| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| EARLY afternoon in classroom B8. Tiny fish flit about a small aquarium. A blue-tongued lizard among lifeless specimens preserved in jars. “You get a release?” asks the teacher. “Of insulin,” says one of 17 students in this afternoon’s year12 biology class. “Diana, can you read that please?” says the teacher. “Michael, have you done question three?” “You all right, Scott?” Nives Zubcevic takes notes diligently. Once she sat in class in Trebinje, in her native Bosnia-Herzegovina. Then came a war. “The bombing was probably the main thing,” she says. “When you’re seven years old, you don’t expect that to happen in your own secure world.” Nives’ parents come from Dubrovnik, in Croatia. Among her closest friends, classmate Jenita Spirtovic is from Bosnia and Adriana Kostic from Serbia. “You don’t look at the person for their background,” Nives says. “You look at them as a person. We probably sometimes discuss the issues because being in a war is not exactly what everyone experiences or everyone would like to experience. (But) it’s not a very big topic between us. We just talk about the normal teenage things.” Noble Park Secondary College is among Australia’s most ethnically diverse schools. Almost half the 708 students were born overseas. Just three in 10 have an English-speaking background. At home, many will slip into one of more than 50 languages and dialects. They have come with their families from around the globe: Afghanistan, Croatia, East Timor, Cambodia, Thailand, Turkey, India, Chile, Ethiopia, Hong Kong, Western Samoa and more. Yet proudly displayed on a corridor wall is the Australian citizenship pledge. Nives Zubcevic reads and writes poetry – Keats’ Ode To A Nightingale is her favorite – but she hopes to study medicine or law. Her family spent two years in a Danish town, Grena, before settling here in 1994. When Nives came here, she could speak several languages from the former Yugoslavia as well as Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. But she knew just one word in English. “I think from cartoons the only word I knew was `dog’,” says the 17-year-old, who learnt the language in a month of watching TV and reading newspapers. “It’s very weird.” CREATED from the merger in 1994 of Noble Park Heights Secondary College and Noble Secondary College, the school is accessible through a side street, secluded from the hubbub of south-eastern suburbia by sporting fields and gums. Some of the factories that lured the rich mix of migrants have closed in recent years. Yet there is a buoyancy here, a sense that there are no limits in Australia. “Really in this country you can do whatever you like,” says Jenita Spirtovic, 16, a Muslim born in Sarajevo whose family lived in Berlin for three years before coming here in 1995. “No matter if you live in Noble Park or Toorak, you can do it. That’s the kind of society it is.” A classmate, Francisca Molnar, 17, was four when her family arrived here from turmoil in Romania. “Whatever was back in our countries was back in our countries,” says Francisca, who joined the Army Reserve last year. “We’re in Australia now. We’re friends. We don’t look for where we come from.” A visitor may wonder at this harmony in diversity, but it seems natural to Richard Colville, 18, of Anglo-Australian descent, who stacks shelves at a supermarket before school, sells second-hand mobile phones afterwards, has his own band and plans to be a sound technician. “Being Australian,” he says, “I’ve always felt safe here and when other people come I feel no resentment. I welcome them because it’s … giving Australia more diversity.” You wonder, too, about the changing nature of Australia’s identity. “The rate of change is still too fast to freeze in an identity,” says Bill Reid, 17, who isn’t sure when his British forebears came to Australia. “The rate of change has to slow down to get a real identity.” The friendship between Nives Zubcevic, Jenita Spirtovic and Adriana Kostic has impressed their English teacher, Peter D’Angelo. To him, the bond epitomises how national tensions can be transcended. “You’d think there’d be racism but there isn’t,” he says of the school. D’Angelo taught some of the students here when they were newly arrived refugees, at nearby Noble Park English Language School, one of four Melbourne schools for migrants and refugees. He is now integration coordinator and one of nine teachers of English as a second language at Noble Park Secondary. He is also a poet and author who has written extensively on the migrant experience. Now 47, he was four-and-a-half when his family emigrated from Italy’s Abruzzi region. His maternal grandfather had a gift for him as he prepared to embark on a converted cargo vessel, the Oceania, with his mother and two sisters for a 31-day trip to a faraway land where he would meet his father, who had gone on ahead before he was born. “My grandfather gave me a pair of sunglasses – and I know this sounds corny but it did happen – and he said: `Put these on when you reach Australia and you’ll see a beautiful place.” His grandfather had told him, too, to use the sunglasses to look out for dolphins. Once he did. But the glasses were broken by a boy on board. There was a borrowed grey car to collect them from Station Pier. The house his father had set out to build was not complete. The family slept on a concrete floor. In the title poem of his collection Folk Songs, he writes of migrants hurried down gangways to shouts of “bloody refos!”, hard times on production lines. And domestic discord with a widening gap between generations. We sent our children to schoolBut they came home with more than English;Strange tonguesCrept into kitchens,Began questioning customs,then dividing our lives … It’s an experience familiar to Yoko Nagashima, 17. “I think there is a gap because my parents are from Japan and they still have that Japanese culture,” she says. “They don’t get as much exposed to Australia as I do because I go to school. I meet all these people and they’re from different cultures. I think everyone gets more exposed to Australia than their parents do.” D’Angelo has watched some students progress from their first months in Australia. Lino Lim, 18, was 12 when he arrived from East Timor. D’Angelo says Lino has grown in confidence but the bright smile was there from the start. Lino plans to learn carpentry before returning to Dili to help rebuild his country. “I would rather go back,” he says. “I’ve got more relatives there. When I go back I can find job easier because the war isn’t happening.” Nives Zubcevic has already been back to her birthplace. “At the beginning I didn’t feel like going much,” she says. “I wanted to see my family and all, but I didn’t think I’d want to go back to that place because obviously the memories were a bit mixed. So I was overwhelmed when I went over there. I absolutely loved it. “But even though it was a great experience, it was very hard for me. I think I still call Australia home, as cliched as that sounds. I was happy to come back here.” We meet again in a conference room. Of four students attending a Student Representative Council meeting, one was born in Australia. The others came from Romania, Afghanistan and New Zealand. “I knew how to spell my name, that’s all,” says quietly spoken Farooq Mohammad, 14, recalling when his family fled Kabul four years ago. “We just wanted to stay there but we couldn’t because there was killing and everything. We had to leave our house behind us … We just wanted peace.” His mother worries that her three sons might marry out of the Muslim faith. “Most parents want their kids to be in the religion,” he says, “and they want them to be strict. But they just can’t because they drift away with others at school and everything.” Farooq has a passion for Australian rules football. Last season he won a best and fairest vote in the Dandenong district league. His family lived in Sydney before coming to Melbourne, so he barracks for the Swans. He first played in the under-11s for a local club and still cringes at an early mistake. “I remember I handballed through the goals. I thought there was going to be a goal. I remember that. I grabbed the ball and the goals were in front of me. I thought, `Easy goal.’ I just handballed it through. It was quite embarrassing…” Demons skipper David Neitz, Kangaroo Glenn Archer and Collingwood’s late Darren Millane came from the same club. Farooq dreams of one day playing for the Swans. “My mum wants me to quit. She goes, `You’re going to hurt yourself.’ I have to go in my bedroom and watch telly when the footy is on. The whole family just hates it totally. Probably one day I’ll hopefully get into AFL and my mum can see me on the telly or something. Then she’ll realise that I did it.” PETER D’Angelo knows the trauma some have endured. “Any sudden noises from a car exhaust, they’d flinch,” he says. D’Angelo was inexperienced and the language school poorly equipped when he faced the disconcerting silence of Vietnamese and Cambodian children in the early 1980s. It took a while before he heard stories of rape by Thai pirates and other horrors. A Cambodian wrote a poem that perplexed him. She explained that it described how her father’s face had been hacked away to reveal the white skull beneath. The Romanians came with their stories of brutalities. Latin Americans too. “The talk of what happened in El Salvador is also frightening,” he says. The Afghanis, fleeing Soviet invasion. Bosnians in the early 1990s. Again and again he told himself, “It just can’t get any worse than this.” Teaching was so much more than a job. “I realised that I had to give them the best I could because it wasn’t a job any more. It was a … true vocation.” But his approach demanded so much that he came to withdraw and, for a while, tried not to give so much of himself. A 16-year-old Bosnian girl he taught had a spirited good nature and ready smile despite kidney and liver disease, loss of sight in one eye and post-trauma epileptic fits. Her father had been beaten and taken away. She and her mother were raped by soldiers. One day, she showed him some lines she had written: I am the essence of my people And the spirit of my past, In this new land I will take as always The good and the bad… Her example inspired him. “I was teaching kids to write poetry in a very detached way,” he says. “It clicked that I was doing it without the real feeling there. I think she clicked too. She wrote a poem and thanked me for teaching her English so she could write about her feelings. “Here I was, doing it by rote. I was cheating my students. I was becoming like a zombie. She made me come back. That’s when I decided to extend it. I wanted to see these kids in another context, which was this school here.” D’Angelo initiated our visit to the school and organised a discussion between more than 20 students. Such was the diversity, it seemed this might be emblematic of a future Australia. He believes Australia is more confident and tolerant than when he came here as a child. “I feel it’s at a stage where it needs to take a final step and we can be anything we want to be. I think these kids have got it in their power to do that.” The Age, 04-Sep-2000 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 