At this year’s Social Justice Dinner, we were delighted to bring together our community of passionate social justice advocates and organisations, pro bono allies and committed supporters. As CEO Jonathon Hunyor said on the night, this is the ‘village’: the network of support and shared expertise empowering our work for positive change. It was uplifting to see that reflected in a room buzzing with energy.
We were inspired by the wisdom offered by our guest speaker, Australian-Tamil author Shankari Chandran. In conversation with host Fran Kelly, Shankari spoke about race and racism in Australia, questions of identity, truth-telling and colonialism, and the value of civil society.
Continuing a theme of Jonathon’s speech, Shankari generously shared the experiences of her community, expressing concerns that homogeneity and assimilation were being promoted under the guise of ‘social cohesion’.
‘Those words terrify me,’ she said. ‘In Sri Lanka, what that meant was the majority asserted an idea of what it meant to have a national identity, what it meant to have national values, and asserted it against a minority.’
‘[In Australia,] we take for granted the protections of the rule of law. Now, if you’ve come from a country that has had that stripped away, then you don’t ever take it for granted,’ she added.
But Shankari also reflected on how the legal sector and social justice advocates work effectively to resist these harms, both in Sri Lanka and in Australia.
‘When the Sri Lankan government and the army and the police turned on its people, it was civil society that stood next to us and tried to make it stop…’
‘It is these organizations and many others, many others here, many lawyers here, who stand up to the erosion of the rule of law, who tell us when those rights are being diminished, and to explain to us when we have rights, we also have responsibilities.’
For Shankari, storytelling is another way of doing the work to defend rights and tackle injustice – including personal injustices she has faced in her career as an Australian-Tamil writer. These experiences have influenced her writing, particularly the 2023 Miles Franklin Award-winning Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
‘I wrote a novel about colonization, dispossession, about the forced migration after a war, and then the creation of a new home in Australia, which felt like one of many Australian stories.’
But publishers queried the book’s relevance for an Australian audience.
‘To be told that it was not Australian was… very revealing to me about what we think it means to be Australian.’
As she explained, these contested histories and identities are woven throughout the story of Australia, making the work of reconciliation and truth-telling all the more urgent.
‘All colonisers need to tell themselves a story about who they have colonised and how they have colonised… So we had to tell ourselves this other story, that loosely, Britain came, settled the land and built the country,’ Shankari says.
‘There was this foundational lie that became a foundational ‘truth’.’
But for Shankari resisting these narratives and changing the stories we tell, to get closer to the truth, is part of the reason she writes fiction. In this way, she doesn’t view her writing career as far removed from her previous job as a social justice lawyer. Shankari recalled a conversation with a survivor of the Sri Lankan civil war.
‘He said: “In Sri Lanka, we cannot tell the truth. And without telling the truth, there is no healing for us. There is no reconciliation for us.”’
“’And so tell the truth any way you can.’”
Thank you to everyone who attended the dinner, and a special thanks those who participated in our auction or made a donation. With your support, we were able to raise more $100,000 to fund the fight for social justice.
