Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories

By Sonja Dechian Heather Millar And Eva Sallis, Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2004, 216 pages, paperback, $19.95. Reviewed by Chelsea Rodd in the June 2004 issue.

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'There are many organic truths outside facts and these stories are works of fiction, imagination and history all in one'. Eva Sallis (p 4)

Voices are important, but it is imperative to listen to the silence. It is crucial to question whose voices are heard in the elucidation of history, in illuminating our social condition. If history is the stories of people's lives it is the sum, the collection, of individual experiences, thoughts and feelings that informs us of our past, instructs us on our present, and guides us into our future. History is, as Eva Sallis suggests in the introduction to Dark Dreams, a melding of fictions, truths and imagination creating something vital, cellular and unique.

Dark Dreams contains the stories of refugees now living in Australia, as told to young Australians aged 11-20 years. The stories deliver important, rare perspectives and personal insights allowing oft-silenced voices to speak from their hearts.

Each story contained in the anthology provides an insight into what it is like to uproot yourself and your family, desert your home, and leave everything familiar behind in the hope of creating a new life. These stories of upheaval, dislocation, loss, desperation, hope, and renewal are told by eloquent young voices who have listened to refugees tell them their stories. A further layer of impact and potency is added through this story-telling device, because the interpretations are imbued with the emotion evoked by confrontations with human endurance and resilience. The refugees have journeyed through a wide range of countries and cultures. They speak a plethora of languages, follow a wide range of religious beliefs, and adhere to myriad ideologies, political belief systems, and values formed indelibly by their experiences.

In 1976 the first asylum seekers arrived in small fishing boats on the northern shores of Australia. The arrival of the first small, rickety vessel with its human cargo was met with shock and disbelief by Australians. That people chose to risk their lives by embarking upon a dangerous, watery journey, a glimmer of hope for a new life buoying them along, was unfathomably courageous. For most Australians at that time, the precarious journey, the uncertainty of reaching a destination in safety, and the need to leave behind families, friends, and belongings was a stunning indictment on the lives these people had fled. There was tacit acceptance of the traumas they had endured and the dangers they had escaped. They were accepted as refugees straightaway, and silently, swiftly ushered into Australian society.

Refugees seeking asylum in Australia today are isolated, faceless, marginalised and disempowered. Dark Dreams offers precious insights into the varied experiences of refugees. Each story is unique, deeply personal, and powerfully seductive. The storytellers write themselves into the tales they tell, positioning their life-experiences, thoughts, and feelings in relation to those of their refugee subjects. The cultural exchange involved in this storytelling process creates a nexus of knowledge formed of experience and compassion. The most powerful and effective form history can assume is the personal, where it illuminates the individual as well as his or her social context. In Dark Dreams the individual stories converge with the wider cultural experience, illuminating some of the political structures, cultural meanings, and ethical dimensions of Australian society.

Hai-Van Nguyen writes that the potency of stories 'in capturing the triumphs and sorrows of each individual's experience, will serve a wider purpose of giving a collective voice to all humanity' (p 199). This moving and informative text should have wide appeal. Written by young people, the stories will engage school children and young adults. As an educational text, it provides an accessible launching pad for discussion about many pertinent and engaging issues. I found the book difficult to put down, the impact of each tale more powerful than the last. The eloquence and force of the stories is incredible given that some are written by people as young as eleven.

Citation

• Chelsea Rodd. 'Review: Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories by Sonja Dechian Heather Millar and Eva Sallis' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 22 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Dark Dreams is an anthology of essays, interviews and short stories written by children and young adults aged 11-20 years. These young writers relate or imaginatively recreate the story of someone who came to Australia as a refugee.
  
  This is a unique book in Austraila. The stories are the finest of hundreds collected through an unprecedented nationwide schools competition, devised by writer Eva Sallis and run by Australians Against Racism Inc.
  
  The essays and stories represent many different countries. Some focus on survival, come on horrors, some on the experiences and alienation of a new world. Some are stories of refugees still living in detention centres in Australia.
  
  These stories are shocking, moving, and at times funny. Some are written with the quirky humour of children, others show the frank compassion and honest surprise of young Australians as they encounter experiences more terrible than their own. Some are gut-churning stories from young children just starting to rebuild lives here.
  
  Across the collection, there emerges the recurrent theme of friendship: friendships lost, broken, remembered and found, now in Australia.
  
  'These stories sear us with their authenticity and their humanity. From holocaust survivors, Vietnamese boat people on to contemporary refugees fleeing oppression in Afghanistan or Iraq, Sri Lanka or Africa, these are accounts we must heed, and learn from'. Tom Shapcott
  
  'We have not been allowed to know the (recent) refugees as human beings - as men, women and children, as mothers and husbands, sons and daughters. These stories change all that and force a personal response from the reader'. Phillip Adams
  
  'The real treasures are the stories told by young refugees themselves, and by the children of people who fled to Australia a generation ago. Some of the more recent arrivals here have struggled with a language not their own, and have produced stories we will never be able to forget'. Helen Garner

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