Sudanese refugees face new hurdles in Australia

Caroline Overington:

IT is 2pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, and Thomas Thiik, 21, has just been released from prison.

"I've been free for two hours," he said, dipping into a pizza box. "So I'm having a celebration."

Thiik (pronounced "Tik") went to jail for three months for driving without a licence, a crime that he, as a newly arrived refugee from Sudan, says he could not comprehend.

"I was told when I arrived in Australia that I must work," he said.

"But I did not have a licence. So how can I get to work?"

Despite being pulled over many times - and warned, and fined, and then suspended - Thiik kept driving, until he was imprisoned.

"It wasn't too bad," he said of jail. "I didn't get into fights, like I do in Toowoomba. The Aborigines here, they bash me up."

Thiik's problems with his car and his neighbours are examples of the difficulties being faced by Sudanese and other African refugees, who are arriving in Australia in unprecedented numbers.

Rhiannon Maasakker, 17, who shares a house with a Sudanese, Ajang Bior Ajang, said the new arrivals were generally well accepted by the mainstream Toowoomba population.

But they were more likely to be pulled over by police, and "for some reason" some local Aborigines gave them problems.

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