On Sunday, the first day of Refugee Week, a 20-year-old who was born in a Tanzanian refugee camp put Australia ahead at in the FIFA World Cup. Nestory Irankunda’s 27th-minute strike against Türkiye sent Australians into euphoria with strangers hugging, scarves waving and a nation united for ninety minutes in a way it rarely manages at any other time.
As we’re all well aware, Australia went on to win 2-0.
Irankunda called it a dream come true. The kind of moment, as he put it afterwards, that makes you want to thank everyone who believed in you. Watching the footage from watch parties around the country, including jumping scenes at Federation Square in Melbourne, the whole country had agreed, just for one night, on something.
The timing could not have been more pointed. This year’s Refugee Week theme, “A Million Stories,” celebrates the one million humanitarian visas Australia has issued since 1947, when this country first opened its doors to four thousand displaced people from postwar Europe. Irankunda is one more thread in that million-strong tapestry. Irankunda was born to Burundian parents who fled civil war, raised first in a camp, then brought to Australia as an infant. His story is not an exception to the Australian story. It is the Australian story.
He is not alone in the green and gold. The Socceroos squad taking on the world in North America is drawn from at least fifteen different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In the lead-up to the tournament, the players released a video addressing the rise in anti-immigration sentiment at home, head-on. “The Socceroos aren’t just a team, we are a reflection of modern Australia,” said midfielder Jackson Irvine. “Our diversity is our strength,” added Mat Leckie. It was a deliberate, unmistakably political statement from a group of athletes who usually let their feet do the talking.
And here is the juxtaposition I cannot get past. Pauline Hanson and her supporters will happily celebrate that goal. They will share the Federation Square videos, feel the same lump in the throat the rest of us did, and call Irankunda one of ours. Yet this is a movement built on the idea that Australia is being “swamped” by people exactly like him. Hanson has been saying some version of this since her maiden speech in 1996, when she warned the country was “in danger of being swamped by Asians.” She has told a sitting senator, Mehreen Faruqi, to “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.” She has stood in Parliament and argued, more recently, that there are “no good Muslims.” Each time, the defence is the same: she isn’t racist, she’s just worried about people who refuse to assimilate, who cling to identity politics instead of embracing Australian culture.
So, I ask, sincerely, what does assimilation actually mean? Do Hanson’s supporters know whether Irankunda practises a religion, and if so, which one? Do they know if he speaks Kirundi at home, whether he keeps close ties to the Burundian community, or whether he wears anything other than a Socceroos jersey on a Sunday? I’d guess they don’t know, and I’d guess they don’t think they need to, because on Sunday night, he scored a goal, and that was apparently proof enough of belonging. But that is precisely the problem. The same movement that demands migrants prove their loyalty, strip away their difference, and earn their place, will hand out honorary citizenship the moment someone is useful or impressive enough to be worth claiming. Irankunda would not tick a single box Hanson’s supporters usually demand of new arrivals. He just happens to be brilliant with a football.
I know this contradiction in my bones, because I have lived it. I was born in Lebanon and came to Australia with my parents when l was just one year old and I have spent my whole life holding two worlds in the one body. My heritage and my nationality were never in competition as they made each other possible. I am not less Australian for speaking my grandparents’ language or cooking their food. I thank whatever luck or fate brought my parents to this country, because our differences, stitched together, are what make Australia worth being proud of, not a threat to it.
That is what made Sunday so moving, and so maddening.
For one day, in one square, we were the country Refugee Week asks us to imagine one that is open, grateful, undivided by where anyone was born. Nestory Irankunda gave us that joy freely, the same way his teammates and a million others before him have built this country freely.
The least we owe him, and everyone like him, is to stop deciding which of their stories we are willing to celebrate.