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At the Time When Our First Colonial Surgeon Dr William Wyatt Strode The

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At the Time When Our First Colonial Surgeon Dr William Wyatt Strode The William Wyatt Oration Dr Philip Harding 17th July 2002 I thank you for the privilege of speaking to you today. I have chosen to deviate from the tradition of Foundation Day addresses and to speak on a contemporary social issue, but at the same time to view it from the perspective of the people and forces responsible for the development of South Australia and indeed the foundation of this hospital 162 years ago this week. It is now 309 days since 11th September 2001 and much has changed in our world. There have been economic burdens, inconvenience and frustration; but above all, a change from our comfortable sense of safety and security to one of uncertainty and suspicion. Obviously, these feelings have been most manifest in the United States; but they have occurred in Australia and last September they became focused on the flow of refugees arriving on our shores, mostly from that very part of the world where the trouble had arisen. Ragged, desperate and terrified people suddenly became potential terrorists. We saw increasing efforts to deflect these arrivals - the so-called "Pacific solution". At the same time, we began to hear international criticism of our treatment of refugees, and were confronted with reports of mental illness, suicide attempts and hunger strikes amongst those detained at Woomera and elsewhere. Since 1999, a large number of boat loads of people seeking refuge or asylum has come to our northern shores mostly by way of Indonesia. Whilst there was the impression of a huge invasion, the fact is that the numbers were but a small proportion of those arriving in countries with land borders or even in the British Isles. In Australia, matters came to a head with the incident involving the Norwegian ship Tampa in August 2001. As you will recall, some 400 people were rescued from a sinking boat and the ship's captain decided to bring them to Christmas Island. 11th September 2001 needs to be remembered for another reason; it was the date upon which Justice North of the Federal Court handed down his decision that the detention of refugees by Australian troops on board the Tampa, and their proposed expulsion from Australian territory, were illegal under Australian law. Although this ruling was subsequently overturned by a majority decision of the Full Court, it serves to remind us of the legal and political turmoil which occupied those few weeks. For any group to devise terrorism of the sort we have seen recently, there must exist hatred, based in turn on division; division between black and white, capitalist and communist, Christian and Muslim, Protestant and Catholic, Arab and Jew. Whilst our country is not free of such problems, we tend to take pride in the level of tolerance and harmony which exists in Australian society. It is becoming obvious, however, that divisions are emerging between us over the way our country is handling those people who have landed here seeking refuge or a better future. Many of us must admit to some misgivings about the treatment being experienced by those arriving as refugees. How do we define somebody as a refugee? The international refugee convention to which Australia is a signatory uses a definition in which the key phrase is "Any person who, owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted……”. Interpretation of the phrase "well founded" can, obviously, be highly subjective. A further and important point is that such persons have a legal right to make an application for refugee status irrespective of whether they arrive in Australia with prior authorisation; furthermore, the refugee convention provides that they should not be discriminated against on the basis of their method of arrival or their possession or otherwise of documentation. Managing our feelings about this issue is not made easier by the fact that the refugees appear alien to us. I make no apology for this statement; it is a simple factual observation. What, as a Sydney Morning Herald columnist observed in May last year, if they were "more like us"? What if a group of white Zimbabwean farmers fled in fear of their life, without opportunity to make an official application for refugee status, arrived here without permission and our response was to place them behind barbed wire, possibly after separating them from their families? There would, of course, be outrage. 2. Whenever we are confronted with a new, foreign or unfamiliar group of fellow human beings the first step in developing understanding is to find some common ground. Those of us who belong to international medical associations take great joy in the bond of fellowship which exists between doctors and which transcends ethnic and cultural boundaries. The same applies to all professions. What, then, if one of the refugees was a doctor? - or a nurse, or an engineer, or anything with which we could identify. Well, there certainly are such people. Some of you will have read the articles about the physical and mental health of refugees in the December 2001 issue of the Medical Journal of Australia. One of these was co-authored by a detainee in the Villawood detention centre, Dr Aamer Sultan. I have been in correspondence with Dr Sultan. His story is a compelling and challenging one, and he allows me to tell it to you. His CV is fairly typical for a young doctor; he graduated from the Medical School of the University of Baghdad (an English-language School) in 1992, did hospital residency, compulsory military service and rural terms and then became involved, in that strife-torn country, in treating injured insurrectionists. His group's activities being discovered, he fled Iraq in fear of his life, crossing the border into Turkey with the assistance of a smuggler who then arranged for him to fly to Australia where he believed he would be given asylum. It is more than possible, of course, that the smuggler knew better but it was certainly not Dr Sultan's expectation that the response to his giving himself up to the first official he saw at Sydney airport would be his placement in detention. By the time of the publication of the article to which I have referred, he had been in Villawood for three years - a tenth of his life. His correspondence with me eloquently expresses feelings of helplessness and frustration at the inability of human rights or international refugee organisations to assist his situation or that of fellow detainees. The Medical Journal of Australia states that he cannot be returned to Iraq because Australia has no diplomatic relations with that country; and Dr Sultan tells me that it is very difficult for him to apply for acceptance by any other country whilst he is in detention here. It is difficult to think of a better description of being between a rock and a hard place. We might refer to people such as Dr Sultan as refugees, asylum seekers or illegal immigrants, but in her recently published book, Dr Mary Crock - an Australian authority on migration and refugee law -calls them future seekers. This is an interesting term as it places the focus on what these people are looking for rather than on what they have left behind. I acknowledge Dr Crock's excellent book as the source for some of the factual material I have presented. Why then, are there future seekers? Any person seeking refuge or asylum for themselves or their family, is doing so because they perceive their future to be uncertain and are expressing a fundamental human need to survive and to grow. These same motives applied to at least some of those who came as the first settlers of South Australia a little over a century and a half ago. Whilst it may seem to many of you surprising, or even odious, that I might compare our forefathers with the current generation of boat people, it has interested me to reflect upon whether there might be some parallels. To start with, they also came by boat; they endured an arduous journey, often under miserable conditions; sometimes, with significant loss of life. It is also possible that some of those arriving had, like Dr Sultan, a rather false impression of what was to await them; Captain Sturt's description of "a magnificent river falling into the sea at Gulf St Vincent" suggests that he must have seen the Torrens in an unusual flood! These 19th- century boat people certainly landed without the permission or approval of the local population who today might take quite a different view of their arrival. The colonisation of South Australia leaves its record in documents couched in a rhetoric of idealism, religious freedom and the hope of prosperity for all. Necessity is, however, always the mother of such invention. What were the circumstances which drove this development? What drove these future seekers of the 1830s to the southern coast of Australia? Edward Gibbon Wakefield is perhaps more than any other individual responsible for us being here today; but how well known is it, for example, that he spent much time on his theories for systematic colonisation in Newgate prison, where he had been sentenced to three years for a series of social indiscretions. The Kings Bench debtors prison also provided fertile ground for meetings between Robert Gouger, later our first Colonial Secretary, and others including Captain Dixon who was able to provide useful information about the southern coasts of Australia. 3. Then there was our first Chief Justice, Sir John Jeffcott, who applied for a position in South Australia being in somewhat urgent need of employment overseas, having killed a medical practitioner in a duel and being deeply in debt.
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