A project to repopulate the Mingoola valley is being closely watched as a template for resettling refugees to country areas, after initial approaches to refugee agencies by the Mingoola Progress Association (MPA) were met with concerns that refugees wouldn’t want to move out from cities.
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This has proven to be anything but the case, with two new families now settling into the area and more on the way. They are living in once-abandoned farm houses that have been restored through community working bees and assistance from organisations such as Habitat for Humanity and Settlement Services. The adult members of the families are picking up local work, clearing pine tree, picking pumpkins and loading hay, and have been lined up for tree pruning on Stanthorpe orchards once the first frost hits.
Mingoola Public School reopened last week with six brand new pupils, after having gone into recess at the end of last year due to lack of students, reflecting the problems the small but energetic Mingoola community was facing.
MPA’s Julia Harpham said the initiative came off of a community action plan formed in 2013 with the objective of encouraging people from rural and remote backgrounds to settle in the area.
“We have an aging population, and we wanted to encourage young people to the area to keep the school going,” she said.
“We need this for our community to thrive and prosper into the future.”
Mingoola has had a tough few years, suffering through flood and drought, but the community opted to be proactive about protecting its future. Ms Harpham said many large farms had two or three houses on them that used to be occupied by workers but now stand empty.
“They’re structurally sound but need some work to make them habitable.”
The local Rotary club has also offered its assistance and the two new families that have resettled are also up to the challenging of doing more work on their new homes while they occupy them.
What appeals to them most is the opportunity to have their own garden and grow food for the household, much as they did back home.
The two families come from Burundi, a small African country next to Rwanda which has been torn apart by civil war. They’ve spent a long time in refugee camps, ending up in Wollongong. Ms Harpham said efforts by the MPA to connect with such potential settlers were frustrating until a chance conversation between a Barnaby Joyce staffer and his counterpart working for Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells resulted in a connection to Emmanuel Musoni, chair of the Great Lakes Agency for Peace and Development.
Mr Musoni has made several visits to Mingoola (some with paintbrush in hand) to pave the way for the new settlers, who themselves had exploratory trips before committing to the move.
The families come from a farming background, and are keen to apply their skills in their new home. Amazingly they find the landscape similar to that of their homeland.
They were the first families to put their hands up when the opportunity arose, as they didn’t want to bring up their children in the city. Renate, one of the wives, hadn’t had a garden for the past 16 years due to the struggles the family had endured so is now very keen to get her hands dirty.
The families are very community-minded and want to be involved in all the local events, and have established their own church (The Revival Pentecostal Church) with everyone most welcome to its services each Sunday at 10am in the Mingoola Hall. Ms Harpham hopes other communities will follow suit and be proactive in attracting settlement to their own districts, but she stresses that it’s imperative to develop a plan.
“You can’t just plop people down and expect it to work,” she said.
The MPA has received very little resistance to the initiative, with Ms Harpham saying maybe 99 per cent of the community was really positive, with the remaining one per cent just having some concerns, such as job opportuni-ties, which have been addressed.
She said deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce’s office has been hugely instrumental and supportive of the effort, seeing how it benefits not only the people moving in but also those already there. High level discussions continue, with Ms Harpham hoping to reach the immigration minister with what some refer to as ‘the Mingoola Model’.
“We’ve welcomed migrants before,” she said. “We’re doing it again. We’ve just got to give people some choice about where they’re settled.”
