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Dandenong, in suburban Melbourne, is classified as one of the most ‘disadvantaged’ urban areas in Australia. Its residents have, on average, some of Australia’s lowest incomes and cheapest rents. It is home to the country’s largest concentration of non-English-speaking background migrants, including 700 Hazara refugees from Afghanistan.
ANU anthropologist Dr Diana Glazebrook has been researching the post-detention lives of Hazaras.
She is particularly interested in their experiences of resettlement — while no refugees could be described as finding resettlement easy, Dr Glazebrook has found that the Hazaras appear to be fairly resilient given the restrictions of their visas — thanks to the mobile phone.
The Hazaras, a Shia Muslim minority in Afghanistan, have endured persecution for centuries from various regimes. Since the late 1970s, following Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule, more than a million have joined other Afghan refugees in neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
Resettlement
Dr Glazebrook spent three months in Dandenong interviewing Hazara refugees to find out how they had managed the process of resettlement after detention.
She says there are about 2,500 Hazara refugees in Australia and just three years after most were released from detention, Hazaras have almost full employment in manufacturing, meat processing and agricultural sectors. Most live in relatively stable shared households with other Hazara. Many are enrolled in TAFE courses. But it hasn’t always been like this. Recent research on the experiences of temporary protection reveals that Hazara, like other Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) holders, were profoundly disoriented — and disheartened by the prospect of indefinite separation from their family — when they were released from detention.
"Every interview would be interrupted by mobile phone calls. At first I thought, ‘why can’t they turn them off?’"
Dr Glazebrook
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“I was interested in how they had managed their resettlement experience after detention. How they felt, what had happened to them, how they coped, what strategies they developed, how they kept contact with families they hadn’t seen for four and a half years.
“Every interview would be interrupted by mobile phone calls. At first I thought, ‘why can’t they turn them off?’
“Then I thought, ‘no, Diana, find out more, think about how they are using them and what effect they have’.
“My question was: how had mobile phones come to be integrated into their everyday lives, and what difference did they make?”
She discovered that with minimal resettlement assistance, and without English language skills, the way people used their mobile phones had been critical to their resettlement.
There is a common misconception, according to Dr Glazebrook, that ownership of a mobile phone indicates a level of affluence that is inconsistent with somebody who needs help, somebody struggling to hold on at the margins of society. In fact, she argues that the mobile phone may be an essential tool for refugee resettlement in the West — even more so when refugees are given minimal access to services.
“The way they use the mobile phone is directly related to the conditions of their visa,” she says.
Most Hazaras hold a TPV which offers three years of temporary residency; no right of family reunion in Australia; and no right of re-entry if holders travel outside Australia. TPV holders are eligible for income assistance under the Special Benefit scheme, and are also permitted to work.
Point of contact
Home phones are not necessarily practical in their often crowded shared households and neither is staying at home waiting for a potential employer to call — particularly given that some Hazara applied for dozens of jobs in the first instance.
“A mobile allows people to have a point of contact even if they are homeless. It allows them to get their bearings if they’re physically lost or don’t understand a procedure.”
Fresh out of detention, one of Dr Glazebrook’s subjects became lost in an Adelaide shopping mall and was unable to find his way back to the bus station. With no spoken English he could not ask for directions, so he called a friend in a different state, took the phone into a shop and handed it to the assistant. His friend spoke to the shopkeeper who gave him directions, which he then translated.
With a mobile phone, Hazaras become literally connected to a support network of other Hazaras. They talk prolifically to each other about Australia and Afghanistan in night-time phone conversations, when mobile phone calls are cheap and often free.
A Hazara refugee may recognise Kabul or an Australian detention centre on the news, but will not be able to understand the announcer — but later that evening phone calls disseminate the information through the community.
“There is an amazing gathering and circulation of news,” says Dr Glazebrook.
Connected to another Dari (the Hazaras’ native tongue) speaker, Hazaras are able to exchange information about the necessities of Australian life (banking, tenancy, Medicare, insurance), share news about events in their area and Afghanistan — and even compare mobile phone network deals.
“The free calling facility is critical to sharing information, but if a refugee is completely at a loss, a brief metered phone call can also be meaningful.”
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