Lead Us To a Place

Saturday 28 April 2012 5:05PM

This week we visit Katanning, a small town in rural Western Australia where the local people and churches have a long history of acceptance and welcome to new arrivals, their faiths and cultures.



Bill Bunbury: ‘Lead Us to a Place’, sung there in the Baptist church at Katanning, Western Australia, by Ler Soe, a Karen Christian, originally from Burma, might well have been glad to have been led to this place. This small country town, Katanning, has been home to many nationalities and several faiths for over 30 years. Traditionally, Katanning was the service town for local farmers, and like many rural communities in more recent times has struggled to retain population, but that struggle slowed in the early 1970s when the local abattoir recruited Malay meat workers from Cocos and Christmas Islands, and a Halal slaughterman to help its Islamic export market. Since then, Muslims from Malaya and Afghanistan, Chinese people and more recently Africans and Karens, many of them refugees, have made new lives here. The first newcomers, back in the 1970s, came to work in Katanning’s abattoir, today run by WAMMCO, the WA Meat Marketing Cooperative. Manager Tony Bessell.

Tony Bessell: The abattoir or the meat processing facility’s been here since established in 1973, so it’s around about a 40 year industry and in the early ‘70s the people that owned the plant at the time brought a number of workers from the Christmas and Cocos Islands, so those workers are of Malay origin, and they really formed the foundation of the workforce back then. The meat industry, no matter where you are in Australia, has heavily relied on migrant labour. It’s not a meat processing, and the jobs aren’t really a career of choice for people in Australia. So we out of necessity, really, have been targeting that class of individual, but even now our major employment draw is through humanitarian refugee programs in Australia.

Bill Bunbury: Tony Bessell. Baptist pastor Marc Chan, based in Perth, has been active in helping very recent arrivals, Karen refugees from Burma, to find work in Katanning.

Marc Chan: The community there in Katanning has really embraced the Karen community. The way that they’ve done that is through opening up their arms when those people went down there, and here in Perth we’ve been trying to find out ways and means of trying to meet the needs of refugees and migrants where the level of English is not as good, and so they’ve found it difficult to find work in industries or factories here in Perth, and one of the elders of the Karen church here in Perth, by the name of Paul Kyaw, he’s contacted the management at the Katanning abattoir there to try and see whether there are ways for them to go down there to work in the abattoir there.

Paul Kyaw: And I myself I came down here, I came alone without knowing anybody. I eat alone at the Lions Park  there, (hotel) that’s the moment I got the feeling that we can live here, and I start talking to WAMMCO. WAMMCO is West Australian Meat Marketing Company, and they are really helpful and we start negotiating things. They said, ‘Your people can work here.’

Bill Bunbury: While Karens are very recent arrivals, Alep Mydie came here in 1974 as a boy with his Malay parents from Christmas Island. His father got a job in the Katanning abattoir as an halal slaughterman.

Alep Mydie: So that’s why we come to arrive in Katanning, and my father and all the islanders with their professions of their own.  He left in a sacrifice and then started a brand new life, as a slaughterman, yes, as a slaughterman.

Bill Bunbury: Today, Alep Mydie is a Katanning Shire councillor and is also Imam of the local mosque, and the mosque wasn’t built in a day.

Alep Mydie: There wasn’t any mosque at all. My grandfather was the Imam, and we struggled to build a mosque, and during the years of our arrival here we were renting RSL hall, we were renting a winery. It was cold in the winter time, it had a big sliding door, and inside it there was a lot of pigeons at night. Imagine we had, we had kerosene heaters left, right, centre and it was very, very cold.

Bill Bunbury: And that’s what you remember?

Alep Mydie: Yes.

Bill Bunbury: But you still became an Imam despite all this.

Alep Mydie: Despite all that, you know, I put up my hand in that someone need to carry forward the traditions...

Bill Bunbury: There are a lot of Christian churches here. Do you talk with them?

Alep Mydie: Yes, growing up I was…and again back when we first arrived we were grateful and blessed in having friends of Christian faith and a Baptist church, Mike, I recall Mr and Mrs Walker, we called them part of the family, they help us, we went to their church, we went to all those church camps, anything like that. I’ve learnt so much from the people that look after us.

Bill Bunbury: Did you find more in common between Islam and Christianity than you expected?

Alep Mydie: In the perspectives of religion, no. Be either Muslims or Christianity, in my perspective of being the Muslims, and it’s a lot to learn, and looking back through the corridor of life you see friends of Christian faith, and this is what we’re all about, the religion it is by itself, it’s marvellous. In how we practice in the perspective of the religion itself, learning how one another can reach out, helping by kindness, and we accept their kindness back.

Malcolm Good: I guess I love harmony, that’s probably one of the driving forces for me, and when there’s harmony, when there are good healthy relationships I kind of go, yes, this is not a bad place to be.

Bill Bunbury: Malcolm Good, current pastor of the Katanning Baptist church, and very involved with helping newcomers. You spoke earlier about it not just being the Baptist church. Do you work with other churches?

Malcolm Good: Yes, I have very strong...well, I like to think I’ve got very strong informal connections with the other churches, and there’s good people in the other fellowships, but in the town. So I’m not, you know, I’m not limiting what happens to necessarily those in Christian churches, there are a very socially-minded people that aren’t connected to a formal church. You know that golden rule, I guess, do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, is very strong.

Tony Bessell: Yes, I think the churches, the local churches, have provided tremendous assistance with these individuals, not even really work related but a place for them to meet and interact and they’ve provided support, particularly the Baptist church here in Katanning has provided assistance with English, and just general assistance in life outside of work.

Bill Bunbury: Abattoir manager, Tony Bessell. When you took in the original intake, the Malay, Cocas Island people who were obviously Islamic, did you have to make work adjustments given their faith, their beliefs, their religious observances?

Tony Bessell: Yes, we did. Even to this day our contract of employment has a whole range of provisions that accommodate some of their cultural beliefs and issues. We can transfer their Australian Queen’s Birthday public holiday to the Islamic religious day of Ramadan or Hajj. There are other provisions that provide for the release of Islamic burial parties in the case of a death in the community.

Bill Bunbury: Friday prayers?

Tony Bessell: Yes, we operate four eight and a half hour days, Monday to Thursday, and then we have a six hour day where the facility essentially finishes its operation around lunchtime to allow those employees to go to prayer, and of recent times we’ve attracted other cultures; Chinese, Burmese, Afghans, there’s increasingly more pressure for us to acknowledge in their contract of employment some of the things that those select groups hold dear also, like, you know, Chinese new year and those sorts of things.

Malcolm Good: For me this is the first time that I’ve lived in a country town, and so I think initially I felt, well, you know, all country towns are like this, but I suspect that there’s something special about Katanning, particularly the seniors. They’re very active, they don’t retire, and they just do other things and are very involved with different community-based activity. To see, you know, the seniors helping out with teaching English or helping at the school with mentoring programs or other things...

Jean Phillips: I had been, years ago before I retired, I was teaching literacy at TAFE for the adult Aboriginals.

Bill Bunbury: Volunteer Jean Phillips, supposedly retired.

Jean Phillips: About...I’m not sure about that, whether it was six or seven years ago, but six years I think, the meatworks brought over on 457 visas a whole lot of mainland Chinese, and one of them came to church with one of the African refugees who was in Katanning at the time, and I was moved to say to Max, this Chinese fellow, ‘Would you like me to help you with your English?’ And he said, ‘Oh, yes’, and I said, ‘You know, free, I’d just help you, and if you’ve got a friend.’ ‘Oh, yes, yes.’

Well, to cut a long story short, he kept saying something about when he had a big house, and I couldn’t think why he needed a big house to learn English. Anyway, I said to him, ‘How about we start’, and he’d got friends, yes, and he went, ‘Fifteen.’ ‘Oh, that’s why he needs a big house.’ So that Saturday afternoon when we began, 20 turned up and Max had a little bit of English, and he had an electronic translator, and I had a nice big whiteboard and I can do stick figures and I can make silly noises and I can wave my arms around, and so between us, starting off with, ‘My name is’, I got involved with the Chinese. Well, a handful of them became Christian. One or two were Christians before they came, and what our church did, at the time we had a young pastor and his wife, and her father has a lot to do with Chinese in Perth, and so they arranged that there was a Chinese church in Perth who would come down once a month and on the Saturday they would prepare a Chinese meal and then they would have games and then there would be a little Christian message. So that’s what happened, because when they first came they had no money, they had to walk everywhere and they were very lonely. They’d got no English and they were stranded, almost, so I got friendly with quite a few of them, helped them with filling in forms and things that they have to do.

Margaret Renk: I’m Margaret Renk, and I’ve lived in Katanning since 1972, and I’ve been involved with Read Write Now which has got us involved with all the different ethnic groups that have moved to the town.

Joan Garston: I’m Joan Garston, I’ve lived in Katanning since 1942, Margaret’s had me under her thumb with Read Write Now for about 20 years, I work with the people because I love people. We don’t discuss religion, we don’t discuss what happened and how they got here, that’s private, I don’t want to interfere. If they...one girl showed me their prayer mat, because they don’t go to the mosque, I didn’t ask, she showed it to me and explained it to me.

Margaret Renk: When we first started trying to get the ladies together to come to learn English as a second language I had great trouble, even though I knew some of the Muslim men quite well, and that was through my scouting era. I’d managed to get a little scouting group going of Muslims, so long as I obeyed their rules with the kids, which was fine, but the men didn’t want their wives to learn English, they didn’t want them to be integrated into our way of living. They could stay at home and cook and do the things they’ve always done. They were virtually housebound these people, and weren’t having contact with anyone but just their own kind, and it took nearly two years before we actually started our first lot of classes, and it grew very quickly.

We had up to around 15 ladies coming initially, and they really were interested, because we worked with things, life skills with them, teaching them the simple things that they could apply every day, and funnily enough from that we ended up with a men’s group coming along to improve their English. It was the man, that the husband said to me, ‘My wife doesn’t need to learn English because when she goes...when she dies and goes she doesn’t need English where she’s going’, and I thought, oh, okay. It was a very interesting statement.

Bill Bunbury: Maybe none of us do, but I’m just thinking, you must’ve then exerted some diplomacy with the men to make that happen, how did you do that?

Margaret Renk: I guess because I was lucky, because I’d worked with the men in having the cub and the scouts going, and one of those men ended up being the elder, so we had a rapport between us, and he has a well-spoken Australian language, well-spoken university person, and he sort of took it on board and took it to their big mosque meeting and discussed it with some of the elders, and obviously he’s persuaded them, but once they had started, it wasn’t long for the men were taking a bit of interest in what their women were doing, and I don’t know whether it was because they were a bit concerned that we might’ve been trying to turn them into Christians, and that... I had assured  Allab that was not our intention. I said we would live our life as we live it, we would respect the way they lived their lives, all we wanted to do was give them enough life skills for them to be able to go and do their shopping and not wait for their husbands to come home or the children to come home from school, and if they had to ring a doctor and make an appointment they could do it. Or post a letter, those sorts of things, and he obviously felt that that was important, because that’s where it started from.

Joan Garston: Well, the first lady that was pregnant, with no English, I tried to ask her if she was having a home birth or going to the hospital, and she kept saying, ‘Here’, so in the end when the lady Walker was here I said to her, ‘Can you organise a tour to the maternity ward?’ So we traipsed up there with seven ladies, only one pregnant, introduced them to the maternity ward and since then we’ve had nine babies, and I’ve introduced them to the doctor and I’ve been with them to the doctor and I’ve introduced the children to schools, admitted them to schools, I’ve introduced them to Woolworths and helped them fill in forms. One gentleman said he had a bill for, say, $20, and he said, ‘I hadn’t bought anything’, but it was the rental on a gas bottle, but it had a 1300 number, I rang it and asked them, somebody else hadn’t paid their rates on time, so we rang them and sorted it out. Just little things, they still come to me with letters, ‘What do I do about this?’ and I said, ‘Don’t take any notice, it’s rubbish’, the next one I’ll say, it was a survey from the hospital—‘Do you use our services?’—and I said, ‘Oh, do, fill that in, do you want me to help you’, ‘No, my daughter can’, just every day things that mothers need to know, you know. I’ve taken them to the doctor, I’ve taken them to the dentist...

Margaret Renk: Well, I think all my life, right from when I was 15 years old I’ve been a volunteer. I’ve been a volunteer in something, scouting to start with and I’ve moved on from that to Read Write Now, which is how we have got into meeting a lot of the ethnic people who have come here, and I get great joy out of teaching, because I’m learning. You learn about them, about their ways, how they think, their customs, which are quite unique, and they’ve been so welcoming of us too. So we appreciate their culture, we...if we visit them we take our shoes off at the door and go in, or... It’s what you get back from what we do that’s so great.

Bill Bunbury: Does your religious belief play any role in this?

Margaret Renk: It does play a part in it. I believe that we should help others, that’s part of our role here on earth is to help other people when we can, so yes, that does play a big part in it. We do not push our religion on the people who come here, but we let them see that, you know, we care, because that’s how we are, and we show them respect for their religion and we just hope that they understand to show respect to us for ours.

Bill Bunbury: Joan, what brought you to wishing to help people?

Joan Garston: Well, I had four children, and when they all left the nest I worked for Telecom for 20 years and when that all closed up I was lost, and someone introduced me to Margaret, and it’s been up hill ever since.

Margaret Renk: It’s been a partnership.

Joan Garston: And I’ve always volunteered to do this or do that, I was in everything, and this gives me a lot of satisfaction, and the people take me into their homes, the first thing you do, like John, you get a cup of coffee or cup of tea and it’s not only teaching them English, it’s teaching them our ways. You know, introducing to the banks and to the schools and to the hospital... Dentist, I held one boy’s hand while he had a tooth extracted, poor child, but you know, things like that. I’ve sat with women that have had their ultrasounds, and... I help in all ways, not just English.

Margaret Renk: Our life goes on as normal, but it’s given us a great insight, hasn’t it, to how other ethnic people live, from all over the world. Yes, it’s touched our lives in opening our eyes to what other people have lived through.

Malcolm Good: I guess friendship would be one thing. Community, to be part of, particularly with the West African folk. There were two ladies, one with children, and they were probably a little isolated, a little alone, we provided support in helping them to reconnect with their partners, their husbands, and I can remember spending one night at the travel agent trying to get one of the guys out of West Africa and we got him stuck in Nigeria, I think it was, and we couldn’t get him on the next flight and that was very frustrating.

Bill Bunbury: Were the people you were helping members of the Baptist church?

Malcolm Good: No, no. They had had Christian connection, I guess, back in their home country, that ethos, that background, and likewise with the Karen community, they’ve got a very strong Christian heritage.

Bill Bunbury: Did they come to you, or did you go to them?

Malcolm Good They came to us. I mean, both times, the West African on a smaller scale, obviously it was just a couple of families, came into the church and we just connected. God has always had a heart for the widows and the orphans and those that don’t have a voice, and that would probably be my main motivation in seeking to continue on that work.

Jean Phillips: I don’t know about deepening my faith, but it does help to identify and to empathise with people who are not in the position that you’re in. So when it comes to... Things that happen in one’s own life, the fact that other people have done it tougher and have come out smiling is a real encouragement, and it is something, you sort of say, ‘Well, look, come on, you know, the Lord got them through and he can get you through.’

Bill Bunbury: Volunteer helper Jean Phillips. I’m Bill Bunbury, you’re with Encounter on RN, and we’re looking at the needs of people often coming from refugee camps to a small country town like Katanning in Western Australia; needs that vary from individual to individual and from family to family. Frances Coventry, Principal of the Katanning primary school.

Frances Coventry: Well, it depends on who’s coming through the door. We obviously offer them all the same services, but we realise the minute they start to ask or attempt to find out how things work that we’re dealing with people with no English or some English, or they might have reasonable English, and that’s the point at which we have to decide what to do next, and we call upon largely volunteer people to come and help us. There’s one or two people in Katanning who are invaluable, they’re worth their weight in gold because of the service they’ve provided to people coming into Australia with very little English. They’re usually older people, retired. One lady in particular is wonderful, we ring her up and say, ‘Help, we’ve got somebody here’, and she rushes down and she knows the right people to go to to perhaps do some interpreting for us.

Bill Bunbury: Do some of the children arrive with more than language problems? Some of the families have come out of difficult situations, does that manifest itself at school?

Frances Coventry: Yes, we do have people that are classed as refugee, and in a small number of cases in primary school we’re aware of the backgrounds they’ve come from, and if we hadn’t been aware of that we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything, but because they’ve been tracked from entry into Australia we’ve been given forewarning, and in one or two cases we’ve been aware and seen the responses in a situation where they’ve been put under a bit of stress or been made to feel frightened, but generally the kids they seem to adapt very quickly. Kids are fairly simplistic in their approach to life, they’re very trusting very quickly and believe the teachers when they say, ‘Come to me if you’ve got a problem’, or ‘Go and ask somebody for help.’ Yes, we find that we’re fairly effective in that way, and that kids don’t bring their baggage with them to school.

Bill Bunbury: If they do, what are the distress symptoms that you have to look out for?

Frances Coventry: Things like just total shut-down, absolute silence, not being able to make sense of them. You’d think that there might be violent reactions, you’d think that there might be the need to physically restrain, but we haven’t seen that as a response. It tends to be just the simple shut-down, and I guess that’s because kids find it more difficult to express their feelings; they struggle to find the words.

Jean Phillips: When the first ones came, pastor and I went around to one family asking how they liked being here, and the mother said it was the first time in her life she wasn’t afraid. She said she went to the refugee camp when she was a little girl, she grew up in the refugee camp, she married and had her children in the refugee camp, but you see, the soldiers come over the border into Thailand and shoot up the refugee camp, so they have to run into the forest, and then one of the girls who was a teenager then, she said, when she and her sister were little girls, when the soldiers came and they all were running into the forest, they lost Mummy. Obviously they probably were with somebody else, but no mummy for about three days, and so the mother said they lived in fear. All the time in the refugee camp you live in fear, and you have a big bowl which is where they put the rice in, and you have to keep your food or whatever you’re going to use in that bowl in between meals to be ready to pick it up and run. So all her life she has never slept without fear, but she said now she lives in Katanning she sleeps at night with no fear.

Malcolm Good: I can remember a West African lady that I helped, and she left Liberia because their house was burnt down. She thought her husband was in the house, and so she left, and she walked through several countries, I think, to get to a refugee camp. He was actually out when the house was burnt down, he came back at a different time, saw the house had been burnt down, thought that she was in the house and dead, and he went back into the countryside and laid low, and she came out to Australia as a refugee, as a widow, with two children thinking that her husband had passed away. A number of years later her husband bumped into her sister in the capital of Liberia and realised of course then that she was still around, and there was a phone call, and she was disbelieving until some information was shared that was personal, and so we spent some time trying to reunite them. So there’s incredible stories out there that I can’t imagine, and even to try I’d fall way short.

Frances Coventry: And it’s not until later on that you do hear some of the stories, and we’ve blown away by the appalling situations that they’ve come from, the appalling incidents or violence that they’ve been witness to or had perpetrated upon them and we can’t believe that they can be highly functioning adults, because you sort of think, ‘Oh, gosh, if that happened to me I don’t think I’d ever get over it’, so the human soul is obviously very resilient, and able to bounce back given the opportunity, and I think that’s what happens here in the Katanning community, they get the opportunity to bounce back.

Breena Bani; I’m Breena Bani, There was war.  Because I lived in Thai and Burma border. The fights every year in my life. In 1997 the war began very terrible in my place, so I fled cross the river, climbed the high mountain and went to Thailand border. After then the UNHCR, they help us, they look after us and they managed the place like refugee camp for us and yes, I lived there.

John Nasary: My name is John, my family name is Nasary. I leave Afghanistan because a life, a human life. I’ve been in Australia 1999, and I was in detention centre in Port Headland, so nearly nine months I was in detention, was really hard time, of course, because my family was back home in Afghanistan, I was worried about them, what happened to them. We got a good life in Afghanistan was, we got a farm or nice house, nice family, and a good culture we got in Afghanistan, so we have no choice to live in Afghanistan, because there, if you’re still there they kill us. Taliban have got a power in Afghanistan because the majority population in Afghanistan is Pashtun, which is Taliban, I am Hazara. So we’ve got no choice there, we have to leave in Afghanistan, our village.

Todd: Just call me Todd. I lived in a small village in Fujian province in China. I used to be a butcher, I have been doing that job for many years and I also went to Singapore, same, as a butcher, so I’m very skilled on this job. When I finished my contract of six years in Singapore and I go back home married with Su En, stayed for a whole year, I found I could do nothing there, I can’t do anything, and I couldn’t find a better job.

Su En: My English name is Su En. I have been here 2006, and that time my boy just a month, so I left my home come to with Tod, because Tod only one person here.

Todd: The baby was still too young, and we know nothing about here, and we don’t have enough money to children, and she gave up her job of kindergarten teacher.

Su En: Very, very hard in that time for me. My mum in law was look after my boy. Now I bring the boy here now. He in primary school.

Bill Bunbury: What do you sense about the parents being in Katanning, they’ve come from sometimes very stressful, difficult situations, do you get a feeling about how they feel about living here?

Frances Coventry: You get a sense from them that they’re relieved, because we really do live in a lovely place. We’re very quick to complain about local politics or federal, but I think they see what we’ve got, and what they’ve left behind.

Bill Bunbury: And for the locals?

Frances Coventry: The rewards are many, and they come over time. The rewards are also seeing all sorts of children in our school, from all sorts of cultures and many countries all getting on. There’s no segregation, there’s no, ‘Well, you’re from Australia and you’re from China’, or whatever. They all play together, it’s like a melting pot, and that for teachers is a really rewarding, a rewarding thing to see, especially if you’ve put a lot of effort into social skills and community issues in the classroom, teaching kids that everyone can be different, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a reason for having sides or taking sides.

Carl Beck: And you know, I always use my daughter as an example, and you see her walking up and down the street with her friends, you know, and there’s an Indian girl, there’s

a Malay girl, you know, they’re all walking up around together in their little group of friends, and because they’ve been brought up like that they just accept that you know, that’s the way it is, we’re all friends and we all do everything together, so it’s great.

Bill Bunbury: Carl Beck, CEO of Katanning Shire.

Carl Beck: I’ve spent quite a bit of time with especially the men from the refugee...from the migrant communities, because I play soccer and I’m involved with them through a lot of sporting activities, and so I spend a lot of time socially with them outside of the work situation, and you know, they’re quite open about the fact that they feel very safe here, and things that we just never think about. You know, the fact they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s so good to be here, and you don’t have to worry about people shooting’, and things like that, so the fact that they feel safe, they feel welcomed, they feel as if they’ve got some worth because they’ve got a job and they’re setting a good example for their children.

They’re very big on family, and they’re very big on setting a good example for their children, and the fact that they can get a job and they can support their family is very important to them, so that makes them feel a higher sense of worth.

Breena Bani They helped us very much and they were very welcoming to us and friendly to us and helpful, so... And we are going to sing a song, the song is meant that I would like to be helpful, anywhere I live.

[Karen song]

Paul Kyaw: And I really love this little town, because we’ve got many sorts of people, as well Chinese, Malay and our traditional owners of the land, our Aboriginal people, and people from England, Australian...

Bill Bunbury:Paul Kyaw, Settlement Grants Officer.

Paul Kyaw: And I should say they’re friendlier than those who are in Perth, because in Perth, until now, I don’t know my next door neighbour’s name, and he never ever showed me a sign that he wants to be my friend, but here we are pretty friendly to each other, so I think the smaller the place the better the relationship. I might be wrong, but I feel that way, because here everyone knows everyone, so that’s the advantage.

Frances Coventry: One of the loveliest parts of the job’s working in the country, when you go downtown and you see the kids there and they love seeing you there, and ‘Hello’, and their parents are there and they see you and recognise where you’re from, and it just helps bond and bind a community together. You’re a lot more accountable for yourself and your actions in the country and I think that might have something to do with it as well, because people know what you do, they know what you say, they know what you’ve done and it sort of keeps people in order a bit more.

[Baptist Church singing]

Carl Beck: And I don’t think anywhere I’ve been has had as many churches as Kittanning. You know, right across the board, and the Muslim people have their own mosque. You know, we have Christmas, and one of my Malay Muslim staff, she runs the Secret Santa type thing... At the end of Ramadan when the Muslims have their big breaking of fast ceremony, you know, we all get invited along, go down, have some amazing food and it’s just a really nice day, so... The Karen people have their new year’s celebrations and things like that, they invite people from the whole range of the community along, so I think everybody’s very tolerant along those lines.

Hazara Song

Malcolm Good: I think for Katanning multiculturalism hit them a lot sooner than any other country town that I can think of. You know, the Malay people came in, you know, over 30 years ago, and I suspect that there might’ve been a heightened sense of anxiety, possibly, when they first started to come in, but the Malay people have just fitted in so well to the life of the town, and are as far as I can see an incredible asset to our community, and I think that has allayed any fears or any anxieties, and I think that has maybe helped in other ethnic groups coming into this community.

Jean Phillips: I think it was a mixture, a little bit of trepidation and a little bit of intrigue, because they were quite different from what Katanning had been used to, to begin with a little bit wary, but because they’ve been here a long time. They’ve been here well over 30 years, 35 years. They’ve settled in and they’re third generation now, so they’ve got their mosque and they join in things in Katanning and people pretty well take them for granted.

Margaret Renk: On a whole the adults accepted them. The young teenagers were a little bit more sceptical, later on I know when our Afghani students arrived here—when I say students they were a group of 23 men—when they arrived here they did have problems with the youth. They were broken into and they had things thrown at their windows, but it was only on a very short term, and it stopped, it finished, because the Afghanis did not fight back or anything like that. They were hurt, but they let it roll, and the youth decided, ‘Well, this is no fun, we’ll leave it at that.’

Juaini Taylor: I mean, we do go through a few issues with, you know, maybe specific groups not getting on with each other, but we always try and address those pretty quickly.

Bill Bunbury: Juaini Taylor, Katanning Shire youth development coordinator.

Juaini Taylor: And, you know, one thing is sport, it always brings people, brings people together.

Richard Kowald: The only example we’ve had of any problem is juniors playing soccer or cricket or something like that.

Bill Bunbury: Shire President Richard Kowald.

Richard Kowald: And initially when some of these groups came here we used to make an Afghan team and a Malay team and such like that, and sometimes boys being boys they’d like to get into a little argy bargy and so the organisers then decided to split the teams and make the teams up of a mixture of groups, and they accepted that really well and it got past all those problems.

Jean Phillips: It was quite funny actually, because the very first time the Chinese...we had a party for the Chinese, the church put on this huge spread, so the Chinese people brought the first course down and all these dear souls in the church who can cook produced all this lovely stuff, and of course the Chinese don’t eat that, they just don’t have it in their culture to eat all the sponge cakes and all the pavlovas and the things that we have.

Breena Bani: The lifestyle  here is very different to our people, because our peoples we have different lives, each other we go to other house... Here they are very friendly but hard to know each other, hard to visit each other’s house. Lifestyle very different to our life, yes.

Juaini Taylor: I was talking to a landlord and he forgot to turn the hot water system on for the new families, migrant families that moved into his house they were renting, and he felt really bad and he apologised, because it was for about a weekend, so it was two days, and the families there, they were like, ‘Oh, no problem, look, we have a house, a roof over our head, we have carpet, we have chairs, tables, this is amazing.’ Like, you know, you should see how grateful they were, and to not have any hot water, as long as they had water they were grateful for what they have. You know, when you come from a hard life, you appreciate the things more.

Margaret Renk: You know, the people are very accepting of anyone who comes here, and makes them welcome. It doesn’t matter what their backgrounds are in religion, they’re human beings so they’re accepted as such.

Reza Rustami: I think being as a Muslim, being as a Shia Muslim, human beings are human beings, I don’t think that there is a problem with the human beings because of religion.

Bill Bunbury: There are a lot of churches in Katanning, almost disproportionate number for the size of the town, do you think religion’s played a role in acceptance?

Frances Coventry: There are certainly a lot of people who make it their business and part of their parish’s business to be welcoming to newcomers to the town, and having said that too, I’m also aware that new people coming to town, especially from the different countries from the world, quite often have very strong faiths, so that perhaps can be one of those reasons that assimilation into a country town in Western Australia seems to happen with little drama. It’s a door opener, so it enables them entry into a community within the larger community. It perhaps also gives them a way of viewing the world. Yes, I think it perhaps is a door opener, that’s probably what it does, it facilitates an easier entry into an unknown community.

Marc Chan: It creates a new dynamic for us in the sense that we have to learn not only about that community, the way that they live, the way that they do things, the way that they go about their everyday life, but also about the country area, Katanning as a town, that we need to understand a lot about what’s happening there, the environment there, the churches there, the people groups there so that we have a better understanding of what’s going on in there so that we can help.

Bill Bunbury: Is there a magic formula here? Do you think there’s a secret that Katanning has?

Tony Bessell: Well, if I had the secret I’d... I really don’t know, I really don’t know what the secret is, but people are pretty open to things that are different.

Marc Chan: I’ve been reflecting on that, and I think that one of the qualities of Katanning is the way in which they are celebrating the diversity of cultures down there. I mean, it was really an eye-opener for me when I went to the harmony festival on Sunday. You’ve got different groups of people there singing in their own language, dancing and people are interested, people are watching, people are talking and the atmosphere there was fantastic. I saw things in there that I was never aware of, like the fashion parade... They call it the multicultural fashion parade happening in a town which is about three and a half hours’ drive from Perth. Never dream about that happening, but to see that happen and to see that the town itself has embraced that diversity, I think that’s the secret. Some people might say, ‘Okay, I don’t know about them, afraid to be in contact with them, and so keep my distance’, but they’ve actually embraced that, and displayed publicly for others to see that, ‘yes, this is who we are and that’s what we are interested in.’ I think that’s the secret of Katanning.

Carl Beck: It’s just one of those things, you know, when you’re playing in a soccer team and you’re alongside one of the Burmese boys or whatever and you’re sitting around in the change rooms after a game and you start to pick up these things. It’s not a conscious process, it’s almost, you know, something that happens subconsciously. You know, my son plays in a soccer team and you know, he’s the big red headed guy in amongst you know, a very multicultural team, and he comes home and says, you know, do you know this dad or do you know that dad, and that’s the way you learn these things. You don’t consciously do it, just by being, you know, in social situations with people you tend to learn as you go along.

Bill Bunbury: Do you think there’s something about country towns that makes it possible for this kind of acceptance and good relationships? Do you think Katanning is special or could any country town do this?

Alep Mydie: I wouldn’t say Katanning is a special country town, it can be. It wasn’t there before we arrived, but it is now it’s happened, but to me it’s about the people; it’s about us eh?; assimilate yourself within any societies in life, regard as what you believe in, coincident well you happen to be a Muslim or that religion, the context of it, but overall if I’ve seen in the wider perspective, if anyone are they in Albany or in Narrogin or maybe be anywhere.

Bill Bunbury: Is there a secret to how Katanning’s done this?

Frances Coventry: I don’t think there is a secret, the way Katanning’s done it is that they haven’t actually done anything. Maybe that’s the secret, that people are genuinely generally nice people. You scratch the surface and you’ll always find good in others, that’s the value that we all aspire to. I also think country people... I don’t like to point qualities at different people, but I think one of the qualities of being a country person is that there’s a more simple approach to life, and acceptance about differences in people. When you live in a country town you know more people and you’re aware of differences and you learn to perhaps learn to live with them better.

Carl Beck: I think for people to be scared of the people that are coming in, obviously some of the people that I know I would consider almost my better friends, have come in, some of them as illegal immigrants and things like that, and they are really nice people. You know, whether or not the government should be allowing more in or whatever I...that’s for the government to decide, but personally these are nice people, they are people that want to work, they are people that want to contribute to our community, and it’s very hard when you know them personally, to not like them.

Bill Bunbury: This has been Encounter on RN, ‘Lead Us to a Place’, Katanning, Western Australia.

My thanks to the Katanning community and special acknowledgment to Sheren and Reza Rustami. Also to Paul Kyaw, May Win and Helwa for the performance of the Hazara and Karen songs heard in today’s program. Technical production today, David Lemay. And don’t forget you can follow us on Twitter @rnencounter. I’m Bill Bunbury and you’ve been with Encounter on ABC RN.


Bill Bunbury