Amid all the political jousting over Australia’s asylum seeker policy, large numbers of African refugees have quietly settled in Australia over the past decade. Dylan Bird speaks to a number of recent arrivals in the rural Victorian town of Shepparton, and examines whether the region offers enough opportunities to sustain such population growth into the future.
Sitting at his desk in a Shepparton office, Thon’s calm demeanor gives no hint of the turbulence he experienced in his earlier life.
In 1985, at the age of 11, he was forced to leave his homeland in South Sudan following the outbreak of a civil war between the central government and rebel forces. With disarming composure, he explains how the 26,000-strong group of boys began a foot journey to Ethiopia that lasted up to a year, facing hunger, exhaustion and the emotional turmoil of losing family members to militia violence.
Thon M. Thon
“When we reached Ethiopia, we were only 12,000,” he says.
“[We] were quite young. A lot of people were taken by animals.”
The region’s rivers and plains are home to various threatening beasts, including crocodiles and lions.
“A lot…just fell asleep and were left there in the forest.”
The group, who have become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, were to be recruited into the rebels’ army when they came of age. While some were eventually conscripted, many still reside in refugee camps in neighbouring countries.
“It is quite sad to see,” says Thon.
“Even though South Sudan [is] independent they cannot go there because they don’t know anybody.”
Thon remained in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya for roughly 20 years, before receiving sponsorship to migrate to Australia in 2005. Initially arriving in Melbourne, he knew early on that he would need to find a more congenial place to establish himself.
“Melbourne was a bit busy for somebody like me, growing up in a small village and refugee camp. It was a bit of a culture shock,” he says.
In search of a more rural lifestyle, Thon moved to Tatura in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, before eventually relocating to Shepparton.
“I was looking for a small town,” he says.
“When the town grows, you grow with the town.”
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The Sudanese community in Shepparton now comprises 130 families and approximately 1000 people. At the time Thon arrived, however, there were very few Africans looking to settle in the Goulburn Valley.
“It was a bit challenging at the beginning, because it was just me and my wife,” he recalls.
“[But] after six months I realised ‘I’m not lonely, I’m here to do something with myself’.”
Having trained and practiced as a nurse for eight years in Kenya, Thon set about the process of having his skills recognised in Australia. While he would eventually find work in the medical field, his first job came as an interpreter for the emerging Congolese population in the area.
In contrast with the various other ethnic groups who came to Shepparton through secondary migration, refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were directly settled in Shepparton through the federal government’s Regional Humanitarian Settlement Pilot. The program, which ran in 2005-6, involved an initial group of 10 Congolese families, who were actively supported in their settlement needs by local organisations and community groups.
For Thon, the initiative opened up an opportunity to provide translating services for the new, Swahili-speaking residents.
“The [Congolese] community started to grow at the same time I came in,” he says.
“It encouraged a lot of organisations to work with me, so that I could help them with settling” into a new place.
One of these organisations was the Ethnic Council of Shepparton – a community agency that supports migrants in all facets of the settlement process. Through his initial work, Thon received ongoing employment with the Ethnic Council in 2007 as a community development officer, where he assists new arrivals of various ethnic backgrounds to settle into a new life.
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Adam Kitungano was one of the first DRC refugees to arrive in Shepparton.
Having fled internal violence in 1996, he spent nine years in a Tanzania refugee camp before being granted a passage to Australia with his wife and children.
Sitting on a bench in the Shepparton city centre, he speaks glowingly of the support he received upon entering the town.
Adam Kitungano
“When we first came…people were aware that something was happening,” he says, in relation to the government program.
“We had people bringing us food and clothes, people used to come to our house and take our kids to the swimming pool…so the community was very, very welcoming, and I think that’s why I’m still here.”
While Kitungano has managed to settle in Shepparton successfully, the process was not necessarily smooth.
Trained as a teacher, he recalls how it was difficult to find work in the region, even after he had a solid command of English and completed further study to have his skills recognised in Australia.
“It took a very long time,” he says, reciting the various accreditation processes he had to undergo.
Kitungano initially found work as a cleaner at Notre Dame College, a Catholic School in Shepparton. With a desire to return to the education field, he became an integration aide at the school in 2007, where he assisted Congolese students and parents with day-to-day tasks. Now, he is employed full-time as a science teacher.
Despite his success, Kitungano says some other Congolese and Sudanese migrants have struggled to establish themselves in the region.
“There are many people around here looking for jobs, but they can’t get work,” he says.
“Even…in the farms, abattoirs, there’s not much.”
A 2007 government report on the Shepparton Regional Humanitarian Settlement Pilot states that the “high availability of unskilled work” in the agriculture and food processing industries was a major factor in the decision to send Congolese arrivals to the region.
Since then, however, the Heinz tomato-processing factory in Girgarre closed its doors, and SPC Ardmona has downsized its workforce and significantly reduced its fruit intake from local growers.
This has contributed to a substantial rise in Shepparton’s unemployment rate. Once sitting slightly below the state and national average, the latest figures indicate that unemployment in the region has shot up to 8 percent, compared with a rate of 5.7 and 5.8 percent for Victoria and Australia respectively.
In a 2009 paper on capacity building for African migrants in the Goulburn Valley, employment is identified by a sample of African-Australians as the number one settlement priority. This includes not only the availability of work, but also the desire to find a job matching one’s skill set and the adequacy of support services.
For Dr Apollo Nsubuga-Kyobe, one of the authors of the paper, employment prospects is one of the key considerations in whether Congolese migrants will remain in Shepparton. While he views the government pilot as a success, he identifies a number of issues with the viability of settling migrants in the region.
“It’s one of those places that has a well diversified economy,” he says, in relation to the canning and agriculture industry.
“But when it comes to skilled work [opportunities are] very, very limited.”
Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe is very well acquainted with issues of migration in the Goulburn Valley. Having spent ten years as a lecturer at La Trobe University’s Shepparton campus, he has written extensively about the resettlement needs and experiences of sub-Saharan Africans, and has helped to establish a number of organisations that deal with diverse settlement issues.
In his view, regional resettlement programs must be balanced with an assessment of whether a particular location has both the social supports and institutions to foster sustained, inclusive growth. While Shepparton has broadly welcomed ethnically diverse migrants, he questions the willingness of people – particularly the Congolese arrivals – to remain in the town given the limited work and study options.
“Those who grew up [in Shepparton], the young ones, they’re migrating to Melbourne,” he says.
“There’s no benefit [in staying].”
Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe says that the region needs to move away from offering merely seasonal or transitional work for migrants, and build on the expertise of people in the community.
“By using the knowledge and skills of people can you create a new economy?” he asks.
“Unless you encourage these higher levels [of work] you’re not going to be creating new types of employment.”
It is a view similar to that of Greater Shepparton mayor Jenny Houlihan. Having resided in the Goulburn Valley since the 1960s, Cr Houlihan was elected to council in 2005 off the back of a campaign to save Shepparton’s International Village – an area established in the 1970s to showcase the region’s ethnic diversity. A former teacher, Cr Houlihan now owns a small home décor business, and is well acquainted with the needs of local residents.
“Some people have come to Australia and been disappointed that they’ve been qualified in something that they’ve not been able to find work in,” she says.
Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe’s 2009 article, which was co-authored by Dr Sundram Sivamalai, argues that the restrictive working hours of farm labour and a lack of confidence in speaking English are significant barriers to migrants seeking work in their professional field.
“It’s disappointing that as a community we cannot use all those skills,” says Cr Houlihan.
In her view, it is up to the government to invest in job creation and education so that people are not forced to move elsewhere for study and work.
“We need to be creating jobs here…we need to have that range of employment options.”
Despite such complications with the targeted resettlement of migrants, there is every indication that Shepparton was a good option for the first government humanitarian settlement program.
From an initial intake of 10 Congolese families, the local Congolese population has grown to 23 families of approximately 160 people – many of whom migrated from major cities after hearing about the experience of those settled through the program.
Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe identifies one main reason for this.
“The Goulburn Valley has [a history of] successful migration, that is a significant matter,” he says.
“The Shepparton program was owned by the community.”
In 2007, a similar program to settle refugees from Togo was implemented in the regional Victorian town of Ballarat. While a government evaluation of the program details a number of positive outcomes, a range of factors including a high rate of unemployment, the cold climate and the inadequacy of some support services are identified as problems confronting the new arrivals.
For Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe, however, the reason for any failings in the initiative is simple.
“The Ballarat program was top-down, the government came with experience from Shepparton…and integration ultimately failed.”
In his view, it is the absence of a long history of ethnic diversity and migration in Ballarat which made it difficult to link new arrivals with an engaged community.
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While Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe is broadly positive about Shepparton’s openness to new arrivals, he has experienced discrimination first-hand.
Arriving in the town in 1996-7 to teach at La Trobe University, fresh from completing his PhD, the Uganda-born academic says he was one of the only Africans to have settled there.
“In those first years, my car was hit with eggs on occasions,” he says.
“But I didn’t care…I had resilience, because I knew what the story was, and how to manage it.”
Research published by the Australian Human Rights Commission reveals that exposure to various forms of racism is common among African Australians.
In Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe’s view, this heightened rate of discrimination is largely because Africans are relative newcomers in the context of Australia’s migration patterns.
In 2003-5, Australia’s intake of refugees from war-torn countries across Africa accounted for around 70 percent of its entire humanitarian program. As a result, by 2006 Australia’s population of people born in sub-Saharan Africa had increased to almost 192,000.
“It’s a fear of the other person,” says Dr Nsubuga-Kyobe matter-of-factly.
“And when you look at [past migrant groups], it’s the same system, it keeps coming again and again.”
In his mind, this reveals a contradiction in Australia’s claim to be an inclusive society.
“Australia believes in what is called a fair go for all. This concept of the fair go is not for all, it is for those in the inner group. And that has been manifested in a whole lot of things.”
Nonetheless, he believes that the discrimination faced by ethnic groups these days is generally less overt than that experienced by earlier generations of migrants.
“We are under different institutional structures,“ he says.
“For example, there are laws to do with discrimination. These things are forcing people to act a bit differently. So in other words the manifestation [of discrimination] we saw then is not what we see now. There is more acceptance.”
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Back in Shepparton, Thon is doing his bit to make it easier for migrants to feel at home in the region.
As a community development officer, he sees his job as largely consisting in transitioning people into jobs that they would like to be doing.
“When someone comes here…I ask ‘what are you good at? What did you do back home?’” he says.
Thon tells a story of a man who was trained as a social worker, but initially settled for work in the farms.
“When he came he got lost, [and] didn’t realise what he had [to offer]. So he threw it away to do milking.”
With assistance from local support agencies, the man now works at the Family Relationship Centre as a liaison officer for new arrivals.
Thon is adamant that Shepparton offers enough job opportunities for new arrivals, particularly those from sub-Saharan Africa. In his mind, the challenge lies in helping people to seek out those opportunities and present themselves as a strong candidate.
“A lot of people in Melbourne sit in Centrelink,” he says.
“They get lost in the city, because they don’t know where to go. But when they get out, they open their minds.”
In addition to his work assisting recent arrivals, Thon runs a grocery shop specialising in African and Asian foods. He says this provides a crucial resource for people who might feel isolated in their new environment.
“If someone comes and says ‘I can’t eat pizza’ for some reason, and they want to eat semolina, we have [it] there,” he says.
For Thon, this is not just a matter of providing familiar food, but helps in connecting members of the community.
“It is very important for people, especially the new arrivals,” he says definitively.
While positive about the overall experience of African migration in the area, Nsubuga-Kyobe is very cautious about calling it a success. In his view, work needs to be continually geared towards making sure the region offers enough employment prospects to sustain further resettlement.
“You need to find a way to [push] things in the right direction,” he says.
Sitting at his desk surrounded by photographs and posters showcasing the town’s diversity, it is clear that Thon is not only content in the place he calls home, but is committed to making sure that others have the same opportunities.
“I see myself staying in Shepparton for a long time,” he says.
“I have to keep doing the settlement work.”
A version of this article appeared in New Matilda on 18/9/2013
https://newmatilda.com/2013/09/18/african-migrants-home-goulburn-valley
The Siren 