Crushing lives, with compassion
By JANENE CAREY
Australia’s immigration policy never seems to be out of the headlines, but until now we haven’t heard much from the people charged with implementing it. That’s about to change with the publication of Compassionate Bastard, a colourful insider’s account written by an ex-manager of the Villawood Detention Centre.
The author, Peter Mitchell, is the son of former UNE historian Dr Bruce Mitchell and former PLC deputy head, Jean Mitchell. He moved to Sydney after finishing school at Duval High, married his childhood sweetheart, and devoted his twenties to being a singer-songwriter for several bands playing the inner-city pub circuit.
When he joined the public service in February 1990, aged 30, he was looking for a mundane job that wouldn’t interfere too much with his poetry and song writing. Offered a choice between taxation, defence and immigration, he says he opted for the latter because ‘tax sounded like it had far too much maths, defence sounded a little bit brutal, and in immigration at least you’d be dealing with people.’
Waiting for his induction interview, he picked up some brochures describing the functions of the department he was about to join. “It seems naïve now, but it was not until then I realised that Australia regulated who could enter its borders, and who could stay. In some way I must have assumed someone was controlling the borders, but I had no idea that it might soon be me,” he writes in his memoir.
A big man, Peter found himself steered into the role of compliance officer because of his ability to ‘fill a door nicely’. Assigned to a small team and equipped with a walkie talkie and a set of handcuffs, he was soon hooked on the adrenalin rush of chasing down unlawful non-citizens – people who had overstayed their visas or entered the country illegally.
The title of the memoir reflects how he came to terms with working at what he calls 'the coalface of the human misery industry'. On advice from his team-mate, Kurt – ‘If you treat everyone with respect, and do the job as humanely as you can, then you’ll be better able to cope with being a bastard and crushing their lives’ – he resolved to act as compassionately as possible, within the bounds of the legislation. Or, as he puts it: “In short, to be a compassionate life-crushing bastard.”
Unfortunately, as a reader I found the pile-up of farcical situations in the first section of the book left me feeling that very little sympathy, let alone compassion, was on display. The anecdotes about capturing ‘duds’ - counterfeit citizens - are all played for laughs, featuring farts in the night, toes peeping through insulation material, and people with giveaway accents improbably claiming to have a speech impediment. They're the kind of blokey stories that you can imagine compliance officers swapping among themselves, possibly because focusing on the funny side helps create a self-preserving psychological distance from the work they have to do.
During his thirteen years with the Department, Peter climbed the public service ladder up to the executive service level, becoming the manager of the infamous Villawood Detention Centre in 1996, and dealing with hunger strikes, self-harm protests, mass escapes, and the occasional glacial stare from Immigration minister Philip Ruddock. He also managed 'Operation Safe Haven' at East Hills, an initiative that ministered to the desperate flood of refugees from Kosovo and East Timor in 1999.
Peter's account of a concert held at the East Hills camp provides a warm and touching moment of epiphany in the memoir. His other life as a musician emerged when he wrote and performed an original song about the Kosovars who'd fled Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing program in Yugoslavia. The audience of more than 500 refugees and colleagues greeted it with rapturous applause, demanded an encore, and joined in the chorus:
"It was a wonderful experience and one that nearly overwhelmed me. How had my professional journey brought me to such a joyous moment? Those nights seeking overstayers, the years of brutal pragmatism, the politics of Villawood - nothing had prepared me for such warm human involvement. It was a moment of elation, and of epiphany. I felt stirrings of deep emotions that I'd been repressing since the days when I wrote and played my music regularly. It all rushed to the surface as I stood singing and crying for the Kosovars and for the person I'd once been."
After leaving the Department of Immigration in 2003, Peter lived in Tamworth and then Newcastle with his wife Penny and their five cats. He wrote his memoir as part of a PhD in creative writing, which he began at the University of New England and completed at CQUniversity under the supervision of Professor Donna Lee Brien.
Compassionate Bastard, an unusual blend of non-partisan administrative memoir and boy's own adventure, with a bit of soul-searching thrown in, will be available in bookshops from August 29.
Dr Peter Mitchell with his PhD supervisor, Professor Donna Lee Brien, at a 2008 writing masterclass on Pumpkin Island, Qld
FROM THE BOOK:
The following excerpt from Compassionate Bastard describes a visit to Villawood Detention Centre by the Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, after two mass escapes had occurred within a few weeks of each other. One involved secret earthworks hidden by prayer mats in a room unwisely designated as a 'Mosque' and the second, most embarassingly, was from the highest security area of the centre:
The minister arrived with a retinue of the high and mighty from state headquarters and Canberra. At one point during the tour of the two escape sites, the minister and I entered the impressive system of steel gates and secure sally-ports that allowed two-at-a-time entry into Stage Three. As we were waiting to be let in, an awkward silence descended. The minister had hardly spoken throughout the tour, presumably to control the rage he felt at the escapes, but his fury was absolutely palpable. I was too intimidated to attempt conversational small talk but, as there was a mortifying delay in finding an ACM officer with a key, the minister felt disposed to ask me a question.
'So, would you say that Stage Three is our most secure facility?'
A seemingly harmless question, you might think, but to anyone who knew the minister - and especially to someone in my position - it was loaded with venom. Realising my peril, with nervous sweat soaking into the pyjamas I was wearing beneath my jacket (having rushed to Villawood following the call that had shattered my sleep at two-thirty that morning), I attempted to defuse the tension with a joke.
'Well, Minister, after last night when a huge hole was cut through it, I'd say that Stage Three was now our least secure facility.'
This didn't go over well. He turned his glacial countenance to me and glowered. I felt myself shrink as he emanated career-ending death rays towards me.
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From the 2011 Winter edition of Seasons magazine published by The Armidale Express, a description of Beyond Empathy's 'Just One Less' project, plus a profile of the fascinating woman who runs the organisation, Kim McConville.
The arts project tackling Armidale's alcohol issues
By JANENE CAREY
1. Just One Less
COMING soon to a public space near you, some dark evening in early July - an extravaganza of light and sound designed to make you stop and think, projected onto a tree, or a bridge, or the side of a building.
The startling outdoor screenings, based on stories collected from the local community about risk-taking behaviour in young people, binge drinking, and alcohol's place in our culture, are the culmination of a six-month project spearheaded by community arts organisation, Beyond Empathy.
They've been deliberately crafted to grab attention first, and raise awareness second, says Kim McConville, Beyond Empathy's cofounder and executive director.
"I call it the Wow factor," she said. "Where people go – WOW! What was that?"
The Just One Less project is trying to kick-start community conversation about a topic that is often dismissed as somebody else's problem.
"We're not trying to dictate to anyone about alcohol," Kim said. "But what's evident is that the problem belongs to everyone in the community. It's not just teenagers. It's also a parental issue. There seems to be some kind of blind spot that parents have around their children drinking."
Content for the screenings comes from the 250 personal stories collected by the mobile video booth stationed around town in February, and also from artworks about alcohol created by local high school students. These include a short drama called ‘Smashed’ by students from TAS, PLC and NEGS; clay animation films from O’Connor Catholic College; a documentary from Armidale High School and a mash-up film by students at Duval High School.
The giant outdoor projections planned for July 1-3 will be staged by internationally renowned artists Craig Walsh and Hiromi Tango as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art's touring project, Digital Odyssey.
Background stories 'Binge drinking tackled at the coalface' and 'City's drinking stories revealed'
2. Pushing for Change: Kim McConville
IN 2006, Kim McConville was named Social Entrepreneur of the Year for her work with Beyond Empathy, a community arts organisation dedicated to tackling tough social issues and raising awareness about problems faced by society's fringe dwellers.
She runs it from the downstairs floor of her home in north Armidale, but with an annual turnover of $2 million it is a substantial non-profit enterprise, employing seven full-time and three part-time staff, and contracting work to a pool of about 70 artistic professionals.
It's called 'Beyond Empathy' because its mission extends past audience enlightenment into the realm of action. "The arts are a wonderful tool for empathy," Kim explained, "but in order to change people's lives you need to go beyond that and build skills, capacity and capability in the community."
Like many of the people whose lives are influenced by Beyond Empathy, Kim knows about pushing boundaries, taking risks and steering dangerously close to the edge. "I think you do need to know," she said. "The best workers in this organisation have a sense of what it's like on the margins."
Her own experiences have certainly taught her some lessons about surviving hard times and dark places.
After finishing school and moving to Sydney at 18, she ran off the rails for two years, living every parent's nightmare. “In late 1984, my life came to a grinding halt. Unable to really hold down a full-time job, I got the sack and faced some tough decisions about trying to get my life back on track,” Kim said.
Her father, Ken McConville, Head of English at The Armidale School, commanding officer of the cadet corps, and the coach who'd just led the school's First XV rugby team on a triumphant tour of the United Kingdom, convinced her to return home and start afresh.
Experienced at working with challenging young people, he offered her a simple choice between training to be a teacher or training to be a nurse - simple choices were the only kind she was equipped to deal with at the time - and she opted to follow in his footsteps and enrol at Armidale Teachers' College.
Three weeks later, in what could have been a crushing blow to her plans to remake herself, her father was killed during an abseiling exercise with the cadets.
"He was my anchor, the one thing at the time that kept me centred and able to believe in myself," Kim said. "After he was killed, I was ready to throw it all in. I was going to go back to Sydney. And I remember my mother saying to me, 'I've just lost your father. I’m not going to lose you too. We've got to see this through.' So, I did."
In Kim's third year at the teachers' college, tragedy struck again. This time it was her boyfriend Sam Bailey, a former TAS student who'd been one of Ken McConville's rugby players on the UK tour.
He was working as a jackeroo in the Northern Territory when a car accident broke his spine and left him a quadriplegic.
Kim supported Sam through his rehabilitation, travelling from Armidale to Brisbane each weekend for six months and taking a teaching job in Moree to be near him when he went back to his family's farm at Croppa Creek.
Sam defied all the odds to become a farmer, pilot, author and inspirational public speaker, but those first few months on the farm were his lowest ebb, and one of the casualties was his relationship with Kim.
Meanwhile, she was facing her own challenges at Courallie High, as the newly appointed teacher for kids with learning difficulties. It was called the OA class; she can't remember what the letters stood for, but everyone knew it as the 'Only Aboriginals' class.
On her first day she realised the most pressing issue she faced wasn't literacy or numeracy, but getting these wild, tough youngsters who hated school to actually turn up and feel good about being there. "These were the kids that nobody else wanted in their classrooms," Kim said. "They were tough because they had to protect themselves, the system was failing them. It was about creating a space that they actually wanted to come to."
In a move that was to set the pattern for her use of the arts to reach out to youth on the margins, she enlisted the aid of local Aboriginal men from a band called Black Impact.
They held a series of music workshops and got everybody writing songs. It was hugely successful; the whole class participated.
Next, she roped in Aunty Paula Duncan, a local visual artist, to run arts workshops for them.
"We had this pumping class of kids that were turning up, who were fully engaged, who were learning things, who were deeply respectful," Kim said. "These kids were inspirational. To me it seemed like a no-brainer."
But although the students' academic results improved, teaching through an artistic, creative lens was well outside the box in the 1980s and Kim's methods received little appreciation.
She resigned her position after a year and spent much of the next decade in Sydney working behind the scenes in Aboriginal education, developing resources, policies and courses.
In 1997, suffering postnatal depression, she moved back to Moree with her husband and two daughters, and found the Aboriginal kids she'd taught previously were still on the fringes of the community, but now they had children of their own, so she began developing arts-led community projects to engage them.
"I applied for a grant from council and I got $1500. We painted a lot of the light poles in the town, and I worked with the kids who were on suspension from school," Kim said.
The next time she applied for a grant she got $60,000, which marked the start of operations on a larger scale.
Kim spent six years as the community development manager for Big hART in Moree, working on films and performances that were screened on television and played at the Adelaide and Melbourne International Arts Festivals.
During that time she met the two people she regards as Beyond Empathy’s co-founders.
One was film director Phillip Crawford, who worked with her on an award-winning docudrama about hurt experienced by young people while growing up; the other was businesswoman and philanthropist Anna Buduls, who financed McConville and Crawford to start their own organisation in 2004.
These days, Beyond Empathy receives funding from a variety of private benefactors, corporate and family foundations and government grants. In 2007, it successfully applied to the Australia Council for the Arts to be recognised as a key producer of high quality community-based artistic work, and became one of a handful of community, arts and cultural development organisations to be funded until 2013.
In her role as executive director, Kim devotes much of her time to cultivating and maintaining relationships with those who support Beyond Empathy financially. People give to people, not causes, and she’s the human face of the organisation, keeping everyone connected, engaged and informed about project developments and outcomes.
“Kim has a marvellous ability to galvanise and motivate the support of investors and the people whose lives she seeks to improve,” said Jan Owens from Social Ventures Australia, announcing that Kim McConville had won their Inspirational Social Entrepreneur Award in 2006. “She represents a new kind of leadership – we need more Kims.”
PHOTO CAPTIONS:
Craig Walsh's digital projection 'Humanature', Gladstone Qld, 2010. Image courtesy of the artist
The 'Just One Less' mobile video booth, with project coordinator Narelle Jarry and lead artist Jonathon Larsen
Kim McConville, Executive Director of Beyond Empathy, the organisation behind Armidale's Just One Less project
Kim with her son in Moree during the 'Connections' project, 2008. The artists pictured are Adam Rish, Aunty Paula Duncan and Garry Shead
Profile of Emma Buzo, published on the front page of the Armidale Express Extra, 9 March.
Available here
