Refugee Week: celebrating the year of Welcome June 14-20, 2020

Pyrawy Sivarajah

We celebrate people’s journey, resilience, and adaption to a new home.
As a health service we also understand how difficult it can be for newly arrived refugees to navigate our health system and access specialised and culturally sensitive services in areas such as sexual and reproductive health. This is why we are here.

“I was born in 1989 in Jaffna (part of the Northern Province), Sri Lanka amidst a civil war. This war started 6 years prior to my birth and continued 20 years after. I am of Tamil descent as were my parents, grandparents and those before them, however this ethnicity was what the problem was.

As a child, I remember carelessly playing with my little brother under the large neem tree in our front yard, riding with my father on his motorbike to the market and sitting on my grandma’s lap in the middle of our rice paddy watching the sunset. Whilst, I cherish these memories, it is hard to separate them from the experiences we faced as the war worsened. The innumerable hours spent hiding in small bunkers, running for safety, being held by my mother during air strikes, losing our animals, farm, home and finally losing the life my parents and grandparents had built over the years. Our identity stripped away turning our family into nomads.

My father moved to Australia in search of our new adoptive home and in 1998 the rest of my family followed to start a new life. Although I found the Australian culture to be quite embracing of ours, I did encounter my fair share of racism. This was especially apparent, during my primary school years, where I was unable to speak english fluently to defend myself and still considered ESL (English as a Second Language). That being said I was still able to discern the racist comments expressed to my loved ones and I by those who were ill-informed. As a young adult I still encountered the odd statement “asylum seekers & refugees are queue jumpers” which was closely followed by “they should go back to where they came from”. It was these such comments which made me hide my story and why I was ashamed and embarrassed to admit I too was an asylum seeker.

All said and done, I still consider myself being blessed to have grown up here and am a proud Australian, but I now proudly tell people my story, of the struggles we faced to get here and how it was, adapting to growing up in a society that was completely different to mine. There are people amongst us who are informed and open minded can empathise with stories similar to mine but there is still a long way to go. My advice to anyone who has a similar story would be, to be proud of your cultural heritage and share it with your neighbours, it will enrich and enhance your communities. I am so grateful to this land and it’s people for allowing me a safe place and a safe future for not just my generation but generations to come.”