Talking to water: Memory, gender and environment for Hazara refugees in Australia

Abstract

This article explores the life histories of 12 Hazara women in south-eastern Australia, each of whom arrived from 2005 onwards. It traces the environmental dimensions of their experiences of home, flight and new settlement, with a sustained focus on how water played a role in their journeys. There has been little discussion to date about the gendered relationships to place and environments for refugees, nor on how the well-publicised depictions of refugee journeys are often gendered, although seldom recognised as such. During in-depth oral history interviews, these Hazara refugee women talked about 'home' and 'water', depicting them as entwined concepts in their recollected early lives in Afghanistan, their long, enforced residence in transit ghettos and their new experiences in south-eastern Australia. The 'everyday' and material experiences they recall and narrate about 'homes' and 'water' in each of these locations of their past and present point not only to the environmental context and implications of their experiences but to the processes of mourning that accompany such traumatic journeys.