Projects
All AAR projects are achieved through volunteers’ time and energy and donated funds, or funds raised from publications. If you can donate to these projects, please contact us.
- 2001 ‘Faces in the Crowd’ TV Commercial went to air on Human Rights Day, 10th December 2001, and had a season in the Mercury Cinema in Adelaide in September 2002. Australia’s first people power commercial. We are working towards more cinema exposure. View the TVC here.
- 2002 Australia IS Refugees! schools competitionIn 2002 school children Australia-wide explored the lives and experiences of refugees as a step towards healing the cultural rift created by the asylum seeker debate. The “Australia IS Refugees!” competitions were offered to year 6 and 7 students, and year 10, 11 and 12 students. Judges were Helen Garner, Tom Shapcott, Phillip Adams, Meme McDonald and Libby Gleeson. 37 of the stories will be published in a major book Dark Dreams: Australian Refugee Stories (Wakefield Press 2004).
- 2002 Exploring conditions in Afghanistan for ourselves.Mariana Hardwick visited Afghanistan in February and March, in the company of Dr Nouria Salehi.
- 2003 TPV University ScholarshipA winner from the AIR! competition was a TPV holder. We raised sufficient funds to pay for his expenses in his first year of university in 2003, and hope to raise what it takes to help him complete his degree.
- 2003-4 BillboardsThis project is still in the making. We aim to get a supersite billboard in at least five capital cities. The idea is simple, controversial, utterly riveting. It is based on the fact that there are no positive images of Muslim people in our public spaces. It says everything by saying nothing. It has something to communicate about all the related issues, without focusing on one of them.Proposed Image: A close-up image of Muslim woman, very human, very individual, very engaging, with a child, in human and ordinary kind of relationship. She makes eye contact with viewer. NO CAPTION.
Subline www.australiansagainstracism.org
This will create a storm and there is absolutely nothing Ruddock or Howard can say about or to it.
We need to raise a considerable fund to put this project into effect. If you can help please contact us.
- 2004 Australia Is Refugees Short Film ProjectThe primary aim of the AIR 2004 film project is to give young refugees a voice to tell their own story, or a story from their family or the wider community. It aims to redress the imbalance created by a media that tells stories about people.The project will provide training and access to video technology to a group of 12 young people aged between 15 and 19. At least half of the participants will be refugees. Participants will write and produce a four-minute documentary about some aspect of the refugee experience.
- 2004 “There is No Place Like Home” Schools CompetitionOn the theme There is No Place Like Home, school children will be encouraged to find and interview someone who was driven or torn from their home and forced to begin a new life and make a new home among strangers. Children and young adults will be invited to find and tell the stories of refugee or Indigenous Australians, displaced peoples from recent times or from the distant past. The competition will encourage the discovery of the meaning and experience of exile or forced dispossession, but participants will also discover how their peers or elders survived and rebuilt their lives.The 2004 competition will build on the successes of the 2002 experience. Again writers will be given absolute freedom of discovery, opinion and mode of expression. And again, prominent Australian authors will be the judges. And Australians Against Racism will again coordinate this competition entirely on donations of time, money and skills.
Would you like your school, your students or your children to participate? If you would like to be put on the electronic mailing list for information on AAR Schools projects, please send us your email address or the addresses of the schools or teachers you know would be interested.
If you have the skills and want to be part of a team, whether administrative, creative or industry experience, contact us.