INVERELL resident Rosemary Breen thinks Inverell has always been a home for refugees who need to find their feet and begin a new life.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Rosemary is the guest speaker at a morning tea organised by the Rural Outreach and Support Centre and the Northern Settlement Services next Monday in observance of Refugee Week.
She began assisting migrants as part of the Inverell Refugee Resettlement Group, not long after she moved to Australia from England in the early 1980s.
Most migrants at that period were escaping the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
“It was at that time when Vietnamese who has assisted the Americans and Australians were non-persons in their country, and we had a number of families who came,” Rosemary said.
The group maintains contact and friendship with the many families and children who call Inverell home.
Rosemary recounted the story of a couple who arrived with two daughters. The mother was cloaked in sadness.
The Inverell group discovered that when escaping, the family was driven from the shore by soldiers, forced to leave their four-year-old son behind.
“It took four years to get that little boy,” she said.
Many years later, the group held a reunion for all the Vietnamese who had settled in Inverell during the 1980s, and a young man approached Rosemary.
“He said, ‘You probably don’t remember me, I was that little boy. I’d just like you to know that last week I qualified as a doctor’.
The resettlement group was later renamed Sanctuary Inverell, and assisted a Sudanese family to be reunited with their son who had been initially lost to them for eight years.
“He now is doing his internship as a radiologist,” Rosemary said.
The stories are many, and Rosemary rejoiced at the accomplishments of people who escaped from dire lives, and excelling in their adoptive country.
Rosemary recalled an 18-month old girl who arrived by boat thirty years ago. Those aboard ran out of water and the child was dying.
“Then suddenly it rained, and her mother held out her clothes and got them damp and held them to her child’s mouth,” Rosemary said.
The child, Nghia Nguyen-Le, has since travelled to Africa with Rosemary on humanitarian missions.
“When she got married, she asked for no wedding presents, just money and they financed a water tank in that poor part of Myanmar where we’ve been building water tanks,” Rosemary said.
Nghia’s sister Duc Stockman works for QBE in Sydney and travelled to Myanmar with Rosemary in 2014 to tour the villages where the water tanks are being built.
“So many of them are now in positions that they’re really giving back to Australia,” Rosemary said.
“They worked hard, most of them have taken the advantages that Australia offered, and they’re able to give back.”
The morning tea for Refugee Week is a 10,30am, Monday, June 15 at the Rural Outreach and Support Service, 124 Otho Street.