Australian of the Year nominees reveal meaningful personal objects
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Version 0 of 1. At first glance the object chosen by the Victorian nominee for Australian of the Year, Paris Aristotle, for a special exhibition showing the public a new side of the nominees, seems to obscure the humanity of his work. The chief executive of Foundation House, which provides services to torture survivors, chose a mind map of the organisation’s goals and structure, sketched by its first chairperson, to exhibit at the National Museum of Australia alongside the personal objects of his fellow nominees. It looks like an expansive family tree, a dull organisational chart, or perhaps the infamous diagram of Labor’s Knowledge Nation policy derided as Noodle Nation. But Aristotle sees in the map the partnerships and networks that are needed to deliver services to people who have suffered terrible experiences, a moral anchor that reminds him of the organisation’s purpose. It’s that moral bearing Aristotle hopes Australia will rediscover, by realising that refugees are the same as any one of us. “They’re affected by their experiences just as any one of us would have been affected had we been unfortunate enough to be in their situation at that point in time,” he told Guardian Australia at the exhibition’s launch on Thursday. The good works of the nominees are as much on display as their personal objects. Alan Mackay-Sim, a biomolecular scientist nominated by Queensland, chose a large sculpture of the human nose because of his work investigating the potential to harvest stem cells from the nose. The mining magnate Twiggy Forrest’s anti-slavery advocacy is represented by a brick given to the Western Australian nominee by Indian villagers who had escaped bonded labour. But other objects are less directly tied to the nominees’ work. Andrea Mason, an Indigenous leader and the nominee from the Northern Territory, chose a photo of her grandmother, to remind her of her roots, and an athletics trophy she won at age six to say that natural talent also requires hard work to come to fruition. Kate Swaffer, a dementia advocate representing South Australia, choose a wooden sculpture of a seagull, which usually hangs in her office, to represent the independence of spirit needed to persist in the fight for better services for people with dementia. The objects will stay at the National Museum of Australia until February, after the Australian of the Year is chosen in late January, then go on a tour of Australia, including Liverpool and Newcastle. The museum’s curator, Laina Hall, told Guardian Australia the objects gave members of the public a “different insight” into the recipients because they showed their core values such as representing a community or taking risks. Hall said the objects were a reminder of what an individual can do and can contribute to society. Aristotle told Guardian Australia he hoped his work and the object he chose would help “develop a deeper appreciation of what refugees and asylum seekers have been through”. “They can make the same contributions to Australia, and they do make the same contributions as the rest of us.” Aristotle called for an end to “binary, adversarial debate” around people smuggling so that Australians could consider the long-term mental health consequences of detention. “Maybe we can find another, even better pathway through that for asylum seekers that is as reflective of how good we are at dealing with refugees we bring into the country, which we are probably the best in the world at settling. “I personally believe we can find better and different ways to respond while also dealing with the terrible practice of people smuggling and awful drownings that occur as a result of that.” The New South Wales nominee, Deng Adut, a former child soldier, refugee and lawyer, is one of the success stories of the humanitarian program which Aristotle spoke about. The objects have lessons not just for their owners, but for the public as well. Kate Swaffer told Guardian Australia that she hoped the wooden seagull would encourage people to keep going and fly in their own direction, as she had done after being diagnosed with dementia. “I was told to go home, give up work, give up study, get my end-of-life affairs in order and start going to aged-care daycare one day a month, at the age of 49,” she said. Swaffer said although she’d needed support with her lifestyle, including studying a double degree fulltime, it was “not logical” to go from that to “able to do nothing” the next day. “I’ve had to take dementia care into the human rights space.” The wind beneath the seagull’s wings represents the lesson we need to “teach people to live with dementia, not just to go home and die from it”. So whether it’s a mind map, a brick or a wooden seagull each of the objects displayed in the exhibition tells us something about the ethical orientation of the nominees. And unlike the noodley appendages of the Knowledge Nation diagram, the map laid out by these inspirational Australians is not as hard to follow as first appears. |