Another Country

The Age

Saturday October 21, 2006

Frank Robson

For more than 1000 Sudanese people, the flight from bloody civil war and desolate refugee camps has ended in Toowoomba, Queensland. While some are thriving, others have found that their problems are far from over. Frank Robson meets Australia's new outsiders.

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Trudging across the hotel foyer in his dusty work boots, Charles Sula appears strangely burdened - as though gravity may have singled him out for special treatment.

He plods into my room on the fourth floor and stares out across the sprawling regional city of Toowoomba, its street lamps already glowing against the onset of night.

Much has changed since Sula and his family became the first Sudanese to settle here under Australia's humanitarian refugee program in 1991. "There was no support structure then," he says. "Those things came as a result of our experience ... In a way, we were still refugees, even here. We were the guinea pigs."

There is no bitterness in Sula's tone, only a weariness so pervasive it crushes the inflection from his words. As he describes his family's flight from the horrors of Sudan's civil war, and the years they spent in a refugee camp

in neighbouring Kenya before coming to Australia, my visitor's misery seems to seep through the room like a gas.

There is no avoiding its immediate cause: on November 22 last year, Sula's wife Rita bashed their 21-year-old son, Jerry, senseless with an axe, then used it to kill their daughter, Connie, 15, before dousing the house with petrol and setting it alight. Jerry came to and escaped before the fire took hold; Rita perished in the blaze. Charles Sula, estranged from his wife since 2000 when he moved out of the family home, broke down when told of the tragedy. "Death is meant to be the worst thing that can happen to you," he said a few days later. "But for me the worst thing has already come. I already feel dead."

At first, when members of Toowoomba's now 1000-strong Sudanese community gathered to grieve outside the charred remains of Rita Sula's house, whispers spread that it was the work of racial extremists. But police investigations confirmed it was a murder-suicide, and that Rita had chosen the day of her 42nd birthday to buy an axe and a can of fuel before committing her terrible deed late that night. Hundreds of Sudanese and other locals attended the funeral of Connie, a popular student at Toowoomba's St Saviour's College, and Rita, buried in her wedding dress. For a time, while recovering from his injuries, Jerry lived at his father's flat in Toowoomba, later moving to Brisbane to stay with friends.

Charles Sula is smallish by Sudanese standards, yet the hotel room is so poky we have to sit almost knee to knee - him on the only chair, and me perched on the bed's edge. In some ways, the story he tells in this oddly domestic setting mirrors the ordeals of the other Sudanese who followed him and Rita

to Toowoomba. Yet it's also different: a cautionary tale of what can happen when "rescued" people fall between two cultures.

Sula, 50, grew up in the shadow of the cultural/religious strife that erupted into civil war in 1983, when the Islamist government in Khartoum, in the north of the country, sought to impose sharia law throughout the mainly Christian and animist south. More than 2 million Sudanese have since died, and up to 4 1/2 million have been displaced. Some escaped during raids on their villages by rapacious Islamic militiamen, only to be rounded up later and sold into slavery. Others, luckier, completed marathon treks to refugee camps in bordering nations, often remaining there for years without knowing the fate of families and friends.

Rita's case was unusual. Born in Uganda, she was raised there by an aunt while her father returned to his native Sudan to oppose the Islamists. As a teenager, Rita had to flee from Uganda into Sudan to escape the bloody purges of Idi Amin. Charles Sula met her soon afterwards, and they were married during a period of relative calm. "Two years later," he says, "the war in Sudan got worse, and Rita's father and some of her best friends were killed in the fighting. She could never get over the trauma of seeing the dead bodies of those people she loved."

The educated Christian couple spent almost seven years in a refugee camp in Kenya before being accepted for settlement in Australia. They arrived with Jerry and Connie (then aged six and one) and went straight to Toowoomba under a new federal government plan to locate refugees in regional as well as urban areas.

"We both believed our struggles were over then," Sula mutters, staring at his boots. "But there was more."

The Sudanese and other ethnic groups are a familiar sight on the Darling Downs these days, and racial incidents - typically schoolyard fights or shouted abuse - are less common. But when the Sulas forged the way they were the first obvious "outsiders" in the region since an influx of dour German immigrants dug in across the Downs in the late 1800s.

"We ran into some good people, some pretenders and some outright nasties," says Sula. "My son came home from school in tears every day for months, from being harassed and called names because he was different. And if we walked by the road, youths in cars would shout a very nasty noise, like: 'Go home, black man!' - only worse, with ugly words. It made you frightened to hear them. My wife wouldn't go anywhere on her own, and we couldn't leave our windows open because of the nasties ... We thought somebody who didn't like us might creep in."

There were other obstacles. Sula's degree in agricultural science wasn't recognised

in Australia, so the couple worked long hours at casual jobs while he undertook a four-year science degree at the University of Queensland's Gatton campus, near Toowoomba. Somehow, they also found time to set up a support group for the Sudanese and other refugees who followed them to the area. At first, Rita delighted in the role. Sula says she was a natural leader who yearned to "belong" and play some part in her people's affairs.

But the new arrivals were mostly from southern Sudan's predominant Dinka tribe

(or language group), while the Sulas were Madi speakers from the Sudan-Uganda border. And while most Sudanese start learning English on arrival here, a lot cling proudly to cultural traditions, speaking Dinka within families and at community and church meetings, and still teaching it to their children. Sula tells me the language barrier led to Rita being effectively sidelined by her own people.

"There was a clash of values," he says, "and competition over who should be [the support group's] leader. The majority [Dinka] group wanted to lead ... and many women in the growing Sudanese community started referring to my wife as a 'black-white' because we'd been here longer, and our attitude was no longer the traditional attitude. I tried to talk my wife out of worrying about these frictions, but I wasn't successful."

After that, he says, they decided to "move on" into the mainstream Australian community, but that didn't work out either: "The mainstream community was still unattainable for us. It was part of our hoped-for future, while the Sudanese community had become part of our past. We had fallen between the two." As time passed, he and Rita argued increasingly over petty things, and lost sight of their "dream of a peaceful ending".

"There were many tensions ... and finally we parted," says Sula. "It was Rita's idea. I thought it would be for maybe six months, but it went on for years." Eventually, at her suggestion, they undertook marriage counselling in the hope of a reunion. "It was going to be a long process between us. And before we got to that point, the tragedy happened."

Did he have any inkling of it?

He stares at the wall. "I have always worried," he says, after a while. "Because of the traumas in her background, and all the things that added to that over the years." He moves his eyes to mine. "But I didn't think that if something like that happened, it would be her wanting to go with the whole family. I still can't think much about that. It's difficult. I hope time will ..." He breaks off, covering his face.

It's my turn to stare at the wall. (An enraged owl I haven't noticed before glares back from its tiny portrait above the mini-bar.) Each weekday, Sula leaves his small brick unit in, of all places, Luck Street, and drives to a piggery outside town where he works as a rural technician. At dusk he returns to the unit

and prepares for the next day. "I have always thought," he says, "that life must go on. By that, I mean the life we imagined before coming here. But now there are two people missing from the equation ... and so much of our vision was driven by those two people."

He gets to his feet. "So you go on," he says, looking past me. "You go through the motions."

The Garden City, as Toowoomba calls itself, has long been known as a pretty but insular place with more than its share of political and religious zealots. The mood is suggested even before a visitor completes the 90-minute drive west from Brisbane, when roadside signs - the likes of "Read Your Bible!" and "No Death Sentences for Unborn Babies" - start rising from the rich farming flatlands

of the Lockyer Valley.

As implied by the recent hefty vote against a plan to introduce water recycling in drought-stricken Toowoomba, this is not a place that embraces change. Yet it's now home to Australia's largest population of Sudanese refugees outside of a capital city - the forerunner in an ongoing plan to decentralise refugee placement. (Like Shepparton in Victoria, another growing Sudanese base, Toowoomba offers an established social infrastructure and seasonal agricultural work.)

Predictably, despite much evidence of goodwill towards the newcomers, there's been an orchestrated backlash against what one national anti-immigration group calls Toowoomba's "crazy social experiment". In letterbox drops and on its website,

the Australia First Party (AFP) calls for a people's resistance campaign against the "liberal minority, [to] root them out of city hall, chase them from the churches and community groups and render this city a veritable Refugee Free Zone ..."

Founded by Graeme Campbell, the expelled former federal Labor member for Kalgoorlie, the AFP is a conspiracy-driven "patriot" movement best summarised by its own internet offerings: "Toowoomba Under Attack!"; "A Conspiracy Of Interests Foments Anti-Australian Racism"; "Political-Police, Perverts And Pimps Unleashed To Impose The African Refugee Madness On Another Australian City".

And so on. There've been a few racially motivated incidents (of which, more later), but most public opposition to the refugees still takes the form described by Charles Sula - "ugly" noises shouted from passing vehicles.

Like most Sudanese, Albino Thiik, chairman of the Sudanese Community of the Darling Downs, has experienced the abuse local yobbos hurl at the Africans. "But that doesn't bother me," he says in his Toowoomba office. "That's just a young man who thinks this is not the country for black people. I tell others, 'Ignore it! Go your way! Wait until something actually happens.' "

Not surprisingly, given what they've already survived, most Sudanese share Thiik's indifference to what one of them calls the "yelling boys". Indeed, Thiik is more concerned about the erosion of male dominance within the transplanted yet still fiercely patriarchal community. "Our culture is that the man is supposed to work and bring the bread home, and the woman is supposed to look after the children," he says. "But here, because of this misunderstood word 'equality', the wife will tell you, 'We're in Australia now - it's your turn to cook!' "

Thiik's weathered face furrows in distaste. "To a Sudanese," he says, "that would be just like a dream! Your wife telling you to cook! Some husbands will almost go mad!" I laugh, but the chairman isn't kidding. "Sometimes," he continues, "such things can lead to domestic violence, or families separating. Sometimes the woman will call police and they will come and drag the man out, calling him a threat to the family and that sort of thing."

Thiik says some Sudanese women became so enamoured of this service they took to calling police even during commonplace domestic rows. So the chairman met with senior officers and reached an agreement that they wouldn't attend domestics unless violence occurred. "Before that," he tells me, "men who had been dragged away would say to their wives, 'I am not coming back. The police are your husband now, because they are the ones who dragged me out.' "

Now Thiik and other community trouble-shooters visit families with domestic problems and try to help resolve them. "Some families have already broken up here," he reports, "and some husbands have left Toowoomba. Because once you leave your wife, then you go and get another wife who has no husband. Then your [ex] wife will always be attacking the other wife. I have a friend who moved to Melbourne to avoid that situation."

A Dinka speaker from southern Sudan, Thiik is a politicised veteran of the civil war, twice imprisoned for his opposition to the Islamist regime. He completed his education in Liberia and London, gaining a master's degree in population studies before returning to Sudan. In 2002, when he and his family had fled to Nairobi to escape the war, Thiik became separated from his wife and seven children. He didn't see them again until they were reunited in Toowoomba two years later. His family got here first in 2003, then tracked him down through the United Nations and aid agencies, and forwarded the forms necessary for him to join them, a process followed by many of the once-divided family groups in Toowoomba.

Thiik arrived in 2004, and is in his second year as chairman of the support group started by Charles and Rita Sula. When I mention that Sula seems a good man, Thiik says he can't respond because he doesn't know him well. Yet he has firm views on what led to the family's tragedy. "It was a very unfortunate case because the Sulas were isolating themselves," he says. "We know the Madi tribe - they always like to do things for themselves. When Rita died, I made a statement that if we'd known we would have tried to involve her more ... but they decided to move more to the local Australian community ... and later, when they were separated, Rita was not open to other Sudanese, and those things led to what she decided to do."

Thiik's full-time job is with the Catholic welfare group Centacare, part of the complex support infrastructure developed (in the years after the Sulas' solo efforts) to help the Sudanese through their settling-in period. There are still many problems for the newcomers, primarily the linked challenges of language and employment.

As Thiik points out, some refugees have little or no formal education, and so can't be taught English in the conventional way: "Some have been here 10 years and still don't speak English ... Many of them work casually on produce farms, but that's limited seasonal work." (In Toowoomba, 35 per cent of the population is in full-time employment, compared to 3.8 per cent of the Sudanese population. Overall, an amazing 77 per cent of the Sudanese population is under the age of 25.)

As these figures suggest, another potentially serious problem involves disaffected young Sudanese (mostly males) who fall between education and employment, leading to trouble with the law and other marginalised groups, such as young Aborigines. Thiik says fights between Sudanese and Aboriginal youths are "just kids mucking around", and are usually sparked by girls or soccer matches. "But there is a group [the Australia First Party] exploiting this to try to inflame the situation ... They go around falsely claiming the government is giving cars to Sudanese, and lots of money, while the Aborigines are left to suffer."

In Toowoomba's Oxygen Cafe, Mary Makuei and her two teenage daughters consider whether one of the girls might one day marry an Australian. Sudanese vary in their attitudes to intermarriage, depending on the depth of their cultural ties. And Makuei, a matriarchal figure in the community, is more steeped in the culture than most. Yet she playfully suggests that for a dowry of "50 or 60 cows" such a union might be possible.

Would they settle for a few four-wheel-drives?

Whoops of laughter. Monica, 15, isn't keen on cows or trucks. "Twenty thousand dollars!" she cries. "No, no - 40 thousand!"

"Three million," deadpans Anna, 18. "And that's only for the dowry. Then you have to pay for other stuff at the wedding. Then, after that, you've gotta be responsible for all the girl's family [problems]. If an Australian man could do that, I think it would be possible ..." But when the joking ends, Anna - a year 12 student at St Saviour's - points out that Sudanese parents still arrange most marriages, even between young refugees who've resettled in different parts of the world.

"It's very difficult," she says of the cultural binds. "Because some white people say that if a couple love each other so much, they should just do it [get married], because that's what they want."

Makuei and seven of her eight children arrived here in 2003, after years at refugee camps in Ethiopia and Uganda. At the time of departure they were separated from her husband Manyang, a doctor, and their eldest son, who are still in Sudan. Like most of the refugees, the Makueis send any money they can spare to the "back people", as they call loved ones still struggling to escape the war. They have various casual jobs, and Makuei's cooking skills are celebrated at her Tastes of Africa feasts at Oxygen Cafe, where Monica also works as a trainee chef.

Owner Michael Pleming, originally from Sydney, says Makuei's sell-out lunches have become something of a political statement in a town that "abhors" change. "There's a lot of goodwill here, but also a lot of entrenched racism ... The lunches [attended mostly by white Australians] reflect that divide. Those who attend support the Sudanese community; those who don't have openly told me they won't come near the place. And I say, 'Fine. I don't want you in my cafe anyway.' "

The worst case of apparent racism against Sudanese involved the first refugee family in Toowoomba to buy a house. In 2004, Jok Macha's home was pelted with rocks and rotten vegetables for months before the siege mysteriously ended. No one was apprehended. Sudanese community leaders hosed down the incident, saying it was an isolated case and that most Australians had welcomed them warmly.

The diplomatic response makes sense, but the reality is that two anti-immigration groups are openly running campaigns against the Sudanese presence. One is a neo-Nazi outfit calling itself White Pride Coalition, whose 'roo-hunting "operative" on the Downs regularly posts internet race-hate messages describing Africans as "scum" and "muds". More organised, with its "long-term resistance" campaign, is the Australia First Party, mentioned earlier. (An AFP leaflet left in Toowoomba letterboxes while I was there gives step-by-step instructions on how to resist the "refugee invasion" - including this: "Mobilise the schoolkids. It is necessary parents tell their children the truth and have them advance the truth at school.")

It's hard to gauge what effect these bigots are having on the local psyche, or whether the noxious "yelling boys" consider themselves part of the AFP resistance. But according to Pleming, incidents involving local kids in cars have been more serious than authorities acknowledge.

"I've actually seen Sudanese people walking on the street and cars moving to the wrong side of the road to try to hit them," he says. "If they hadn't jumped out of the way, they would have been hit. It was absolutely deliberate."

A curious element of the Sudanese presence here is the sense - experienced by the refugees and the existing community - that neither group is quite "real". Australians sympathise with the refugees over their ordeals, and the Sudanese marvel at the tranquillity and convenience of the Lucky Country. Yet neither group can readily deepen its understanding of the other because of the chasm dividing their experiences.

It's a theme of special interest to Clifton Maberly, pastor of the Toowoomba Central Seventh-Day Adventist Church and an anthropologist with Third World experience. Maberly believes the refugees' early feelings of awe at their new surroundings can turn to a sense of unreality - especially in dealings with authority figures. "They have trouble seeing Australians as real ... Everyone becomes like an actor to them, or a two-dimensional cartoon figure. So when a white woman teacher stands before a class telling them what they should do, or a policeman pulls them over for driving without a licence, it's difficult for them to take such things as real or serious." (From a recent Toowoomba Catholic education discussion paper: "[Sudanese students] often have difficulty in assessing what is real or fiction ... especially in ...television programs and movies, particularly when the lines are blurred, for example, Independence Day, which mixes up fact (moon landing) with fiction (aliens)...")

On the other side of the equation, Maberly finds that although Australians are respectful towards the Sudanese in his congregation, "they're still not quite dealing with them as people ... When I ask how many Sudanese they've invited to their homes for a meal, they say the idea hadn't really occurred to them. They say they're happy to have them around, and that they're very nice, noble-looking people and all the rest of it. But it's all a bit superficial."

When a popular young Sudanese was killed in a car crash in October 2004, Maberly found a practical way to get more involved. The victim, Rose Bol, 19, died at the scene after the car driven by her newly licensed fiance, Bol Buoi, crossed the centre verge and hit an oncoming vehicle on the highway near Toowoomba. (Buoi panicked when honked at by another driver while changing lanes and overreacted, swerving violently.)

Maberly visited the distressed Buoi in hospital, and helped him regain his will to carry on. He then devised an unusual training course for the Sudanese, whose appalling (and often unlicensed) driving is notorious across the Downs. Of the 800 of them here at that time, only a handful had managed to obtain full driver's licences. (Community chairman Albino Thiik failed his tests repeatedly before declaring he would never try again. In 2005, after various warnings and fines, Thiik's 21-year-old son Thomas served three months in jail for unlicensed driving.)

Maberly set up an obstacle course in a field, acquired some bomb cars, and with help from local volunteers began training Buoi and others. It was harrowing work. "They just have none of the instincts for driving that young Australians possess," the pastor reports. Reversing was a particular ordeal: "Some took 10 one-hour lessons before reaching the stage where, when they turned the wheel, there was more than a 50 per cent chance of them going the way they intended." Sudanese flocked to the lessons from as far away as Brisbane. As a consequence, the community now has more than 50 licensed drivers often called upon to transport others on a roster basis.

There are other positive stories. Strolling with his family in Toowoomba, choolteacher Wac Duot Wac sometimes meets young people he taught during his 11 years in a Kenyan refugee camp. "Some of them have finished their studies here, and some have even graduated from Australian universities," he says. "Hearing of these things makes me very happy."

Duot Wac, 42, from southern Sudan, worked voluntarily in the Kenyan camp, where he was reunited with his wife Tabitha after they were separated by the war. The couple arrived in Toowoomba four years ago. Two of their children - son Duot, 7, and daughter Aduk, 4 - were born in Kenya; another son, Kuol, 2, was born here. Wac Duot Wac is studying to re-qualify as a teacher in Australia.

As one of Sudan's "Lost Boys", Paduol Ater watched jet trails above the desert and wondered how people learned to fly. "At first," he confesses, "I thought pilots must have some special ability given to them by God. But later I realised it was a matter of opportunity." Driven by his early dream of becoming a commercial jet pilot, Ater arrived here in 2002 and completed his final three years of high school in record time. At 27, he has passed his general flying program licence (meaning he can take passengers within a restricted area) and is saving to pay for the extra flying hours needed to complete his goal.

Ater's escape from a militia raid on his village in southern Sudan was symptomatic of how the so-called Lost Boys came to be. Like numerous other fleet-footed kids he eluded the raiders but never again saw his parents or four of his five siblings. In 1991, Ater was among thousands of boys driven from their Ethiopian refugee camp. Many died during the Lost Boys' subsequent trek to the Narus camp on the Sudan-Kenyan border, from where Ater later came to Australia.

Ater describes a river crossing on the journey, when he was 12 and death came in three different forms. "Some of our colleagues got drowned, some got killed by gunfire [from pursuing militia], and some got eaten by crocodiles," he says. "We never thought that any others might help us from our situation. So the bigger boys had to take care of the little ones. We became like brothers."

Thirteen years later, when the excited young man left Narus camp on the first leg of his journey to Australia, a crew member on the Egyptian Airlines flight introduced him to the captain. "I spoke to him in Arabic [about] how I wanted to be a jet pilot, like him," Ater says. "He gave me advice, and then he said, 'If you do it, Paduol, perhaps one day we will meet at the airport.' For some reason, I always remember those words."

On the night of his visit to my hotel, Charles Sula told how the Sudanese community had done its best to draw him back to the fold. "But I can't go back," he says. "I am a misfit; I just can't seem to fit in. If I went back, people would always see me in the light of the tragedy. So I want to grow into my own thing. Which might mean going to another part of Australia, because of the memories here." He worries a lot about his son, Jerry - "I don't think he is in a good mental state" - but doesn't know how to help him.

We walk together to the street. As Sula turns to leave, I find myself blurting out an invitation for him and his son to visit me in Brisbane.

He smiles and grasps my shoulder, yet we both know he won't come. "God bless you," he says formally, and trudges off into the night.

© 2006 The Age

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