This book is the story of South Sudanese Australians, told in their own voices. At one level, it’s a single story: a story of war, of loss, of violent displacement, of the rupturing of ordinary life for these people. It tells of years in refugee camps, of the journeys that brought them to Australia, and of the new life they’re forging for themselves and their families here.
But this story has been experienced by individuals, by ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, events that have become all too common in our present world. Before Syria, South Sudan had already become a byword for never-ending, relentless civil war, famine, and desperate children, women, and men. So the story is multi-facetted. It’s many stories, and those are the personal stories that make up this book.
Some of those stories, those of the Lost Boys, have already been told in books, film, and song. There’s almost nothing yet from others, especially from the women whose lives were also shattered by these wars. Their stories are of the loss of children, parents, and husbands, of the deaths and forced abandonment of newborns, of multiple forced displacements.
But the stories are also stories of survival and resilience. The twenty-seven people who tell their stories in this book recount the different routes that finally brought them to Australia, of their gratitude to be in a country with no war, and of their determination to make a contribution and to forge a good life here, for themselves, and especially for their families and children, demonstrating how wrong are political accusations of non-integration and sensationalist reporting about ‘African Gangs’ in Melbourne.
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