Meet new columnist HAMOUDI AL-SAGHIR, a remarkable young Syrian refugee with a terrible story of survival. In his first column, he shares a glimpse of his confronting past and his youthful optimism as he thrives at studying law at the ANU. 

Australians were recently glued to their screens watching the Socceroos get rinsed in the Football World Cup. I was among these avid viewers.

However, my original association with soccer was not so pleasant. As a nine-year-old, I was playing football with my brothers outside our home in Idlib, northwest Syria.

Overhead, I heard helicopters buzzing about. This was nothing new as helicopters were commonly used by the murderous Assad regime to terrorise people.

However, on this occasion the helicopter I heard was to have a terrible impact on my family. It dropped bombs, one of which fell on a local market where my father was shopping for bread. The bomb killed my dad – and changed my life forever. 

Some months later, what was left of my family, we fled war-torn Syria in a perilous bus trip, taking back roads to avoid military checkpoints.

We reached Lebanon where, as refugees, we spent the next four years scrounging – literally – an existence: me as a child labourer to supplement the meagre money and food provided by the UNHCR.

Our first “home” there was a chicken shed, which we made habitable by removing the manure and lining its floors and walls with make-do materials we found. Schooling was zero.

Then, my family and I won the lottery of life. We were offered refugee places to come to Australia. Australia! Such a far-away place we had never even heard of! 

In June 2018, we arrived in Sydney and then, through a series of transfers and moves, settled in regional Victoria.

After a chance meeting with a kindly elderly man on the street, Frank Bartlett, this Muslim refugee was sponsored to attend a Catholic school, Faithful Companions of Jesus College, in a small town, Benalla, in northeast Victoria.

Mr Boyle, a teacher but so much more, organised a local family, the Scrivens, to informally foster me. They were to become my “Aussie family”.

Together, the nuns, teachers, Scrivens and people of Benalla embraced this refugee boy who could barely speak their language. They made it their mission to restore the education Assad’s war had taken from me. And safety, with stability and belonging. 

In the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), the boy who could barely speak English five years earlier did sufficiently well to earn a spot to study criminology at the prestigious ANU.

So I packed my bags and moved up to Canberra. After a year and a half of hard slog, I won a spot in the coveted law degree: me, a law student at the ANU!

Canberra slowly became more than the place where I studied. I made friends, developed routines, found favourite places and started to make connections.

I met lawyers, senior public servants and academics who generously gave me their time, coached me and, sometimes without realising it, helped shape the person I am becoming. 

Perhaps because so many people have invested in me, I sought to reciprocate; to repay the support I received.

For a year, I volunteered at Legal Aid ACT as a paralegal in its civil justice practice. There, under the wing of a senior lawyer, Michael, I was taught that studying law and actually helping someone with it are two very different things. 

And then I met Robert. If Frank, FCJ and Scrivens were the people who nurtured me in Benalla, Robert has come to play the same role in Canberra.

Somewhere along the way he and his family became far more than a professional connection: adviser, guardian and, at times, overseer! Robert once told me: “Hamoudi, you have a support safety net here now”. Simple words; but I do not think he realised how much they meant to a boy who had spent much of his life on the move. 

Professionally, I spent 18 months working in the APS at the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman – an opportunity recommended by one of my ANU lecturers. 

I recently gained a highly contested place as a paralegal at Norton Rose, a prestigious global law firm, in its public law and industrial relations practices. All while studying full-time at the ANU. 

As for what comes next, I am still working that out. My interests currently wander rather ambitiously between commercial and IR law, constitutional and administrative law, and criminal law. I am told I may eventually have to pick a lane. But for someone so used to chasing opportunity, that feels so hard. 

For me, Australia has proven so much more than the lucky country. Benalla gave me safety; but Canberra gave me a home. And I truly pray that my future work as a lawyer gives me a way to repay both. 

Hamoudi Al-Saghir is a law student at the ANU and will be writing on social and related issues from a younger perspective.

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