A country welcome: emotional wellbeing and belonging among Iraqi women in rural Australia

© 2006 Dr. Katherine Elizabeth VaseyThe Iraqi women in this study have made Australia their ‘home’ in the years following the Gulf War in 1991, and are the first generation to move to a small rural town in Australia. The experiences documented in this thesis are based on 15 months of ethnographic research, between March 2003 and June 2004, with twenty-six Iraqi women, sixteen service providers and members of the communities of which they are a part. The focus of the study is on Iraqi women’s experiences of resettlement, their sense of emotional wellbeing and belonging. By and large, studies of refugee mental health attribute ‘refugee suffering’ to pre-migration experiences, rooted to the cultures of peoples’ home countries, principally through war, persecution and trauma, and how this legacy impacts upon women’s emotional wellbeing and ability to belong in resettlement. In many ways, it is convenient for host countries to ascribe refugee mental health problems to pre-migration experiences because the power dynamics of integration, the complex micro politics and the consequences of encounters with the Australian system are made indiscernible. The emergent discourse not only obscures the economic, historical and social conditions that lie at the heart of processes of displacement, but also ignores, silences and speaks on behalf of refugees. This thesis demonstrates that Iraqi women’s articulations of their experiences of displacement and resettlement are anchored in and deeply affected by the material, legal and cultural circumstances of the local and national places they inhabit. Accordingly, their accounts of emotional suffering are in part framed within the experiences of war and persecution, both past and present, but they are also entangled and embedded in their contemporary realities resulting from multiple social barriers in resettlement, including cultural and religious racism, social invisibility, exclusion and being ‘othered’ in their daily lives, which impacts upon their wellbeing and sense of belonging in Australia. The experiences documented in this thesis not only privileges Iraqi women’s own understandings of displacement and resettlement and the ways in which they frame the reality of their lives, but also implicates the Australian system and structural axes of inequality in their resettlement experiences, in an attempt to move beyond western epistemological explanations that define the form and content of refugee lives as well as their illness and wellbeing