” I went on to this walk to raise awareness of our treatment of asylum seekers and refugees and on the walk I met asylum seekers, refugees and I met workers who had worked in the detention centres. Everyone had post traumatic stress disorders. The walk was from Villawood to Canberra to collect letters to give to the authorities, politicians etc.
It was a very traumatic experience for me because I couldn’t believe the cruelty we are inflicting on people and at the end of the walk I said to the lady who organised it…’well what can we do now?’ And she said ‘tell people!’ So I started be telling people and unfortunately nobody ran with it. People were interested but didn’t want to take it on so I had a fundraiser at Lennox Head in November last year and from that I gathered contact details and in February this year we formed a group ‘Ballina Region for Refugees’ so now there is about 40 of us on the mailing list and we meet once a month. We have one group that organises housing / respite for people because what happens is when they are going through the process they can’t work and it can be very isolating, it’s really awful so people have offered to have them in their home for a few days, a week or so and we are ultimately trying to work on settling some people in our region to give them a little quality of life while they are going through this process. It’s also good for people in our region to know these people. They are often highly educated, loving families and basically escaping the bullets we are firing.
The government has just cut back on all legal aid so we do fundraising. There are so many wonderful lawyers out the who are working pro bono. Awareness raising is also another thing we do so on World Refugee day which was the same day as the Lantern Parade we had an art exhibition with works done by refugees and asylum seekers so that was really powerful and we had a film about the journey on the boat and it’s been really effective. Just in this last year Byron, Ballina and Tweed have become refugee welcome zones and Lismore has been that way since 2003. There’s also another group ‘Mullumbimby loves Refugees’ there’s the ‘Uki Refugee Project’ and Federal also has a group so there’s quite a few now.”
WITH OPEN ARMS, Ballina Region for Refugees