By Steve RE Pereira
For those of us who are East African Asians and of a certain generation, Hafsa Zayyan’s novel We Are All Birds of Uganda is far too disturbingly familiar. Published by #Merky Books, a British imprint founded in a collaboration by the British rapper Stormzy with Penguin Random House UK to publish stories ‘far too often underrepresented’, the novel is a timely reminder of a watershed moment in the history of the South Asian diaspora.
WHAT’S GOING ON?
On Saturday May 1, 2021, the Australian government headed by Scott Morrison announced a temporary travel ban that applies to any travellers who have visited India within 14 days of their intended arrival date in Australia. Breaches of the travel ban could lead to up to five years’ imprisonment. This travel ban is a consequence of changes to the Biosecurity Act which means that Australians could face up to five years in jail and heavy fines if they leave India return home. As the ABC reported, “It is understood to be the first time Australia has banned its own citizens from returning, to the point of there being criminal sanctions for those who make it home.”
WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?
As Indu Balachandran and a team of concerned citizens note, ” Infection rates in the USA and UK peaked in January 2021 at 89 and 76 cases per 100,000. India’s rates today are 27 cases per 100,000. Yet there is a ban on citizens travelling from India today. No other Aussies have faced this indignity. India’s health and administrative systems are buckling under the care of Indian citizens. Yet one of the richest countries in the world says, “look after ours as well, thanks”. “
Sadly, one Australian man has alreday died in India after contracting COVID-19. Read more here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-08/australian-resident-dies-in-india-covid-19-crisis/100125780
As Sukhmani Khorana writes in The Conversation, “The real question is why those flying from India are being singled out. Such drastic steps were not in place when the US, the UK and Europe were going through similarly deadly and infectious COVID outbreaks in the past year. One possible explanation is the Indian community in Australia is simply an easy target, especially when India is in an unprecedented crisis. Indian officials and media are likely to be preoccupied with more pressing domestic matters and may not complain about the treatment of Indian-Australians the way they did during the student attacks a decade ago.”
As Mohan Dhall writes in Indian Link, “It seems to me it is hard to defend the accusation that it looks racist. When assessing justice, there is a notion called ‘apprehended bias.’ This means bias that is perceived. Apprehended bias is widely felt – not only by Indian Australians but by the Australian Human Rights Commission, high profile commentators and numerous others.”
As Sandeep Varma and the SAARI Editorial Team write, “The Australian government’s travel ban preventing Australian citizens and permanent residents in India from returning to Australia is fear-based and explicitly discriminatory. The ban, created as an emergency determination under the Biosecurity Act 2015, is an abrogation of the responsibilities this nation owes its citizens and residents under law, and is shoddy political action to score points with emotionally-charged supporters.”
THIS COULD BE ME: HOW THIS AFFECTS OVER 600,000 AUSTRALIANS OF INDIA ORIGIN
There are over 9000 Australians stranded in India, many of who left Australia to go back to India to care for loved ones dealing with COVID-19. As Melissa Cunningham reports in The Age, “Many of the people trapped are children who are stuck in India without their parents after travelling to the country with their grandparents.” Her article documents the heartbreaking stories of many Australians stranded in India.
“Bhaumik Dholakiya wept, cradling his 11-month-old son in his arms, as his father succumbed to coronavirus in a crowded hospital ward in India last week. The Melbourne man’s entire family, including himself, his wife, Laxita, and their baby boy, Reyansh, have been infected with COVID-19 during India’s deadly second wave, as hospitals run out of beds and oxygen and people die in lines waiting to see doctors…“We have been so scared for our lives,” says Dholakiya, an Australian citizen of more than 15 years. “We feel like we have been left here to die.”
Read more of Bhaumik Dholakia’s story and the stories of many others stranded in India here, as reported by Melissa Cunningham
As George Megalogenis writes in The Age, “Race cards might have worked in 1996, when migrants were in the minority and the English-born in Australia still outnumbered the total number of migrants from all Asian countries. But not now. Australia is a majority migrant nation, with almost 51 per cent of the population either born overseas (29.8 per cent on the latest figures for 2020) or with at least one parent born overseas (20.9 per cent)…Migrants born in India were already the largest community in Melbourne ahead of the Chinese, and ranked second behind the Chinese in Sydney.”
BRING AUSTRALIANS IN INDIA HOME NOW
Register your protest by signing this petition: https://me.getup.org.au/petitions/bring-australians-in-india-home-now?source=facebook-share-button&time=1620043171&utm_source=facebook&share=3416b704-b6d2-4fba-9b6b-cfbc2543456d&fbclid=IwAR1oYKjs-fp0thEneZR3u_J1LhHDSGWnw0Y6fOrk1QB53IQ7Ke_DL6sYZvQ
Do you have a loved one in India? Are you are appalled by the Morrison government’s racist travel ban? Share your story here: https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6331058/India-travel-ban-Share-your-story
SYDNEY VIGIL FOR INDIA ON MAY 13 AT SYDNEY TOWN HALL
More here: https://fb.me/e/iEMKK6cW8
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WANT TO KNOW MORE?
A review of Andrew Kwong’s One Bright Moon
By Devika Brendon
Andrew Kwong’s voice in One Bright Moon, is both rational and compassionate, and the fusion of the two enables and generates restorative harmony. Reading this memoir is a healing experience. I’m sure that writing it must have been cathartic for the writer, but rarely have I read a life story that has given me not only admiration for the author but hope for myself, as a fellow human being, as his reader.
Dear Mr. Tayyeb Shah,
I came to Australia as an international student from Mumbai, India in 1998. One reason that attracted me to Australian institutions of higher education was their commitment to creativity, to intellectual rigour and to encouraging a plurality of ideas.
I wrote a book of short stories called The Permanent Resident, mainly to chronicle the lives of Indians in Australia, including the lives of international students. This book is published by UWAP. It has since won a NSW Premier’s Literary Award 2018 (Multicultural), been very well-reviewed in Australia and India, is on the syllabi of a number of universities and on several “must-read” booklists. This would not have happened without UWAP, particularly Terri-ann White, championing my book.
By Roanna Gonsalves
Here in Sydney, it’s the time of the spring equinox. The city submits to the Southern Hemisphere’s annual movement towards heat, fire, flowers. A large audience has gathered in the courtyard at Old Government House to experience Bhoomi: Woman and Earth. It is the third in a series of annual recitals produced and directed by Arjunan Puveendran and Indu Balachandran as part of the Sydney Sacred Music Festival.
By Rashida Murphy
“All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.”
T.S. Eliot
Salman Rushdie’s 2017 novel, The Golden House, has an Australian hypnotist in a transnational cast of characters ranging from Mumbai ex-cons to Belgian filmmakers in New York. It is a typical Rushdie novel, full of verbal pyrotechnics and not-so-obscure political references, but it is the Australian character I puzzle over. Nothing wrong at all in placing an Australian in the heart of Manhattan. But one that speaks with a Kiwi accent?Rushdie’s hypnotherapist speaks in a grimly unfunny and terribly clipped way that mocks the Kiwi accent, not the Australian one. Especially when you consider that Rushdie was in a brief relationship with Australian writer Robyn Davidson in the 1980s, you wonder if the gaff is deliberate or an oversight. And whether, in a convoluted way, Rushdie is attempting to reverse centuries of negative portrayals of brown people in white fiction.
In March 2019, Sydney-based Nautanki Theatre Company invited the world-renowned theatre artist, Danish Husain, to perform live at Riverside Theatre, and to conduct an interactive masterclass at Macquarie University, Sydney. Roanna Gonsalves interviewed Danish Husain, via email, about his chosen artform and his practice as a performer within the broader context of global performance practice.
By Maria Elena Indelicato
Australia has been at the forefront of international education. It is at her shores that internationalisation as a fully-fledged policy was first introduced in the global reality of higher education in 1992. Significantly, the then Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Kim Beazley, launched the policy to counter the overseas criticism that Australia’s approach to international education ‘was too narrowly commercial.’ The birth of internationalisation is in fact tied to the commercialisation of higher education in the late 1980s, when Australian universities and colleges were allowed to provide full-cost courses designed for international students. Since then, academic and grey policy-oriented studies which try to determine international students’ market choices and needs have proliferated, leaving very little room to discuss issues surrounding the presence of international students in Australia otherwise. Discourses of economic necessity have thus overdetermined the ways in which we think of, talk about and, ultimately, relate to international students at academic and policy levels.
By Roanna Gonsalves
[This text was presented upon invitation, as a speech at ‘Voice, Agency, and Integrity – Diversity and Inclusion in the Arts’, the launch of the Beyond Tick Boxes report by Diversity Arts Australia, Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, on Friday, Oct 5, 2018.]
Good afternoon everyone. I was going to title this talk “What polyamory can teach us about the Australian arts landscape”, but, I thought, ‘it’s not the right moment yet’.
By Rashida Murphy
These days I write the word ‘writer’ on forms that ask me what I do. I know I’ve earned it. I am that person – a published novelist. Publication has changed the way I view my profession. The secret is out. I can own it. Even when I’m questioned and occasionally challenged. ‘What do you write?’ is the inevitable question and these days I have an answer. Sometimes that answer – fiction, is followed by another question – what sort? This leads to conversations, which in most part are educational, entertaining or informative. I may hear the idea of a story I really ought to write or I may be asked to read 500 pages of this story they wrote when their dad was a lad during the war. Of course, everyone knows someone who writes and surely, as a writer I must know them too. Occasionally the conversation turns to my ability to speak English so well, the colour of my skin and my good fortune that Australia allows me to do whatever I want to. Because in Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Fiji or wherever I come from, opportunities for women are so limited, you know, because they don’t even let women drive there.