The epic voyage that started it all …
Five young men who had arrived in Darwin on a fishing boat one hot April day in 1976 were claiming to be refugees. But Immigration officers had their doubts. Read …
A scar is borne
Woomera’s detention centre is in mothballs, but the pain of its existence will leave a mark on the inmates and the nation. Read …
Lunar voices
Monday night in Preston. Mother and daughter are among more than 30 women to have turned up at a salmon-pink building for a weekly rehearsal. They are among 45 “roaming members” of Melbourne’s three-generation Italian choir La Voce Della Luna. Read …
Refugee plucks Hazaras’ heart strings
Taqi Khan plucks a lute-like, two-stringed instrument that Melbourne’s Hazara community gave him when he settled here after three months in detention on Christmas Island. Read …
Islands in the mainstream
A Holocaust survivor finds a rapt audience for her stories and songs in far north Queensland. Read …
Holocaust memories preserved
HENRYK Kranz’s father taught him to draw by candlelight in a hiding place he had helped a farmer dig into the hillside during the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II. Read …
Unsung heroes of the Holocaust
Blessed with an optimism and steely determination, she would risk her life, concealing 13 Jewish children, some left at the orphanage gates by desperate parents. Few of the parents would survive to see their children again, the oldest of whom was 11, the youngest just 17 months. Read …
Heaven’s Gate
Off the ships and down the gangways they came, wearing colored plastic buttons to indicate destination. Pink for South Australia; blue for private accommodation; purple for Tasmania; green for New South Wales and further north. Wearing white buttons, single female workers were usually sent somewhere other than the main party, often to a Broadmeadows hostel. Read …
The boy whose birthday gift was Australia
The sun was about to rise on May 14, 1949. A man and a boy stood together on the deck of a ship called Mohammedi berthed at Melbourne’s Station Pier. It was the boy’s seventh birthday. Read …
Reliving a sentimental journey
As the ship drew close to Station Pier, families huddled together, and friends of recent weeks were farewelled. Read …
Gangways of nostalgia
Many migrants who poured off ships onto Station Pier felt they had come to the end of the world. Read …
Why the scars of war still run deep
The general is home. Nida Mohammed Kakar has a photograph of himself in military attire on display in the living room. It shares pride of place with a black-and-white portrait of his father, who was police commissioner in the southern Afghan city of Khandahar when Mr Kakar was a boy. Read …
Victims tell how conflict took its toll
He still grieves the death of his sister, Wajeeha, 20 years ago. She was just 17 when Communist Party members opened fire on Kabul high school students demonstrating against the Soviet presence one spring day. Read ...
The Aussie mates who aren’t alert or alarmed
ANGELA was listening to the radio one morning when she heard a talkback host discussing the Howard Government’s 2002 “Be Alert Not Alarmed” fridge magnet campaign. So the bayside woman rang the station and asked the host to explain. Read …
A bridge to nowhere
Thousands of asylum seekers live freely in Australia – on condition they do not work or receive welfare payments. For many, this means poverty. Critics say this is detention without the razor wire. Read …
Sudan in the suburbs
ZACHARIA Dhieu Bul has two clocks on the livingroom wall of his northern suburbs home. One reads 9.27am, the other 4.27pm, this wintry afternoon. Read …
Haven, hope and harmony
After fleeing their troubled homeland, Sudanese students find sanctuary in one of Australia’s most culturally diverse schools in suburban Melbourne. Read …
Field of dreams
REMZI Dermele scoops the ball up with his right foot and lets it spin back on to his instep. “This is how I could make my dreams come true,” says the 15-year-old Eritrean refugee. Read …
Larry Schwartz Writer 