Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
May 11, 2013 Saturday
A force for harmony
LUNCH WITH STEPAN KERKYASHARIAN
by Rick Feneley
As he steps down from his official role, the ‘hero of
multiculturalism’ reflects on the remarkable family story that shaped
his outlook, writes Rick Feneley.
Our window table is a lovely perch with a view over the canopy of Hyde
Park’s figs. As the autumn sunlight streams in to the Hellenic Club,
it catches the sheen of a tear on Stepan Kerkyasharian’s cheek. The
son of survivors of the Armenian genocide, Kerkyasharian has made a
long career in Australia of building racial harmony. He is an
optimist. But he also has some terrible stories about the worst of
human nature.
He is telling the hardest of them now. It concerns the death of his
grandmother. It is his father’s account of watching her die.
“My father, Manuel, was nine years old,” Kerkyasharian says. It was
1916. Manuel and his parents were on a long, forced march out of what
today is Turkey. They and hordes of fellow Armenians were rounded up
and deported. Along the way they witnessed murder, rape, atrocities.
“My grandmother couldn’t go on. She asked her husband to carry her to
the river. My grandfather refused. A neighbour carried her on his back
and my father accompanied them. His mother knelt and prayed, and then
she jumped in the river.” Years later, Manuel would say: “I looked and
the waters carried her away.”
Kerkyasharian’s choice of the Hellenic Club, on the fifth floor in
Elizabeth Street, seems the perfect vantage point from which to survey
his remarkable life and career. He notes the Anzac memorial in the
park across the road. He was raised by his poor refugee parents in
Cyprus, where his classmates were Greek, Turkish, Maronite, Armenian
and English. Kerkyasharian and our waiter exchange pleasantries in
Greek, one of his four languages, as he orders the beef casserole,
mosharaki stifado, and requests water rather than wine. I take his
recommendation of baked lamb.
Approaching 70 – and after almost 25 years at the helm of NSW’s
Community Relations Commission and its predecessor, the Ethnic Affairs
Commission – Kerkyasharian reveals he will not seek to renew his
contract after September. He has outlasted six premiers, from Nick
Greiner to Kristina Keneally, and has worked happily with both sides
of politics, including with seventh premier Barry O’Farrell, who
describes him as a “hero of multiculturalism”.
Kerkyasharian has played shuttle diplomat between the politicians and
Sydney’s immigrant communities. He has helped extinguish spotfires of
racial tension that at times seemed they would engulf us: following
the assassination of Cabramatta MP John Newman; the first Gulf War;
the September 11 attacks; riots at Whitlam Park and Arncliffe mosque;
the Lakemba police station shooting; the Cronulla riots.
“I’ve had my share of death threats,” he says. “On one occasion I had
people sitting outside my house with balaclavas. Once I was followed
over the Harbour Bridge. Mostly I think it’s people letting off
steam.”
Kerkyasharian prefers to measure his commission’s success by the long
absences of headlines. Foreign diplomats visit it regularly, he says,
because they recognise its vital part in the success of Australian
multiculturalism, which is the envy of the world. To understand his
part in that success, we need to go back to the Cyprus of British
colonial rule. Here, young Stepan sewed hemlines to help his
dressmaker mother, Zarouhi. He packed shelves in a shop to pay for his
fees at the English School.
“There were three aisles in our classes,” he recalls. “The Greek kids
sat on one side, the Turks on the other, and the Armenians, Maronites,
and English sat together in the middle. It was quite clear
segregation, a mini-apartheid. Not a single teacher ever said I want
to mix these children together.”
Some of those Greek and Turkish classmates, he has been told since,
became paramilitaries and then leaders on either side of a bloody
conflict. “Our school was firebombed a couple of times,” he says.
The Kerkyasharian home in Nicosia was only 30 metres from the
barbed-wire division between the Greek and Turkish communities.
At 17, in 1960, he bought a plane ticket and, with £10 to his name,
moved to London. It was the year Cyprus gained independence. Under the
new constitution, opportunities for Greeks and Turks were entrenched.
The chances of an Armenian getting a good public service job were
“zilch”.
Stepan studied electronics. He became a manager at a nightclub. He
worked in production engineering for navigation systems. In London, he
also met Brenda, an Armenian girl raised in India. But Stepan had
plans to move again.
Back in his school days, a student had brought in a brochure from
Trans World Airlines. Its cover picture, of a turtle on a white-sand
beach, had entranced Stepan. That was where he wanted to live, so he
told Brenda: “I’m going to Australia. I’m going to become successful
and rich, and I’ll send for you.” She replied: “No, if you don’t take
me now, I won’t ever come.” With her parents’ blessing, they married.
Stepan was 23, Brenda just 18. It was 1967 and they boarded a boat for
Australia. His parents would follow the next year.
Kerkyasharian would never find that beach with the turtle but, in
Sydney, he joined the Medical Instruments Company and worked on early
designs for electrocardiograms and blood-pressure monitors. He was
also making connections with Armenians, who delegated him in 1968 to
answer a call to Canberra. Two immigration officials informed
Kerkyasharian that his people would no longer need to assimilate.
Rather, they could integrate, meaning they could hang on to their
culture. “Assimilation had been an appeasement – it was spin. Of
course, it failed. Australians soon said, ‘They still look funny. They
still talk funny.”‘
In the early 1970s, the Whitlam government was to launch a universal
healthcare system but realised it could not reach hundreds of
thousands of people who spoke no English. It used emergency powers to
create radio stations 2EA and 3EA – for ethnic Australia.
“But at this stage, it had nothing to do with multiculturalism,”
Kerkyasharian says. “No news was allowed, only music and incessant
announcements about Medibank and how good it was for you. It was only
meant to last a few months but, once they started it, politically it
became impossible to shut them down.”
SBS Radio at first broadcast in eight languages, then in another 11,
and then in another 26, including Armenian. For three years, from
1976, Kerkyasharian was the volunteer host of a weekly show. He later
became Sydney station manager, then SBS’s head of radio.
The biggest challenge, he says, was news and bias. Standards could be
appalling. Foreign governments pushing propaganda would provide
volunteer announcers with free packaged programs. “There was one
broadcaster who’d arrive, go to the boot of his car, bring in the
tapes and just let them run. Some of it was offensive; some would
create inter-communal conflict.”
By 1988, he and Brenda had three children. But that year, in a case of
medical malpractice, Brenda died after a hysterectomy. She was only
39. In the same year, Kerkyasharian became chairman of the Ethnic
Affairs Commission.
A Sun-Herald reporter asked him then if he had thought of changing his
name, apparently to make it easier for people to pronounce. “I said I
already had changed it. She asked, ‘What was it before?’ I said it
used to be Smith.”
A sense of humour would serve him well in his new role. So would a
sense of purpose. That purpose was to engage with communities, to
learn their concerns and to act on them. Following the 1994
assassination of Newman, there was widespread anxiety about Asian
gangs. Months later, with the support of new premier Bob Carr, “I went
there with my staff. Four of us walked the streets of Cabramatta …
we saw people lining up to buy drugs in front of home units. We saw
people lying on the street, out of their brains, drugged out.”
He recommended a City Watch program, employed a liaison officer to
knock on doors, and ran a forum where tables of 10 residents sat with
a police officer and an interpreter. “We heard their concerns and went
through the list, one by one. The broken street light was fixed. The
dirty creek was cleaned up. Police would investigate the brothel next
door.”
It became a model for connecting with communities. It was the model
for dealing with Indian students when they became the victims of
violence. “Racism is not something you can let simmer,” Kerkyasharian
says. “It doesn’t simmer. It explodes.”
On this measure, he says, NSW can be proud as the pioneer of the
Community Relations Commission model. It was in the early and
mid-2000s – after September 11, Tampa, the Cronulla riots – that he
was less impressed with the response from federal politicians, on both
sides of the fence. “We got to the point where political leaders were
making statements in support of multiculturalism, then looking over
their shoulder in case someone heard them say it.”
He saw it as a reversion to worst instincts. “Whether we like it or
not, racism … is part of human nature. It is the mark of a
civilisation to rise above that. And that requires constant political
leadership.”
It is a point that brings him back to Manuel, his father. In the early
1980s, at his son’s urging, Manuel taped his account of the genocide –
about eight hours of recordings – on the condition that Stepan not
listen to it until after his death. Manuel died in Sydney in 1996, at
91. Since then, his account has become a book, selling six print runs
in Turkey.
“That has been possible because my father told this story with no
hatred or bitterness. He simply recorded what happened … He always
said, ‘I should have died when I was nine. This life is a gift from
God.”‘
Soon after his mother’s suicide, Manuel’s father also died on the
road. Left alone and naked – because children had stolen his clothes –
Manuel was approached by some Turkish women. One wanted to kill him
but another, “took the swaddle off [her] baby and wrapped it around me
like a skirt”. She took him to her home, washed and dressed him.
“To me,” says Kerkyasharian, “that is very instructive. A lot of these
enmities, the violence and hatred, are simply generated by the
leadership. It is not the people.”
Manuel spent the next nine years hopping from village to village,
working here, sheltered there, until he found a people smuggler.
Ultimately he landed in Cyprus, reunited at last with one of his four
sisters.
Fifteen years ago, Kerkyasharian found “great happiness” when he
married Hilda, also of Armenian roots. Three years ago, they visited
Armenia for the first time. “Now it is time for me to take it a bit
easier, to do some community work.”
And perhaps go searching for that elusive beach with the turtle.