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Keywords: Tamil Family

  • AUSTRALIA

    Playing God with the Tamil family's fate

    • Kerry Murphy
    • 23 September 2019
    8 Comments

    Last week the Federal Court granted an interim injunction to a child born in Australia preventing her removal from Australia. The case raises complex issues regarding the statutory bars preventing asylum seekers from even making any application at all, and the exercise of the ministerial discretion to lift that bar.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Australian unis failing Hong Kong students

    • Sangeetha Thanapal
    • 14 September 2019
    5 Comments

    The students might not have many rights back home, but they do in the western democracies in which they live. The violence against peaceful protestors not just in Hong Kong but in countries where Hong Kong students are exercising their basic rights is unsettling. Yet the response by unis all over Australia has been taciturn at best.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Palm Sunday protests demand a better way

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 21 March 2018
    15 Comments

    Critics are right to say the marches are ineffectual in the face of bipartisan and popular support for Australia's brutal behaviour. But the faces of those who take part - refugees and activists, older Australians and children, churchgoers and atheists - witness that the Australian community can wear a compassionate face.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Do we really value families?

    • Fatima Measham
    • 15 March 2018
    3 Comments

    Politicians like to talk family. They talk about their own during campaigns, to establish their credential as human beings. They talk about ours, the 'working families' and 'family values' upon which socio-economies rest. There is even a party called Family First. But let's get real. We wreck families all the time.

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  • RELIGION

    'Equal laws and equal rights ... dealt out to the whole community'. How close 161 years on?

    • Frank Brennan
    • 04 December 2015
    1 Comment

    'Tonight, gathered here in the Southern Cross Club in the national capital, gathered as Eureka's children. We affirm that there is room for everyone under the Southern Cross. I hope you will return to Canberra carrying the Southern Cross flag when we proclaim the Australia Republic on 1 January 2020 which will be two elections after Australia last had a monarchist leader of a major political party. Tony Abbott is the last of his type. Whether the prime minister honoured to witness the proclamation is Malcolm Turnbull, Bill Shorten or another matters not.' Annual Dinner for Eureka's Children, Southern Cross Club, Canberra, 3 December 2015.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    In memory of Leo

    • Diane Fahey
    • 24 March 2015
    8 Comments

    'If I'm deported back to Sri Lanka, torture is certain because I'm a Tamil.' On the day I hear of Leo's death I pass a tall maple, its star-like leaves, blood-red and flame-red, irradiated. The Australian government refused the visas applied for by Leo's family so that they might attend his funeral. As three Tamil men at a microphone sing a long hymn in Tamil the Basilica fills with an undertow of sound.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The masala stone

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 12 November 2014
    19 Comments

    Families, like mine, that are born from migration are reborn punctually through the scent of their cuisine. It's the 1970s and a grinding rhythm from the garden is audible through my window. Leaning over the ros kari, Jessie, our family cook, is crushing spices for the evening curry. With her two hands, she holds flat a cylindrical stone, the baba, and rolls it with her wrists back and forth, on its large rectangular base.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Hyphenated migrant's homeland homage

    • Bernard Appassamy
    • 01 November 2013
    7 Comments

    Leaving Mauritius for Australia changed everything and nothing. While I am now liberated from a suffocating horizon, I only need to step outside to sense the presence of a different horizon, one that sits instead as a formidable continent behind me. My understanding of home has also evolved. As a hyphenated migrant, my home does not have a main entry, but a few side doors.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Visiting detention is a political act

    • Nik Tan
    • 12 June 2013
    12 Comments

    The toddlers are from Syria. The boys are Sri Lankan Tamils, nervous as they will soon be flown to a Tasmanian facility for unaccompanied minors — one asks me if it will be cold. Visiting a detention centre is a small act to say that the Australian Government's policy of detaining asylum seeker men, women and children is not in our name.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Family drama reveals detention contortions

    • Fatima Measham
    • 16 January 2013
    15 Comments

    Ranjini turned up for a routine catch-up with her caseworker only to be told she was deemed a security risk and that she and her young sons would be detained indefinitely. Days later she found out she was pregnant. Last night, she gave birth to that child, a son who will be an Australian citizen.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Songs and stories of Sri Lanka's war

    • Martin Mulligan
    • 23 November 2011
    5 Comments

    After a meal cooked in the distinctive Jaffna way, the multi-talented Professor treated us to a repertoire of his own songs about his mother, victims of the 2004 tsunami, and those who had suffered during the war. Songs and stories of lived experience, translated into all the languages of Sri Lanka, might achieve more than the government's Reconciliation Commission.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Tales from the kingdom of force

    • Ben Coleridge
    • 16 August 2010
    2 Comments

    Flicking the frisbee with a well practised arm, Jimmy told me about his former home in Sri Lanka. 'Last time I was there, I was carrying bodies to their graves in my arms, even the bodies of friends.' Homer's Iliad is a poem of force in which, at all times, the human spirit is shown modified by its relations with force.

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