The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson Read Free Book Online

then build his own party – ‘Voice for the West’ – in time for last year’s state election, is an almighty shock. He came to Australia as a refugee via Sudan and Egypt in the late 1980s. He is thick-accented. You’d call him ‘an African community leader’, right, only despite decades spent working with communities from Africa he is not interested in being called that. He is determined to be part of this country’s political process, to contribute to Australia’s social and political life. He tried Labor. Tried Greens (‘too busy moralising and scolding instead of working on the fundamentals’) and being an independent. Now his own party is his passion. He is unperturbed by results: ‘Election is not about winning but about sharpening the mind.’
    I listen to an ABC radio interview. Berhan is explaining how his new party is seeking to redress the woeful neglect of the western suburbs (fastest growing, highest unemployment, longest hospital queues, no infrastructure or good schools) of Melbourne. The journalist smells the familiar odour of a refugee banging on about not having enough resources for this or that. ‘So,’ she says, ‘it’s all about money.’ Berhan is completely taken aback. ‘No,’ he says. He tries to explain further: as someone who came here with nothing, he says, he believes in education, in opportunities, in creative ideas, in giving people ways of participating. The journalist pushes along, impatient, audibly uninterested. I cringe.
    â€˜As an intellectual,’ Berhan tells me, ‘you have got a moral responsibility to your profession. But sometimes you have to deal with a force of morality to be an intellectual far beyond your territory.’ It’s not a choice. You have to do it.
    If I can, just for a moment, play amateur psychoanalyst to our fine nation: could I suggest that some of the problems herein aired might come from our need to see migrants as children? To accept them as adults is to accept them talking back. It is to accept them mirroring us back to ourselves. Migrants who cannot be babied – e.g. intellectuals – often elicit the harshest or the most bewildered response. Anyway, write me letters and tell me what you think.
    I find a column in Brisbane’s Sunday Mail circa 1954 – ‘Professor Murdoch Answers’. Professor Murdoch is Walter Murdoch, great uncle of Rupert, whose widely read and syndicated weekly column ran for nearly twenty years. That week Professor Murdoch was answering a letter from a migrant with a Swiss university degree who wanted to be employed in his profession, rather than as a lavatory cleaner, street sweeper or car painter, which had been the man’s job trajectory in Australia up to that point. ‘What you should have been told,’ writes Murdoch, ‘was that the chief opportunity proffered by this country to its migrants is an opportunity for patience.’ And then, he continues, ‘You may reply that years is long enough to exhaust the patience of Job.’
    Ouyang Yu tells me he is turning sixty in a month. In Chinese terms, he says, it is a cycle. After sixty years you are born anew. ‘I will declare that I haven’t written a single book and will start again,’ he says.
    This breaks my heart. All of it.
    My beloved first-generation friends from Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bosnia, Italy, Ukraine, Poland, with brains as big as the world itself, struggling, forever struggling, to find a place for themselves, saying yes to the worst jobs at the smallest universities and colleges, retraining, giving up, making yourself tiny and inoffensive, sliding into obscurity, hopeful – hopeful still? – that one day, in this country, you could be at least 10 per cent of who you are. Don’t you give up, please.
    As to you, Dad, I know it’s too late. You are a pensioner, that’s how you describe yourself, not a scientist