There’s a hum of excitement as Karen community members gather around Nhill Lake, a small freshwater lake in the centre of the township of Nhill. The lake looks inviting on such a warm afternoon.
It has not rained for some time, not unusual for the Wimmera this time of year. The tall gum trees are full of corellas making a racket. This is the Wimmera in summer. A filmmaker is setting up his camera by the edge of the lake, Karen community members are busy setting up a scene to be filmed. CFA Nhill Brigade members and local CFA District staff hover around waiting for instruction.
A very unique fire safety film is being created in partnership with CFA, the Nhill Learning Centre, the University of Adelaide and most critically the local Karen community.
Nhill was a struggling rural town with a dwindling population and empty shops lining the main street. The community was ageing, the town was too. Then in 2009 a local business manager came up with an idea. The business, a duck processing plant needed workers but could not recruit anyone from around the local district, and it was becoming a problem.
Hearing about the plight of the Karen people, refugees from Myanmar (now Burma) who had been living in refugee camps across the border in Thailand and had now been settled in Australia and eager for work, the local business man made a momentous decision. He decided to offer jobs to the Karen people in the processing plant in Nhill. It would mean they would have to move up to the town, as commuting from Werribee would be out of the question. So, they came to Nhill and it has paid off, not just for the local duck processing plant but for the whole town. The new Karen community have boosted the local town’s economy, increased employment and increased enrolments at the local school. It has been nearly 10 years since the Karen community started to call Nhill home.
The weather conditions here in Victoria and particularly in the Wimmera are very different to Thailand and Burma. Not far from the equator, Burma and Thailand have very little bushfire risk; it is too wet and humid for fire to start and move quickly over there. Here in western Victoria it is a different story. It is dry, very dry and at the moment the grass is all cured. And it is hot over summer, a dry heat very different to that in Burma. If you ask the local Karen community they will tell you that they do not mind the heat, it is actually the cold winters that are more difficult to get used to. But they are willing to put on the extra layers as living here in Nhill is a far cry from life in a refugee camp.
We move on to the Nhill community garden to film another scene. The community garden is bigger than I had anticipated and quite impressive. A rich green colour permeates through each of the veggie plots where a myriad of vegetables and herbs look fastidiously cared for by the Karen community. The Karen people obviously have a very green thumb. And it is here that I get a much greater sense of a love of food, and the care taken to grow it. I am told that the community garden pays a pivotal role in the life of the local Karen people. I can see even today that many are gathered, tending to their gardens and watering the plants.
And here comes the CFA truck, part of the Nhill Lake film scene. The local CFA firefighters here in Nhill have been really keen to be involved with the project, keen to better connect with the local Karen community and keen to help them understand more about fire restrictions and what CFA are all about. I watch the scene unfold in front of me, everyone is working together, laughing, joking and it dawns on me that this is what will build the local understanding and trust.
One of the people out with us on the film shoot is Annette Creek, from the Nhill Learning Centre. She explains the steep learning curve the town has been on to learn about the Karen people and she is full of wisdom and compassion. I ask what the Learning Centre did before the Karen people arrived and she smiles explaining not nearly as much as they do now. Learning English, one of the many programs the Learning Centre offers, is an important stepping stone for many Karen who eagerly want to find employment and buy a home. But she explains it can take time, as some of the Karen people have never attended any formal learning and cannot read in their own language.
To appreciate the need for the fire safety film being produced we need to go back a few years when a local Karen community member was taken to court for lighting a fire outside during a Total Fire Ban to cook the fish he had caught. It is common practice to cook the fish that you have caught on hot coals next to the river or Nhill Lake. How would a newly arrived person from a country close to the equator understand the fire risk we face here in Victoria and South East Australia. If you have not grown up with bushfire how would you know about it? If you could not speak or read English well how would you learn about fire safety and fire behaviour? The magistrate also realised that it was not so much a matter of enforcement but a matter of education. The magistrate asked CFA to deliver some fire safety sessions, which they did over two years ago.
And this is where the story could have finished if it weren’t for a new approach to engaging multicultural communities that was advocated by the University of Adelaide in a new Toolkit designed to help Emergency Services better communicate the risks of natural hazards. The approach advocated for in the toolkit is called the Community Based Participatory Approach.
And this is where the story changes, as it becomes one that puts the community alongside the CFA in working together to come up with a fire safety education resource that is culturally relevant and meaningful to the Karen community. It is not the CFA telling the community what to do; it is not translating a bunch of words or publications for them to understand. It is about working with the local Karen community who have a local fire safety concern - in this case, fire restrictions, and asking them how best to communicate this back to their community. This approach challenges many of the assumptions associated with traditional risk communication. No longer are communities treated as empty knowledge vessels, requiring ‘expert’ information to help them behave in a safe manner during fire danger periods. Rather, this new approach involves an interactive process between CFA and migrant communities, which recognises that if risk messages respond to cultural needs - values, practices, and beliefs - they are far more likely to be heard and trusted.
In the case of the Karen here in Nhill, they decided to make a film. Stories and images are key elements of communication for this group. They will act in the film, and it is all spoken in the Karen language, in locations that are meaningful to them, such as the community garden. It also involves the local CFA to help familiarise the local community with who they are and what they do. In the Burmese villages and refugee camps, there was no fire service. If you ever needed the fire service in the city you would have to pay; in fact, you almost always had to pay or bribe officials or authority figures in Burma (particularly if you were Karen). That is why there is often a lot of fear and misunderstanding about who the CFA are and what they want from newly arrived Karen community members. This film will help ease that fear and develop mutual understanding and trust.
As we finish filming I get a much better appreciation of the Nhill township, of the importance of being open and accepting of diverse cultures and of being kind and welcoming. I also see how valuable the Community Based Participatory Approach has been in allowing the Karen community to get involved in a solution that is about them and their fire safety.
It is Cultural Diversity Week this week (17th to the 25th of March), and the more I think about this project the more I think this project really epitomises the way we can work with the multicultural community. It shows that when asked, communities can come up with their own solutions for engaging one another and take a share of the responsibility. We just need to let them.