It’s a moment Danijel Malbasa can still see when he closes his eyes.
At just seven years old, returning home from school, he walked into the family home to see his father’s remains in a casket. Hours earlier, he was fatally wounded after stepping on a landmine.
For Danijel, life changed in a second.
“I think I stopped being a child at that point, because it wasn’t only that I’d lost my dad but my mum was also lost to us in the sense that she now had to become a breadwinner.”
His parents - an ethnic Croat and an ethnic Serb - had met in Yugoslavia and had four children. Danijel is the youngest in a set of twins. He describes his early childhood as idyllic, with family outings on the beaches of Croatia, until the War of Independence broke in 1991.
Danijel's parents, Jeka and Mirko Malbasa, married in Yugoslavia before the War of Independence in Croatia broke out. Source: SBS News / Danijel Malbasa
After the death of his father, his mother Jeka Malbasa moved the children from village to village, searching for safe spaces and bomb shelters to shield them from the violence. Quickly it became apparent there were no safe spaces left.
In the dead of night in 1995, they left Croatia in a trailer pulled behind a tractor. One family amidst a mass exodus of 300,000 people fleeing the country.
Danijel Malbasa (far right) with his siblings in Croatia. They would later come to Australia as refugees. Source: Supplied / Danijel Malbasa
They lived there in a makeshift refugee camp on the outskirts of Kosovo with 700 others for five years.
Conditions inside the camp worsened as families struggled to survive without adequate food or clothing. Suicides became common, Danijel’s nanny took her life as the children she was watching looked on.
He says the local Serbian community made it known that they did not want these refugees.
“I remember going to school and they would correct our pronunciations, the children would get snowballs and put rocks and razors in them and hit us with them and tell us to go back to where we came from.”
His mother, Jeka, applied for a humanitarian refugee relocation at the UNHCR in Belgrade but their case was complex. They’d fled the war in Croatia, and we’re now caught in the crossfires of a new war in Kosovo.
In 1999 the family was granted permission to come to Australia, after Jeka was granted a Woman at Risk visa.
Danijel's mother, Jeka, arrived in Adelaide with her family in 1999 after being granted a Woman at Risk visa by the Australian government. Source: Supplied / Danijel Malbasa
“It was literally going from the Croatian War, to the Bosnian War of '95 to the Kosovo War of '99. All I ever knew was war.”
He remembers wide blue skies and singing birds as the family stepped onto the tarmac in Adelaide.
There were also a lot of challenges in beginning the healing process, he says. Children at his new school accused Danijel and his twin brother of being war criminals, dubbing the boys the “KGB Twins”, and would sometimes pat them down, checking for bombs.
Despite the trauma of their past, he says, most adults didn’t want to know.
“Our teachers did not let us reflect on it, they did not let us process that war trauma. It was sort of insisted we forget it.”
It was these experiences, coupled with the changes to asylum seeker policies in federal politics after 2010, that led Danijel to begin advocating for refugees.
Speaking out
He says with the , followed by the Coalition winning the election on its “Stop the Boats” campaign slogan, the public perspective on refugees was tainted.
“We’ve framed refugees as a threat. We went from seeing refugees as people at risk, to being seen as the risk. The risk to be avoided.”
To combat this narrative, he’s spent the last decade speaking out. He sits on the steering committee of the National Refugee-led Advisory and Advocacy Group. He also volunteers as a migration agent with Refugee Legal, where he helps asylum seekers apply for temporary protection visas. He is also the deputy chair of the Forcibly Displaced People Network – Australia’s first LGBTIQ+ refugee network.
Danijel spends his time speaking out for refugees and asylum seekers, both at a judicial and advocacy level. Source: Supplied / Danijel Malbasa
Sponsored by SBS, the award recognises an outstanding former refugee who is raising awareness of the plight of forcibly displaced people.
SBS Director of Audio and Language Content David Hua sat on the selection panel for the award.
“There are so many people who live in Australia who come from a displaced persons' background and being able to support communities and individuals through an award such as this allows the wider Australian community to understand the contribution that refugees make.”
He says while competition for the award was fierce, Danijel stood out as a storyteller and a selfless advocate for refugees.
Danijel stood out as the recipient of the Les Murray award because he fought for the rights of others with his lived experience as a refugee. Source: SBS News / Abby Dinham
His work sets an example not just for other refugees but for wider Australia, according to UNHCR deputy national director Trudi Mitchell.
“Seeing a person who has overcome incredible challenges but has been successful in his working and creative life is wonderful, and for the wider Australian community seeing someone who is a refugee and really contributing back is really important.”
An ethic honouring the namesake of the award, beloved sports broadcaster Les Murray who was also a former refugee from Hungary.
His daughter Natalie Murray says the award is an apt tribute to her father’s legacy.
“He himself is one example of many refugees in Australia going on to do amazing things. Part of his mission was to change the perception of refugees in Australia as not burdens but contributors.
“And thinking of refugees not as what they can take but what they can give.”
She says there are many similarities between Les and Danijel, in their journeys to come to Australia and the passion they both have for people.
“Danijel sounds like the perfect recipient [of the award] and someone my dad would have been very proud to have met and known.”
Danijel says he plans to use his platform as the inaugural winner of the Les Murray award for Refugee Recognition to continue his work making known the plight of refugees around the world, and to broaden the public perspective of what a refugee is.
“We need to widen the aperture of who can be a refugee, that it’s not just people fleeing war and violence. It’s homophobia, it’s climate, it’s drought, it’s floods and we have an obligation to help these people because one day we could find ourselves in the same situation.”
