Freedom fighter's new frontier

David Nyuol Vincent: 'While most of Australia is overwhelmingly not racist, there are certain elements of racism in the community. And it's enough to make you feel sometimes like this isn't your home.'

David Nyuol Vincent survived a childhood in war-torn Sudan and 17 years in a refugee camp. Now he continues the struggle for peace as an Australian.

DAVID Vincent was eight when he and his father fled Sudan. Over most of two decades, he endured training as a child soldier for the Sudan People's Liberation Army, bomb raids, starvation, land mines and cholera. He came to Australia, aged 26, in 2004. Vincent settled in quickly, gained a degree in political science and criminology from Melbourne University, and became a community leader.

In this extract from his memoirs, published to mark the first anniversary of independence for South Sudan, he reflects on life in Australia.

IN SEPTEMBER 2007, Sudanese teenager Liep Gony was bashed to death in Noble Park. Twenty-four-year-old Clinton Rintoull pleaded guilty to murder and is serving 20 years in jail. Throughout that year, stories had appeared in the media about so-called Sudanese gangs being violent and anti-social and causing trouble. It is true that some Sudanese kids get intoxicated with alcohol, get into fights and can be disengaged. But this can be said about youth of all ethnic backgrounds.

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Mostly they were just kids hanging out in groups. When people saw them together, they made the assumption that they were a gang. I could be hanging out with my soccer boys in a peaceful gathering, but someone would see 20 black men together and conclude that we're a gang.

Liep was not a troublemaker; he loved playing basketball and hanging out with his friends. His funeral reinforced the senselessness of a teenage boy's life lost. A boy who had escaped the horrors of war-ravaged Sudan and come to a country that was meant to value freedom and security - only to die a brutal death.

In the camp in Africa and as a child soldier, I had buried my own friends over the years without shedding a tear. But that day I cried for Liep. And for the first time since I had arrived in Australia, I wished that I was back in Kakuma, the refugee camp in Kenya. I felt that I hated Australia the way I had been taught to hate the northern Sudanese.

I thought I had seen everything in Africa. I thought I was now incapable of being shocked by anything. But Liep's death shocked me. Violent death was normal in Africa. I struggled to comprehend how this could happen in Australia.

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Freedom fighter's new frontier