The PEOPLE AUSTRALIA FORGOT

A controversial deal between the Australian government and the Obama administration in 2016 has seen more than 600 asylum seekers from Australia’s off-shore detention centres resettled in the US. Anne Fullerton meets a group of Aussie expats who are determined to do what their leaders didn’t: give these women and men a fair go and help them start over

When entrepreneur and former fashion designer Fleur Wood heard that 1250 asylum seekers from Australia’s off-shore detention centres were being resettled in the US, she was struck with empathy.

It was 2016 and the men, women and children who had spent years languishing on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island would now be transferred to a country on the other side of the world as part of a deal between the Australian government and the Obama administration. After so much uncertainty and despair, this was their chance to start over – but not without enormous challenges.

“I knew what a big ask it is to resettle in a foreign country,” says Wood, who had moved from Sydney to New York with her husband and children in 2013. “I came here with a partner, a job, my family, money in the bank. I just couldn’t imagine what life was going to be like for these refugees who had no money, who sometimes had little education, a language barrier, and who were suffering severe PTSD from spending years living in terrible conditions where their basic human rights were denied. I also knew I wasn’t going to be the only Australian in America who felt like that.”

Wood began building a network of Australians living in the US who were keen to help out, and in 2018 she co-founded the not-for-profit Ads-Up (Aussie Diaspora Steps Up) with fellow Australian Ben Winsor. Their aim was to do what the Australian government would not: provide a social network and financial assistance to help refugees begin their lives in a new country.