COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA - Humanities Assignment

Internal Code: MAS4405

Humanities Assignment :

Case Study: ‘La musique, la danse, les amis, le rire’ (music, dance, friends, laughter). These were part of Camille;s1 life before civil unrest erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo, separating her from family members, and forcing her to abandon everything to seek asylum. Safe now, Camille finds life in her tiny unit to be sadly lacking in music, dance, friends and laughter. Camille was part of a small group of refugee women who participated in an ethnographic project with eight women who arrived in Australia as refugees. The quote above is drawn from the first author& reflections during fieldwork over a 12-month period in 2008 and 2009, where the women participated in interviews and constructed their own digital stories to document narratives about their mental health and wellbeing. Their stories followed the intricacies and complexities of their everyday lives indicating a mix of resilience and despair. There were instances of personal agency, producing feelings of well-being, as well as struggle, loneliness, isolation and states of mental health that reflected harshly in their physical bodies and family lives. The study did, however, show that for women who were sole parents, the settlement journey could be a challenging and often lonely one. Indeed, participating women were supported by human service agencies upon their arrival and continued to intermittently access agencies where basic services such as housing, employment and language classes were concerned. However, they felt largely alone in establishing their lives in Australia. The women themselves called it ‘learning to stand on our own two feet’, and they were conscious of not asking too much from agencies or from their communities. Their stories touched us, evoking respect for their resilience, but raising questions about how such families can respond to their own aspirations, when they have access to fewer social relations and community capital, and experience tight financial circumstances, paired with limited basic support from human service agencies because of tight funding.