Mariam Maz Hakim is currently a radio announcer at 104.7 in Canberra, a Refugee Week Ambassador and a Welcome to Australia Ambassador.
A couple of days ago, the AFTRS graduate gave a lecture to the Canberra TedX Women’s conference.
Mariam comes from a traditional Afghan family where music and entertainment played a significant role in her upbringing. Her family arrived in Australia in 1987 after her father fled Kabul with his family during the invasion by the Soviet Union.
For the first couple of minutes of the lecture, Mariam recounted how her parents, while making the journey to the boat that would take them to Australia, lost their toenails from excessive walking, all the while carrying their 6 month old child – Mariam’s older sister.
The young announcer then launched a defence of refugees in the Australian context: ‘We first arrived in what is now known as Villawood detention centre – 26 years ago…It’s scary to think, that had my parents not escaped by boat and Australia had not accepted us, I’d be living the life of my first cousin Fariah‘.
Mariam’s first cousin lives just north of Kabul, wanted to be a doctor, but was only allowed to go to school until she was 10 years old. She shares her room with 4 other people. Her task everyday is to dress and feed her eight siblings.
‘I wake up wondering what heels I’ll wear to go – the furthest Fariah can go out of the house is her front garden’.
Speaking more generally, Mariam questioned the language surrounding the Australian asylum seeker/refugee debate: ‘I am so incredibly grateful for all the opportunities that this country has provided, but when I hear people saying – send them back, they are not welcome here – I feel as if me and my family are being directly addressed.’
‘When you think about ‘boat people’, do you see a boat full of hope, or a boat full of threats?’
Instead of accepting a definition of her family as illegal, she instead described her family (her father is an architect and mother a homemaker) as ‘devoted and loving, working hard in respectable fields and an asset to society today’.
‘Australia is the lucky country, how generous are we going to be with all this opportunity? Many refugees are thirsty to learn, to achieve, and to dream, but they may never have that opportunity’.
‘I will continue to work in this society, in the media, and hopefully I will be a model to anybody who has unconscious stereotypes about refugees and asylum seekers’.
Watch the full lecture here.