Africa to Australia is made up of several videos and photo essays about the experiences of a range of Africans who have come to live in Australia. I love ‘No Migrants, No Me’, about Somalian sisters Ramla and Lucky who are training to be surf lifesavers. They don burqinis and patrol the beach, overshadowed by some particularly hateful graffiti to which they and their fellow lifesavers respond in an inspired way.

Some years ago I was a surf lifesaver, so I grinned in recognition at the pre-patrol briefing and the girls setting off down the beach with their tubes underarm. I play soccer, and so was drawn to ‘Africa United’, where young refugees from all over Africa come together on the soccer field. I was surprised to learn in ‘Food is Value’ that cassava and okra are being grown in Parramatta, having eaten a great deal of both when in the Pacific. I don’t mean to make this all about me, it’s just an exercise to show that a middle-class white girl can have many points in common with people from a world away.

I’ve talked here before about humanising people through stories as a way into an issue, and Africa to Australia does exactly this. Rather than looking at ‘the African community’ as a homogenous whole, it presents engaging morsels on a range of diverse individuals. John Connell, who produced most of the content, did a great deal of research to find these stories. Many in African communities had felt they weren’t being particularly well represented in the media, and Connell says once he approached people for the project they were usually more than happy to be involved. “At the time we made the documentary, the Somali community was feeling under fire after some arrests relating to terrorism charges, and this seemed like a good chance to redress these issues, and for them to say ‘yes we’re different, yes we’re Muslim, but we’re very proud of who we are and we love Australia’,” he says. He also explains that they were really trying to get across the multitude of stories that there are - Africa can sound like a catch-all term but of course there are many countries and many different cultures and experiences.

Connell says he hopes the project will be a tool for younger people wanting to know more about Australia; an educational tool showing the diversity that exists in this country. “I also see it as a resource for the African community that they can look at and be proud of, but also to show their friends, and say ‘this is the story - or part of the story - of African people in Australia’.”

Humour me while I make it all about myself again briefly - when I was 15, I was waiting for the bus to school one day and noticed someone different at the bus stop. She was maybe a bit older than me and dark skinned, and smilingly came up and introduced herself. She was Fijian, here in Australia to attend TAFE, and we chatted happily on the bus until her stop arrived. Then I waved her goodbye and went on to school. I never saw her again, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve looked back and wished I’d asked for her phone number and invited her out with my friends. It was so brave of her to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a new and unknown country, and I was a fairly self-involved teenager who didn’t realise she was looking to make friends. Perhaps if I’d seen something like Africa to Australia at the time, I might have realised more quickly how much we could have in common.