By Frud Bezhan

 Melbourne - For the women of Afghanistan, it is yet another brutal message — that death awaits those who choose a public life.

By Katie Fraser

 Melbourne - When I first started working with African clients six months ago at a Community Legal Centre in Melbourne’s western suburbs, I had a slightly sensationalized idea of what I might expect. Disaffected youths picked up for loitering, concealed weapons, and drug possession? Crimes involving gang violence and assault?

By Frud Bezhan

  Melbourne -  Nazifa Nader endured more than her fair share of  the upheavals in Afghanistan for two decades before coming to Australia.

After the death of her husband, father, brothers and uncles during the war between the Soviet Union and the Mujahidin in the 1980s Nazifa, then a 26-year-old widow, was left alone to fend for her six-month old daughter, two sons aged three and five and an elderly mother.

In April 1992 Nazifa fled Afghanistan and escaped to a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, teeming with widows, children and elderly men and women.

By Rosemary Kelada, CEO, Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre

  Melbourne - An opportunity is knocking for both employers and retrenched manufacturing workers, like the latest group from Pacific Brands. It is easy to become depressed about the global financial crisis and to consider the prospective unemployment of many of the manufacturing workers, many of them migrant men and women, as being a further layer of disadvantage for them. In our experience, however, migrants have much to offer potential employers.

By  Keren Leizerovitz

 MELBOURNE - Labelled ‘the lost tribe’, Russian-Jews or Jewish-Russians depending on where you sit, the Jewish community from the former Soviet Union in Melbourne has often been misunderstood or not sufficiently acknowledged.

By Sean Morris 

 MELBOURNE - Why does anyone leave their country permanently?  For a better, safer life and more opportunities.

By Natasha Cooper

 MELBOURNE - They call their soccer team Lil’ Brazil, they dream of one day making it to Rio to meet their football idols but for now its Melbourne.

The girls of Lil’ Brazil come from Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Lebanon and even further across the globe, Malaya. But they proudly wear the green and gold colours of the Brazilian team strip in their matches around Melbournes’s northern suburbs.

The team is the brainchild of Hala Abdelnour of the Spectrum Migrant Resource Centre (SMRC) in Preston and Coordinator of a leadership group called the Ethnic Youth Council (EYC).

By Colm McNaughton

 MELBOURNE - In my first radio documentary Awakening from History? the listener is invited into my own story as a way to enter the vexing question of intergenerational trauma in the North of Ireland.

In what follows, I examines some of the difficulties encountered and the strategies pursued both in the field and the studio to producing this piece.

The documentary was aired on the Radio Eye program on Radio National, and won a Walkley award for best radio documentary in 2008.

By Ramla Hashi

MELBOURNE - I was young, naive and I still feared the wrath of my mother. I had two things working against me that year:

By Eskias Mengistie

 MELBOURNE - Many of the roughly 20,000 Ethiopians living in Australia headed for Melbourne in the last week of December for their annual cultural festival and soccer tournament.