Benjamin Law speaks with model Adut Akech Bior about growing up in a refugee camp, the hard work behind modelling and the insulting moment no Australian should find acceptable
Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we're told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they're given. This week he talks to Adut Akech Bior. The Australian fashion model, 19, was born in what is now South Sudan, spent several years in refugee camps and arrived here in 2008.
You’ve gained a sense of gratitude by having gone through these experiences. Have you also acquired trauma? There’s definitely trauma. It took time to adjust to Australia [after Akech and her family arrived in Adelaide in 2008]. It was weird that we didn’t have to go to sleep feeling scared or hungry. I judged my Australian-born cousins as being ungrateful and spoiled. But they don’t know what it’s like to come from hardship, so I had to learn that they’re not going to act or think the same way.
It was insulting; it is racist and it is pure, straight-up racism and whoever doesn’t see it as racist has a problem. Australia is my home, and it affects me when these types of things happen. A lot of people were saying, “Oh, it’s just a common error. It’s a mistake.” When something happens constantly, it’s no longer “a mistake”. A lot of people think that to be racist, you have to say, “You don’t belong in this country,” but racism doesn’t just come in one form.I’m very good at arm-wrestles.
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