In the night they come, like an unholy ยญalliance of swarming ghosts. Heโs tried to outrun them; woken up in the tarry black with a bloodied toenail or a lump on his head from slamming, spooked, into a doorframe. He can leave his modest Sydney house lit up like a ship and still they come. Unbidden visions crowd his skull, a panic of arms and legs and burnt, broken bodies, and he canโt escape the dark commotion of what he did and what was done to him: the guilt, the shame, the terror. Memories of his childhood.
Heโll never outrun the nightmares, but Deng Adut, 33, has learnt to outwit them. He knows they come between midnight and 3am and so he sets his alarm clock. For three hours, in the dead of night, he keeps the bad dreams at bay by not sleeping. Three hours in which to feed a raging appetite for knowledge. Cramming his days and these dark, wakeful hours with learning helped bring Adut, a former child soldier from South Sudan, to the position he holds today: a respected lawyer and refugee advocate, a testament to the transformative power of education, an inspiration to many new Australians. Heโs also โ somewhat improbably, given he grew up in remotest sub-Saharan Africa with no clothes, no English and zero contact with Western ways โ a budding media star.
Adut had already acquired a level of local fame as a defender of the dispossessed on the multicultural streets of Blacktown, western Sydney, when he was chosen last year to star in an advertisement for his alma mater, Western Sydney University. The ad dramatised Adutโs journey from conscription into the Sudan Peopleโs Liberation Army at the age of six to his arrival in Sydney at 14 via a UN refugee camp in Kenya. It followed the illiterate, penniless new Australian as he taught himself English and slept in his car while juggling part-time jobs, eventually being accepted to study law. Determination, Optimism, Courage: Unlimited, ran the tagline.
The ad went viral, attracting almost 2.5 million views to date and became one of the marketing sensations of 2015. Moved by his story, NSW ยญPremier Mike Baird invited Adut to give this yearโs Australia Day address at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music; his impassioned plea for inclusiveness received widespread acclaim. Soon after, artist Nick Stathopoulos won the Archibald Prize ยญPeopleโs Choice award with his portrait of Adut, the ยญBlacktown artistโs hyper-realist style capturing a suggestion of unrest in his subjectโs molten eyes. The refugee-made-good is increasingly in demand as a corporate speaker, has been nominated for Australian of the Year and, thanks to the Archibald, his face gazes out from bus shelters around Sydney.
Next week he releases his memoir, Songs of a War Boy, which puts meat on the bones of WSUโs abridged version of his life story. Itโs a textbook ยญnarrative of hope for the thousands of refugees who seek a better life and for all those who wish them well, a neat counterpoint to the sentiment summed up by immigration minister Peter ยญDuttonโs recent remarks about illiterate, welfare-dependent refugees.
Adut, however, is ambivalent about his newfound celebrity. Itโs not that the hero mantle makes him uncomfortable, exactly, but itโs incidental. Fame will not bring him peace. Advocating for others within a free, safe and fair society, a counter to his lawless, violent homeland, goes some way to easing his guilt and shame. But it canโt erase the terror. At night, when the atmosphere shifts and cracks, the nightmares still swarm. Sometimes he canโt outfox them. โHe crashed on the couch recently at my place,โ says Joe Correy, Adutโs partner in the AC Law Group, which they co-founded in 2014. โI woke up to a sound I thought was a woman, but it was him screaming. My wife heard him the other night as well. She said he was screaming all night.โ
Hyper real: with artist Nick Stathopoulos and his Archibald Prize portrait of Deng.
The room is a bustle of pillow-white armchairs, matching tablecloths and tastefully arranged ยญflowers. Adut, tall and raw-boned, stands amid the scented-candle ambience, contemplating a First World problem: where to sit. โIโm not much into comfort,โ he says. The wedding-venue refinement of this inner-city Sydney cafe is starkly at odds with the tale of blood and monsters that Adut will soon unfurl, but the ethos behind it is not. All profits go to the charity Freedom Hub, which ยญsupports trafficked women in Australia.
As I arrive, the charityโs founder, Sally Irwin, is talking to Adut about taking part in a short film to raise awareness. He helps where he can. โCreating opportunity for women who were ยญtrafficked, thatโs something dear to me,โ he says. โThe horror that people face in state-of-war countries like my country should not be transplanted to Australia, to countries that are highly civilised.โ
Adut became an Australian citizen in 2001 and youโd travel far to find a more patriotic resident. His new home is โa mighty countryโ, a peaceful land with inflexible boundaries between right and wrong, where freedom from fear is, as he said in his Australia Day address, โalmost taken for grantedโ.
Itโs also a place where one can readily purchase a flash suit. Adut was born into the Dinka tribe, the largest ethnic group in South Sudan, known for adorning their bodies with ostentatious displays of colourful beading. Translating this peacock aesthetic to the West makes for flamboyant fashion; today Adut wears a navy suit, coffee-coloured waistcoat and spotted tie, offset by a paisley-patterned pocket square. The cuffs of a lavender shirt, which he routinely tugs down over restless hands, are monogrammed with the initials of his law firm. Above a loosened black and gold striped cravat a high forehead bears tiny scars where Adut had nerves cut when he was small, a traditional practice the Dinka believe can prevent river blindness.
What Adut doesnโt have is the pattern of V-shaped lines ritually scarified onto a young Dinka boyโs head around the age of 10 as an ยญinitiation into adulthood. This rite was stolen from him, along with most of his childhood, by the ยญsoldiers who forcibly removed him from his ยญfamily and armed him with an AK-47 at an age when most Australians are in primary school.
Adut was born in Malek, a small fishing village near the White Nile River in South Sudan. His father, a banana farmer, died when he was young and he has since lost four of his seven siblings: two to disease, two to war.
In 1987, members of the Sudan Peopleโs Liberation Army (SPLA) came to his village. The ragtag rebel group from the south had formed four years previously to fight the northern Khartoum-based Islamic government in what was to become a ยญbrutal civil war claiming more than two million lives, according to UN estimates. Inter-tribal conflict and the superior firepower of the northern army had decimated SPLA ranks and they came looking for new recruits in the rural villages that were now populated mostly by women and children. One boy would be taken from each family. Adut was playing in the mud, moulding little make-believe cows, when they came. He was told heโd been selected to go to Ethiopia โto be educatedโ and, though he cried inconsolably at having to leave his mother, there was no denying the SPLA. Adut was given an army-issue khaki shirt, his first article of clothing. Along with 30 other boys, including three cousins, all of them โtiny, crying and shivering with fearโ, he was marched for nearly five weeks across the equatorial wilderness to Ethiopia. Before even reaching their ยญdestination, he says, the child conscripts endured attacks from lions and other wild animals preying on those who fell behind. Some were shot by ยญbandits; others died from starvation or thirst.
Adut says his military training began in Ethiopia in Pinyudo, ostensibly a refugee camp, but which the SPLA secretly used to train young boys. Disease swept through the camp and soon Adut was bone-thin and often feverish; he was in and out of the campโs primitive hospital, sleeping on the ground with corn sacks for bedclothes. He went a little mad, he says, watching as dead boys around him, including a cousin, were sewn into their corn sacks and placed in a makeshift communal grave. Many conscripts, some no older than 10, put guns to their heads to escape the misery, he says. More than once, Adut considered this option.
However, extreme and violent discipline, including ยญconstant beatings and executions by ยญfiring squad for insurrection, drilled into each boy a deadly allegiance: โIn that camp we slowly but surely became effective, faithful killers,โ he says. If we die today, so what? the child army would chant as they charged machine-gun ยญbunkers and side-stepped tracer bullets. With bloodlust kindled by sustained brainwashing, and fuelled by daily doses of a herbal stimulant called khat, they had one thing on their mind: kill the enemy.
Today, he carries a number of physical scars: a limp, nerve damage, and needling pain in his groin and back. But the unseen damage is most acute. โTo look at my generation that were born in war, you would say that they are all carrying with them some sort of psychological injuries,โ he says, plucking at a stalk of dried banksia from one of the cafeโs floral arrangements. Adut is accompanied throughout this interview by not one but two publicists. His publishers, after putting him through a course of media training, are keen to smooth any hiccups in translation. Unnecessary. Adutโs English, while quirky, is perfectly clear โ he uses it in court, after all โ and the rawness of his delivery lends it a ยญgranular eloquence.
One memory in particular stalks his sleepless nights. Based in a staging camp near Kapoeta, he was on patrol one day when a sniper shot dead a good friend. Back at camp, his superiors demanded retaliation. Adut and his fellow war boys brought in a group of blameless local tribespeople โ men, children, a pregnant woman โ who happened to be passing by, hogtied them and โtortured them terriblyโ before handing them over to special forces soldiers, who burnt them alive.
โIf I was wise enough or didnโt have hate against what was done to one of my colleagues, I could have let them go,โ he says now. โWe should have let them go. For them to die like that, and I was part of the people that captured them and brought them to the authorities, well Iโm not proud of it.
โNo one should celebrate someoneโs death but we were celebrating their death at the time. We were just a bunch of kids seeing an eye for an eye as a way forward. It was just part of our training. But reflecting back on that, I should be ashamed.โ
Following the torture incident, Adutโs unit was sent to the frontline of a battle raging against government soldiers in Kapoeta. Here he engaged in his first real conflict, raiding a nest of enemy machine-gunners. It felt anti-climactic: โMy first battle was over, and far too quickly. Had I killed? I wasnโt sure.โ The second raid was a ยญdisaster. SPLA platoons were massacred; Adut was shot through the testicles, wounded by ยญshrapnel and sustained a bullet wound โthe size of a coinโ in his back.
Despite his latter-day accomplishments, Adut tends to focus on his lesser angels, reeling off a ยญlitany of reasons for his enduring shame and guilt as one of the publicists weeps quietly beside him. โI am ashamed of being in this position, right now, being able to acquire education that other people did not acquire, especially people of my age group,โ he says. โI feel bad because Iโm the only beneficiary; they died prematurely and their life got ended with nothing. I am unable to pay back my debt to those kids that helped me out [in Sudan], so I am ashamed at being able to enjoy the life that we all should deserve to enjoy. All these things, they donโt make me feel good. Iโm not feeling good at all.โ
Adut narrates the horror of his past at a remove. Correy, his law partner and friend, says he rarely opens up about it in private, preferring to goof around with his mates and keep things light. Though he has a room-filling charisma, and what journalist Hugh Riminton, a family friend, calls โa striking intellectโ, Adut is not naturally inclined to seek the limelight. He drives a โbeat-upโ Corolla and sleeps on a mattress on the floor, notes a colleague, adding that โheโs not driven by wealth or prestigeโ. Ben Mckelvey, the Australian journalist who co-authored Adutโs memoir, says: โHeโs not an egotistical person. But he does like to pontificate a bit from time to time, which comes from his innate sense of justiceโฆ He feels that even though he was a child and he didnโt have any choice but to do the things he did, he carries a debt. If you feel a general sense of shame, youโre either going to lash out or it can be the engine for something useful.โ
Adut has a heavy workload, taking on fee-ยญpaying criminal trials and family law for AC Law as well as refugee pro bono cases that sometimes, Correy says, โconsume him to the point of taking up almost half his practiceโ. He also volunteers his time with community groups, helping to explain civil and criminal matters to members of the Sudanese community. โHeโs helped many Sudanese-Australian young people who canโt afford legal services and, especially when youโre in an industry that is highly commercial, that shows how passionate he is about justice,โ says ยญfellow South Sudanese ยญrefugee Maker Mayek, now a ยญDarwin solicitor.
Superintendent Mark Wright, former Blacktown commander and now head of the NSW Police Force Command College, first met Adut in 2008 when he was emerging as a ยญdedicated and energetic community leader. โHe was someone you had to warm to and you could see he wanted to make a difference; he didnโt want the youth to suffer the way he did as a kid,โ Wright says. โBut heโs also big on making sure they give back. Iโve heard him say that many times: โI want you to get educated and work and pay taxes in ยญAustralia and give back to this country.โ โ
Correy says his partner has โan alpha male ยญpersonalityโ and, in court, โheโs a fighterโ who โnever takes a backwards stepโ. Adut once failed an ethics component of his law degree rather than concede his hard-line stance that torture could be condoned in extreme ยญcircumstances. He concedes he has been a โdissenterโ from an early age. โI donโt follow orders, I break them,โ he told a women in finance conference in Sydney recently. Care and protection order hearings, ยญparticularly, fire his blood. โI got reported once for misbehaving in court because I told off the magistrate. I know that my practising certificate will be under fire but I am looking at the interests of my clientโฆ If the government is involved in taking somebodyโs child, I want the judge who makes that decision to be very clear why.โ
Adut at his graduation with his brother, John Mac Akuek.
Heโs a โremarkably good lawyerโ, says Professor Michael Adams, Dean of the School of Law at WSU, where Adut has a scholarship to study for his second Masters of Law degree. โBut, yes, I can imagine sometimes the frustration of the system would get to Deng,โ he says. โHe does like to challenge and his passion certainly could cause some blindness.โ
Adut also devotes time to the John Mac Foundation, a charity established in memory of his late brother, 12 years his senior. Proceeds from the book and Adutโs numerous speaking engagements will be used to fund mentoring and scholarship programs for refugees in Australia, and will also go towards education and bolstering the fledgling legal system in South Sudan, which gained ยญindependence from Sudan in 2011 but is still riven by ethnic infighting. โWhat I do for other people is what will make me happy,โ Adut says. โThereโs no bigger debt than what my brother did for me.โ
John Mac Akuek is a defining presence in Adutโs life, responsible for his escape from hell. In 1996, while Adut was stationed in a town called Nattinger, he was reunited with his brother, who had voluntarily joined the SPLA but escaped after falling foul of factional infighting. With his ยญpregnant wife Elizabeth, John risked his life to smuggle Adut to Kenya under cover of night on a truck loaded with sacks of corn. They spent 18 months in a mud hut in a ยญblistering hot refugee camp in Kenya before their visa for Australia was approved in 1998, thanks to the sponsorship of Christian aid workers Bob and Christine ยญHarrison. At the age of 14, Adut arrived in Sydney.
The magnitude of the refugeeโs adjustment to Western life makes Adutโs standing today all the more remarkable. When he arrived with John and Elizabeth and their newborn son, they were told they were to be settled in a place called ยญBlacktown. Their hearts sank. Surely ยญBlacktown was yet another ghetto, โa place to dump all the black peopleโ. In fact, there were few African faces and everything was alien, beginning with his first meal: โyellow potato stringsโ at a ยญsuburban McDonaldโs staffed by โpeople dressed up in ยญuniforms who werenโt soldiersโ. Here is a flushing toilet. This is a brush for your teeth. There were nuclear-orange snacks in vending machines and confounding, plastic-coated sandwiches. Adut baulked at road intersections and exhaust fumes; he remembers feeling helpless after seeing a woman hit by a car and not knowing to call 000.
Through the Christian charity Marist Youth Care, Bob Harrison organised an apartment โfilled with technological wondersโ. Elizabeth tried to heat the oven with kindling and fire and Adut exploded a can of Coke by putting it in the ยญmicrowave to warm it. โDeng was bewildered by everything,โ recalls Bob, who divorced from ยญChristine in 1999. Adut has lost contact with Christine but still visits Perth-based Bob, a 64-year-old auditor whom he calls his โAustralian papaโ.
Cold weather was another new concept that added to the daily tumble of disorientation and ยญcultural stumbling blocks. Adut felt untethered and missed his mother, with whom heโd had no contact for nearly a decade. โBut of course I was luckier than other Sudanese,โ he says. โI had my Australian family, Christine and Bob Harrison, and my brother and a few people around to help me out in terms of mentoring and language. I didnโt just grow from the concrete without ยญsomebody watering me.โ
He lasted just one day at Evans High School, where lessons in literature and human biology sounded to him like โgibberishโ. But he had always considered education the pot of gold at rainbowโs end and so he enrolled in an intensive English course at Blacktown TAFE and haunted the ยญlibraries while supporting himself working various part-time jobs, often sleeping in his car so he wasnโt late to class. โHe was eager to learn and he learnt very quickly,โ says Bob. โDengโs very self-contained and he had sufficient strength of character to be able to handle the trauma heโd been through and put it in a compartment.โ
Adutโs studies were supplemented by repeat viewings of his nephewโs Wiggles DVDs and reciting long passages from the Bible (although Adut is an avowed atheist). He played soccer; listened to the densely packed rhymes of US rapper Xzibit; made friends with other disenfranchised African boys. Riminton remembers an โintense and broodingโ teenager, charismatic even then, but โwaryโ.
In 2001, Adut graduated from TAFE with the equivalent of a High School Certificate before completing an accountancy diploma. But book-balancing wasnโt his forte and John suggested he channel his anger at injustice and love of an argument into studying law. He was accepted into three universities, settling on Western Sydney. Meanwhile, John โ despite gaining a social science degree โ could find no work outside a factory. He travelled back and forth to Sudan, where he was killed when fighting flared again in 2013.
Adut considers himself an โalternative parentโ to Johnโs three young children, who live with their mother in Blacktown. Itโs a job that requires the โsoft approachโ he has nurtured since shedding the rhino-tough defences of his childhood. โI would say Iโm more Westerner than some people that say they are Westerners,โ he says. โYes, I am soft. Somehow, Iโm more vulnerable to seeing other people being treated cruelly. Consider the way I was treated in South Sudan; all these things will make you a tough nut to crack. But if you come to a place like Australia, where there is no nut to crack, that requires me to soften my approach in life.โ
Child protection, understandably, is an issue close to Adutโs heart; it forms the basis for much of his legal work and itโs central to his criticism of the Australian governmentโs policy of forcing all ยญasylum seekers who arrive by boat into offshore detention. โNo child should be left in a queue to wait in detention, to wait with no definite answer,โ he says. โIt creates uncertainty and it makes us cruel.โ Adut sits straighter in his chair and tugs angrily at the lapels of his hand-ยญtailored suit. This is the one area in which he advocates discrimination. โThe intakes should involve people who have children taking priority and those that donโt should wait in the queue.โ
Reunion: with his mum in South Sudan; they were separated when he was six.
As for those granted asylum here, he asks that his fellow Australians show compassion. โWhen they come to this country, everything is confusing, everything is new,โ he says. Unemployment, ยญlanguage barriers, cultural ยญdifferences and intergenerational conflict within families all work against the new Australian. ยญHaving represented hundreds of members of the local Sudanese ยญcommunity, Adut has seen some of the resulting problems first-hand. โWeโre bringing people to Australia and we expect people to know this ยญcomplex society,โ he says. โIf someone just goes around the corner and pees, he has committed a crime under Australian law but he didnโt know! Because thatโs what he used to do back in Africa, he used to go in the bushes. So now we have ยญpeople going through the legal system who didnโt know better; theyโre breaking the laws as they go because they canโt understand whatโs going on.โ
Following allegations that young South ยญSudanese men were involved in a spate of violent activities across Australian cities recently, ยญparticularly in Melbourne, Adut controversially told ABC radio that many of them should be deported as they were โjust too traumatised to adjust. Theyโre not adding anything to this ยญeconomy, theyโre not helping their parents, and theyโre not helping anyone.โ
โI know people blame me for saying that,โ he says now. โBut if they understand we are doing bad for the children, or for Australia, to criminalise them when they are young, start locking them up, what benefit will we get in Australia? They will become a burden, they will not be able to get a job.โ He realises, he says, that providing all the help that refugees need is too much to ask of ยญgovernment. โBut individually there are people who are available in Australia to assist those who have been given a protection visa to get a job or get into school and maybe make a meaningful life in Australia.โ
Mud spatters like shrapnel as the first drops of the coming rains pit the dusty tracks. It is June, the beginning of the wet season in South Sudan, a difficult five months during which much of the country comes to a standstill. Adut has returned to his homeland for the first time since John was killed. He has long suspected that his brother was assassinated, perhaps by a fellow SPLA officer to settle an old score, and he needs to find out. For peace of mind, or the closest heโs allowed to that state. As it turns out, there was no conspiracy; John had fallen prey to sectarian violence, just another victim of the friction between warring tribes.
While in South Sudan, Adut visited his home village of Malek and stayed a few days with his mother, Athieu Akau Deng. โDeng has a great fealty to his mum,โ says Mckelvey, who accompanied Adut on the trip. โHe only spent the first six years of his life with her, but he talks about her all the time. Sheโs one of the few anchors in his life.โ
Athieu Deng is an old woman now, a traditional African who is wedded to the continent. She will never leave but Adut canโt stay. He is more Australian than Sudanese; a lawyer not a soldier. And though his heart will forever skip a beat at the sight of the White Nile River, and the eagles soaring above it, Adut has little time for the country of his birth, a near-bankrupt โkleptocracyโ ruled by โdemagogues and madmenโ where the rule of law bends to suit the powerful. Itโs where he lost his childhood. And itโs the birthplace of the nightmares that suffocate his sleep, the scenes of torture and murder he firmly believes are a reminder that he owes a debt to the world he can never repay.
Songs of a War Boy, by Deng Adut and Ben Mckelvey, will be published by Hachette Australia on October 25.
FULL ARTICLE http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/child-soldier-turned-lawyer-deng-adut-transforms-trauma-into-hope/news-story/f6ffedfd0bb891a1507bbf81d4fab208