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February-May 2021, Melbourne, Australia.
It was the 11th of December 2020. Farhad Bandesh was ready to spend his 39th birthday in detention, when his phone started to ring. A six-month temporary visa was granted to him, and he had ten minutes to give an address of residence to a caseworker. “I was born again,” he said. He was free. Bandesh is an artist, a winemaker, and a Kurdish refugee. He is part of a persecuted minority from Iran who has historically suffered from human rights offences and the denying of their cultural rights. In July 2013, he fled his hometown, Ilam, in Kurdish Iran, where he worked as a guitar maker and plasterer. He arrived in Jakarta, Indonesia, a historic rendezvous city for refugees seeking asylum in Australia. Then he sailed for Christmas Island, only to be detained and exiled to Manus Island for six years. The Australian Government, under Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, resumed offshore processing at Nauru and Papua New Guinea in August 2012. Commonly referred to as the ‘pacific solution’. Designed as a method of punishment to deter refugees seeking asylum from setting foot on Australian shores. Bandesh is one of 200 refugees which had been evacuated from Manus Island for mental health treatment under the Medevac legislation in 2019. With 65 other refugees, he was taken to Melbourne and detained on the third floor of the Mantra hotel in Preston for nine months. He was then transferred to the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation for another eight months before his release. Jenell Quinsee's residence is the address that Bandesh gave to the caseworker and the place he has called home since. Jenell is an activist, a songwriter and a friend of Farhad, who regularly went to Manus Island to visit him. They wrote a number of songs together including, The Big Exhale. Eventually getting to perform it at the Sidney Myer Bowl for the Symphonic Song Circle, a concert inspired by journalist Behrouz Boochani’s book No Friend but the Mountains. He has also found support from the Yarra Valley winemakers community, who donated two tons of Shiraz grapes to him. Bandesh started the production of his wine, Time to Fly. Named after a drawing he created in detention of a flying bird, it has become the symbol of his resistance. Today, Bandesh, in his freedom, continues to battle Australia’s cruel immigration detention system for his brothers and sisters who remain detained and caged. The Guardian APA Stories Award |
