The journey from a hot and dusty African refugee camp to a top-tier Melbourne law firm has been a long and emotional walk for Nyadol Nyuon.
As a child at Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, she saw people die from malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis or from injuries sustained in a street fight – after her own younger sister had almost died as a three-week old baby fleeing a civil war.
The South Sudanese woman grew up in a mud hut shanty town, where food was rationed and one tap was shared by 2,000 people.
Her experience has given her an insight into Melbourne’s gang violence spree involving African youths.
Nyadol Nyuon has had a long journey from a Kenyan refugee camp to a Melbourne law firm
Nyadol Nyuon witnessed extreme poverty and death growing up in a UN refugee camp
The lawyer has also rebutted calls from Immigration Minister Peter Dutton for African-born gang members to be deported from the country.
‘It really does demonstrate to people who are not criminals that their Australianness is up for debate,’ she told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday.
‘It means that for me, as a South Sudanese Australian, my citizenship, my sense of identity and attachment to Australia is not as valued as an Anglo person.’
Melbourne is more than 12,000 kilometres from the Kakuma refugee camp, in north-west Kenya, where many malnourished residents would queue up from 4am just to get a scarce supply of chlorinated water instead of drinking from a dirty well.
People there were lucky to eat two meals a day.
Ms Nyuon, a 30-year-old Melbourne Law School graduate lawyer with Arnold Bloch Leibler, was born at the Itang refugee camp in Ethiopia, where her family had gone to escape the long-running civil war in what is now South Sudan.
The lawyer born at a refugee camp in Ethiopia says calls to deport Africans give people
When she was a young girl, in 1991, her family was forced to flee a new outbreak of conflict in Ethiopia, crossing into Kenya via Sudan.
During this time Ms Nyuon’s younger sister, who was barely a month old, nearly died during the 40-day walk through a quagmire.
‘It was raining heavily, it was very muddy,’ she said, recalling how her mother had carried her younger sister on her head in a plastic tub.
‘She covered the top of my little sister’s head with some clothing and my then my little sister stopped breathing.
‘She saw that she was dead and then some older woman started pouring cold water on the top of my little sister’s head and then eventually she started breathing.
‘The horrible thing about it all is, I asked my mum what would have happened if she actually died and she said, “We would have just left her there.”
‘There would have been no burial. This is actually really emotional.’
For the next 14 years, a United Nations refugee camp at Kakuma, in northern Kenya, was Ms Nyuon’s home.
The commercial litigator fled civil war in Ethiopia and South Sudan for a new life in Australia
Her mother was absent for those first five years, as she returned to Ethiopia to find other family members caught in the conflict.
But 1996 was also the year she lost her father, who was a soldier, in the South Sudanese conflict.
Witnessing or learning about death was a regular part of Ms Nyuon’s childhood.
‘People died quite easily in the camp,’ she said.
‘I suppose if you’re really starved and your body is kind of functioning at a survival level, it’s easy for an infection or something to just tip you over.’
Emotionally, while her culture gives people the space to mourn, the trauma of death did breed resilience.
As a teenager (pictured left with a friend), Nyadol Nyuon was an avid reader in a Kenyan camp
Nyadol Nyuon was born at the Itang refugee camp in Ethiopia (pictured in 1991) after her family fled civil war in Sudan
‘Maybe in the back of your mind, you knew how helpless the situation was and you just tried to live your best because it could be you, it could be anybody and it could be anytime,’ she said.
‘In some ways it makes me resilient and I think in some ways it makes me very vulnerable.
‘You’ve seen some very tough things and how difficult life can get and sometimes you feel like that you’ve not really escaped the refugee camp, you’re constantly concerned. It’s left with you no matter where you go.’
Living in Melbourne, as the second eldest of eight children, Ms Nyuon has often been asked to comment in the media about Melbourne’s spate of youth gang violence, involving people from Africa.
The Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya was where Nyadol Nyuon spent 14 years of her childhood
The Itang refugee camp (stock image) in Ethiopia – the crowded compound where she was born
The lawyer’s call for politicians to frame the thuggery as an ‘Australian youth issue’ instead of an African gang problem has made her a magnet for criticism.
‘If you find yourself sometimes complaining or feeling overwhelmed by certain things, backlash – some of it has been racist – I’ll be like, you know what, “You can survive that”,’ she said.
‘If you survive a refugee camp, that’s not the worst thing.’
While Ms Nyuon doesn’t excuse the spate of violent crime in Melbourne involving African youths, she has condemned calls from Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and Melbourne-based federal Liberal MP Jason Wood to deport African youths convicted of violent crime.
The South Sudanese Australian has slammed a call from Immigration Minister Peter Dutton (pictured) to deport African youths convicted of violence crime
‘Whenever a young, white Australian commit a crime and they do it multiple times, are we deporting them to the country where their parents came from? Nobody suggests that,’ she said.
She has drawn from her own experiences of escaping conflict and surviving extreme poverty in Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya to explain how it is possible to embark on a successful career in Australia with hard work and the right inspiration.
‘My mum really encouraged me to pursue education,’ she said.
‘She used to tell us around the camp, the main reason I want to take you to Australia is that you can get an education and better yourself and have better lives.’