meet mariam issa

Tell us how you made your way to Australia.

My journey as a refugee was twenty-one years ago. I came to Australia when I was thirty years old, with four children. I was pregnant with my fifth child. It was a really huge journey.

Prior to coming to Australia, we were displaced for eight years. It was a journey of adversity after having closed that chapter of eight years of displacement of the civil war in Somalia. I had never interacted with a Westerner before. I knew nothing about the Western culture.

We were settled straight away into a beautiful suburb in Melbourne, in Brighton. I knew nothing about Brighton. I knew nothing of its affluency. I’d come to a completely different world.

I came at a time when I was really so tired. My husband did not have a word of English at the time, so he started school. The kids started school.

I felt that at that time the transition between my family and the community was all on me. The sad part is we were almost the first Africans to reside in Brighton. It was a totally different sort of community as well. I remember, at that time, our next-door neighbour installed cameras in his house.

Because you’d moved there?

Yes, because we’d moved there. And then two years after that, September 11 happened, and then we were not only Black in Brighton, but we were also Muslim in Brighton. That kind of shook us, and we went into a journey of uncertainty.

We took the kids out of the normal schools and put them into an Islamic school. As all that was happening, my child who was born in the heart of the community reached kinder age.

We went to the nearest kinder in our home. And when we came out, she asked me a question that changed the trajectory of our whole family. She said, “Mum, do they not want me because I’m Black?” It was like a bomb in a mother’s heart. I do get emotional