The Best Australian Essays 2015 Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinking, Omar. That’s not for you. Just tell us what’s happening.’
    You supply the raw data; they process it, analyse and interpret it, work it up into policies and papers.
    â€˜I also work with police on many issues. What they do is ask me to provide information about what’s happening, never the recommendations. They say, tell us exactly who is doing what … I want to give a bigger picture, about how we might work to stop certain things happening. They don’t want a bigger picture. There is no space for that from someone like me.’
    When you are not allowed to sit and eat at the policy table, and when you have no control over how the information you provide will be used, it is like you are spying on your community. They want Omar to be ‘the eyes and ears’, he says. Just not the brain.
    *
    When Omar Farah came to Melbourne from Somalia in 1988 people would say, ‘Oh, Samoa?’ And he’d correct them, patiently. ‘No, no, Somalia.’ African migrants, by and large, only started arriving in Australia in the mid-1980s. Now enough people see the kids of African parents, at kindergartens, schools or universities, for Omar to hope this matter-of-fact daily exposure, this easy familiarity, might change things for the second generation. He worries about the second generation. They were born and educated here. They speak English and tend to have no deep relationship with their parents’ culture. Still they are being shown that this is not their place – in the way they are always treated as new arrivals, even if they have been inhaling this country’s air since day one, even if this air is all the air that they know; in the way their parents cannot find meaningful, skilled work and a dignified way of being in Australia.
    It is not just the parents and the sons and the daughters who are damaged. Of the mistreatment of DP doctors in post-WWII Australia, Kunz writes: ‘The degrading of doctors was … not a matter affecting the doctors only, but was felt as a personal loss and an affront by a large proportion of the 170,000 refugees.’
    Omar used to run the Horn-Afrik Men’s Employment, Training and Advocacy project at the Carlton Neighbourhood Learning Centre. The job got decommissioned in 2014, and he is relieved. It felt meaningless by the end. He wasn’t able to achieve much at all and the moment had come when being paid to do this job began to feel ‘denigrating’. He is a long-standing adviser to the Victorian Government and police. He says by now he’s had a meeting with everyone in Melbourne, including Labor leader Bill Shorten. Shorten was talking about refugees. And Omar said to Shorten: ‘When will I graduate from being a refugee? Over a quarter of a century in this country and I am still being referred to as a refugee.’
    He has five children, all born in Australia, all now at universities. That is how long he has been here. ‘The Australians who were born when I arrived here are now becoming managers, while I am still doing exactly what I was doing then.’ That’s how long. In 2013 Omar was awarded the medal of the Order of Australia. Protocol demands that he writes OAM next to his name. He tries not to. Because when he does, people say to him, ‘Are you sure?’
    A long time ago Omar used to drive a taxi. The damn taxis … One day he picked up an older lady, well groomed, from the airport. She grilled him about how on earth he was allowed to drive a taxi. How long had he been in Melbourne? How well did he know the city? ‘In her eyes, I was this guy who came from the jungle. In my own case, I could not tell my family back home that, actually, I was driving a taxi. They’d have said, ‘Are you really a taxi driver ?’
    Omar stopped driving taxis when his son told him he wanted to be a taxi driver too when he grew up.
    To be clear, the people I speak to in this essay are not