanently. That’s the trauma we continue to face today. It’s a limbo that affects my mental and physical health.

I didn’t want to lose the knowledge I had from Iran. I wanted to improve myself. Every day I was in detention, I spoke to other asylum seekers about their experiences and learned from them. I later did cash-in-hand jobs, from painting to restaurant work, to pay for more education in my field. Among my studies, I completed a Master of Research at the University of NSW’s School of Psychiatry.

Now, as a research officer at UNSW, I’ve been able to look in depth at mental health impacts on asylum seekers and refugees. My Master’s research examined how the asylum seeker process affects children who remain with their families. It showed how children living with the insecurity of bridging visas for up to seven years experienced almost double the rates of psychosocial difficulties as those with permanent residency.

In coordinating my research with hundreds of families, I also took on an informal role as a community advocate and support worker, helping people build new lives while living with visa insecurity and the subsequent lack of access to services. I was honoured to be announced as the winner of the Refugee Community Worker category in the 2021 NSW Humanitarian Awards.

My family and I are still impacted by insecurity and exclusion to this day. For example, my eldest wants to go to university next year but if she doesn’t get a scholarship we would face expensive international student fees that we can’t afford. I tell her not to worry, that I’ll figure it out somehow. I am optimistic my daughters will have a good life, but it’s still a big challenge for us.

We are still waiting for certainty, but in the meantime we have a responsibility to ourselves, our families and community. Constantly learning and improving ourselves is the way to a better life.