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Staying Within

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Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods

Part of the book series: Perspectives on Children and Young People ((PCYP,volume 7))

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Abstract

Hakim, a ten-year-old Iraqi-Australian, or ‘the New Iraqi’ as he called himself, was privy to a range of racist discourse about ‘refugees’ in Riverstone. Fluent in English and Arabic, Hakim lived with his mother and father and two siblings in a three-bedroom rental property in an inner suburb near his public primary school, Inner North. Three years after settling in Australia, his family had relocated to Riverstone in search of a higher standard of living than was available in low-income suburbs of Sydney. However, on moving to Riverstone, Hakim’s family encountered a new wave of prejudice from which they had been largely shielded in the ethnically diverse suburbs of Sydney’s west. Sitting in the lounge room with his parents one Saturday evening, Hakim spoke angrily about kids at school who did not understand what his family had endured prior to, and since arriving in Australia. He was well aware of the vilification faced by ‘refugees’—he saw it on the news, he overheard his parents’ discussions, he knew of his older sister Sanaa’s experiences of overt racism in her local public high school, common for adolescents from refugee backgrounds in Australia (Gifford et al. in Good starts for recently arrived youth with refugee backgrounds: promoting well-being in the first three years of settlement in Melbourne, Australia. La Trobe Refugee Research Centre, Melbourne, and he was privy to the conversations on the topic at school. These were the moments in which children nattered over anecdotes about ‘refugees’ that they picked up in their routine everyday lives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Asylum seekers’, ‘refugees’ and ‘boat people’ have emerged as a major policy issue in Australian politics, and become the target of considerable antagonism in Australian media (Every and Augoustinos 2007; Perrin and Dunn 2007). Asylum seekers are also commonly viewed by sections of the Australian public as undeserving, inauthentic, ‘queue jumpers’, the product of organised crime and/or of ill-intent (Humphrey 2003; Pederson et al. 2005; Perrin and Dunn 2007).

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  1. Deakin University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Rose Butler

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Butler, R. (2019). Staying Within. In: Class, Culture and Belonging in Rural Childhoods. Perspectives on Children and Young People, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1102-4_5

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