Image: Sinead Mildenhall of WWW, by Tamara McDonald
Surreptitiously, clusters of ‘Australia Says Welcome’ posters appeared around Melbourne, seemingly overnight. Thousands gathered in Treasury Gardens, spurred on by a hashtag, #lightthedark, to honor the life of Syrian child, drowned at sea whilst seeking asylum from horrific conflict. Few issues in recent times have galvanized the public like the global refugee crisis, and Australia’s wildly unpopular political reaction to it. As a generation becomes politicized out of disgust, characters and communities around Melbourne are banding together, most often united by social media, to assist the refugees settled in our city.
Good samaritans in Melbourne’s west have formed a Facebook group, West Welcome Wagon (WWW), that endeavors to provide local asylum seekers with essentials and emotional support. Currently, the group has over 5,600 members. 22-year-old Sinead Mildenhall, a Footscray local who works for local government whilst studying post-graduate law at RMIT, joined the Facebook group and is now a key member of the behind the scenes team.
With 65 core members, the committee of the West Welcome Wagon work tirelessly to ensure local refugees receive the provisions and support they need. Refugees are referred to the organization by caseworkers, with WWW currently aiding 540 families around Melbourne’s West. WWW focuses on families on bridging visas that have not been fast tracked through the system, and are occasionally even deported out of Australia suddenly. Once an individual has left Australia on a bridging visa, they are unable to re-enter. It’s an unstable position to be in- an uncomfortable limbo that prevents refugees feeling the security being granted citizenship brings. Mildenhall says that they often arrive with nothing but “passports and the clothes on their back”. Whilst waiting for applications to be processed, families are often left with “no food, no money, and no material aid. They’re just put in a house somewhere, and just left.” It’s during this turbulent period of waiting and uncertainty that WWW will become involved.
“Material aid is what we do. We will set a house up with everything they need in the first couple of weeks,” explains Mildenhall. It’s important that goods, donated by members of the Facebook group, are of good quality, as refugees won’t be able to replace them often. “When we provide them with a TV, it had to be relatively new, it can’t have broken down or have any major defects, and we have to be able to provide it quickly and get it to them straight away, so they can see the news and their home country.”
WWW’s services extend to measures that target food insecurity, a major issue for families of refugees with limited access to fresh produce. The organization has implemented ‘Vegie Wagon’, an initiative that sees members deliver refugees the tools they need to start a vegie patch, which they can grow and maintain themselves. WWW then connects the families with local gardening groups, so they can form relationships within local communities over the practice.
Isolation is a significant issue for refugee families, who are often placed in the outer West with no contacts as well as no means, while they wait for their Centrelink applications to be painstakingly processed. WWW looks to address the social isolation they experience. Mildenhall says that “one of the next steps that we’re looking at is to have more integration between ourselves and the asylum seeker families. Putting them in touch with an alumni group almost, or a community project group. Often they just need someone to have a chat to.”
Working with WWW has reinvigorated Mildenhall’s sense of purpose, as she feels responsible for the wellbeing of some of the West’s most vulnerable families. “Even on the worst days, when you’re feeling so negative with the world, what’s going to get you out of bed in the morning? Knowing someone is not going to eat today unless you get up out of bed in the morning. This is really important, and I am doing a really good job.”
The WWW’s continued commitment to refugee families means committee members and volunteers develop an obligation to the cause. “It’s not as though we just have them for a little while and then they leave, we continuously check in with them and provide them with food and anything that they need. It’s a huge organization and it does so much for so little,” Mildenhall says.
Experiencing the precarious circumstances those on bridging visas live in has clearly had a profound impact on Mildenhall, who is worldly and wise beyond her years. One particular encounter has stuck with her. “The first family that I dropped a food pack of to, I walked up to the door into this tiny concrete shoebox in Sunshine West, and I go along laden with food. I had enough food for them for two months. Carrying all this stuff, I knock on the door, and this woman opens the door. She has a baby on her hip, one toddler of about two, a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and then the husband walked out as well.” Mildenhall then dropped the food on the porch, pushing through a severe language barrier to explain that the food was for the family. “She was so happy, she started crying. She hugged me, her husband hugged me, shaking hands all around. The kids were crying.” The group then all shared a cup of tea, sharing smiles rather than banter due to a language barrier. Mildenhall tried to stay composed, but admits that her eyes were filling with tears as she cried “welcome”.
While Mildenhall attributes the dire conditions families on bridging visas experience to a lack of government attention and aid, local councils attempt to bridge the gap by implementing “Refugee Welcome Zones”. Councillor Colleen Gates is the Mayor of Hobsons Bay, the precinct where most of WWW’s volunteers resides. She says that the council first signed the Refugee Welcome Zone Declaration in November 2002, and then resigned the declaration in June 2014, “to reinforce Hobsons Bay’s continued commitment to welcoming and supporting refugees and asylum seekers.” The west is an area where refugees are often settled, so it’s important local council is “committed to raising awareness about the issues affecting refugees and asylum”. Like WWW, the Mayor and council are conscious of the social isolation re-settlement bestows on families. Resultantly, the Hobsons Bay Settlement Network has been established. It has resulted in initiatives including the annual Refugee Week, which the Mayor says is full of “community celebrations to welcome refugees into our community”, and diminish the loneliness a new and foreign home can bring.
For the people who become involved in the aftermath of refugee settlement, the consensus is that the government’s attention towards settled refugees is inadequate. For Mildenhall, her experience with WWW has reinvigorated her sense of community and trust in the power of neighborly goodwill. Mildenhall is grateful that WWW has catalyzed bringing “so many people who wouldn’t have otherwise known each other or heard about each other together. It’s really brought out this groundswell of action in the local community that otherwise wouldn’t have happened.” She looks forward to continuing to give back to the west and its new residents, saying “we know we’re going to be around for quite a while because we are literally filling a gap that no one knew existed and didn’t care to think about.” In an age of unprecedented screen time, initiatives such as WWW allude to a greater good hiding within our news feeds.
