From his hat to his sock protectors, Eh Hta Dah Shee is a park ranger. The 25-year-old Karen man, known as Dutchie, has spent the past four years volunteering at the Werribee Park mansion and at Serendip sanctuary, in Melbourne’s outer west.
He keeps to a strict schedule: Tuesday and Wednesday at Werribee Park, Thursday with the animals of Serendip wildlife sanctuary, Friday back at Werribee for the weekly lunch hosted by members of the Karen or Pwa Ka Nyaw community.
The project is part of a joint program run by Parks Victoria and Australian Migrant Employment Services (Ames) called Working Beyond the Boundaries, which is designed to help members of the Karen community gain the skills and confidence necessary to join the workforce.
On this Friday we find Dutchie in the vegetable garden. He has accessorised his ranger’s uniform – provided in recognition of his efforts by the ranger-in-charge, James Brincat – with a pair of wraparound sunglasses secured with a waterproof strap and a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt.
The chickens are laying well, he says, but not as well as Evelyn, one of the senior volunteers at the garden and a leader in Melbourne’s Karen community, would like. Dutchie opens a hutch to reveal a cluster of fresh, brown eggs. They get about 20 a day, he says.
Next to the chook pen is a plot of carefully staked-out green beans. It’s off to one side of the main vegetable garden, which sits in the centre of a neatly mown area encircled by buildings that were once used as stables or coaching houses for the mansion. Several of the buildings still contain two-wheeled buggies, gathering dust.
The vegetable garden started in 2011 and is run entirely by volunteers. Most are refugees who fled the Karen conflict in Myanmar during the 60-year civil war.
Hundreds of thousands of Karen people were killed in the conflict and about 140,000 made it across the border to refugee camps in Thailand. Just over 3,000 have been settled in Victoria.
The main languages spoken between gardeners are various Karen dialects, which are also tentatively spoken by Brincat, who has been learning with Dutchie’s help. There are occasional conversations in Burmese or Thai.
Many of the volunteers, including Dutchie, are shy about their English skills. When they are unsure of a word, they look to Brincat.
“[When I] first started and then I’m shy and nervous when I see the people, the new people,” Dutchie told Guardian Australia. “I looking down on the ground when the people talk to me – I am shy and hide. Now I am getting good. Speak with the people.”
The project is loosely connected to another Ames program that helped 160 Karen people settle in the small town of Nhill, 374km north-west of Melbourne, primarily to work for the poultry producer Luv-a-duck. That program has contributed $40m to the local economy, Ames says.
Some volunteers, including Dutchie, who has learning difficulties, are unable to transition to work but continue to help the park. His favourite days are the ones when he gets to work with Hsar Thein Ju, another Karen refugee who was hired as a trainee ranger last year.
Dutchie describes the steps he follows to prepare food for different animals at the wildlife sanctuary before listing his two reservations: he won’t deal with spiders (“I do not like them,” he says, shuddering) and he won’t handle all the snakes (“When they got poison, I don’t want to touch it”).
“I don’t want to stay home because [I’m] just alone, I’m lonely, I don’t want to be like that,” he says. “I need a friend and I don’t have friends, so I just go out.”
Making friends has been difficult for Dutchie. He arrived in Australia when he was 13, the youngest of five siblings. His older siblings have all since left home. Like many Karen who found their way to Australia, his family had lived in Mae La refugee camp in Thailand’s Tak province, near the Myanmar border.
It was a violent place, he says: “The people were fighting or hurting each other, and when I come here I’m scared of people ... They kill each other, they don’t care. No one cares about it. They pull them to the side of the road and just leave them.”
Until December, when his mother took him back to Thailand to visit family, he had only been on a plane once.
His primary memory of that first flight, which took him to Australia, is of embarrassment: he had accepted the flight attendant’s offer of coffee, despite not knowing what it was, and spent several minutes holding the bitter liquid in his mouth trying to find a polite way to spit it out.
Dutchie says he prepared for his second flight by watching documentaries about air crash investigations and cheerfully explained that he was looking forward to visiting Thailand provided the plane didn’t go down. The conflict that drove the Karen from their homes is over now, he says, thanks to ceasefires signed between the Karen National Union and the government of Myanmar in 2012 and 2015.
Other Karen are less confident of their safety.
Evelyn, who goes by her first name only, was 18 when the soldiers came and drove the Karen from their village across the river into Mae La camp. There may be a ceasefire now, she says, but that doesn’t mean the fighting will not start again. Evelyn lived in the camp for 22 years.
“My children all born in the refugee camp,” she said. “We stay across the river and we never go back to the Karen side.”
Now 53, she says the fear of being persecuted remains.
“Our memories are of being scared,” she says. “Sometimes I’m like that. My brother died for the war. Sometimes all of us remember that.”
Evelyn worked as a midwife at Mae La but was unable to continue in that profession in Australia because her English was not good enough. Instead she worked in aged care and now spends her days volunteering at the vegetable garden.
“When I came here, [it was] like my old village,” she says. “Then I felt very, very nice and very happy. Me, I like the countryside, like this. Not for the city.”
She comes every day that it is not raining, and manages the fundraising efforts. On Fridays at 12pm she can be found in the small kitchen in a demountable unit around the back of the coaching houses, collecting money from Parks Victoria staff and guests who want to lunch with the Karen.
The food is grown and cooked on site and the money used to buy cooking equipment, seeds and fertiliser. In September they paid for a new commercial stove, installed by some of the parks staff.
Not all the volunteers are refugees, or have any connection to the Karen. At the new stove, producing enough pikelets for a junior football team, we find 56-year-old Nancy Reuvino.
She pauses to let one of the Karen women inspect the batter, then says: “When I’m home I have no incentive, even though there are things to do … I have no incentive, I just sit around. But when I come here I can sleep at night. So I come here Tuesday and Friday – I don’t do much, I just wash the dishes. Today is the first day I have made pikelets.”
English-speaking volunteers are a welcome addition, Evelyn says. They are good for language practice, which is a major drawcard in her campaign to recruit new volunteers.
“I tell the new people in my community, ‘If all the time you stay home and are boring, you get bored, and you feel lonely, then you can come here,’” she says.
“Before I came here, I was scared, scared to talk with the people, but now I have more confidence ... In the beginning I was very scared of the people here. I try, try, try and then I get more confident. And then I tell the volunteers here, ‘If you come here you have to talk to the other people a lot and then you will feel more confident.’”
The confidence is working: a number of volunteers have since found paid jobs in the local area, thanks to a recommendation from Brincat or other park rangers.
After lunch, Dutchie returns to the chickens. They don’t need any more water but he fusses with the hose anyway, coiling it up. The sun is beating down, drying the water droplets on his felt hat. He smiles and surveys the garden.
“When I was in Thailand I did not imagine that Australia would be like this, that I would be here in the country growing vegetables,” he says. “I am very lucky.”
