IN Go Back to Where You Came from, a three-part documentary screened last week on SBS television, six people retrace the steps of refugees who came to Australia as onshore asylum seekers or through Australia’s offshore humanitarian program. Over a five-week period, they travel from Australia via several transit countries to two of the main sources of global refugee movements, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the beginning of their journey, the six stay for a week with refugees in Australia: a family from Burundi and the Congo living in Wodonga, and four Iraqi men living in Sydney. In Darwin, they board what appears to be a leaky and entirely unseaworthy boat. Their next stop is Malaysia, where they are hosted by Chin refugees from Burma; later, they accompany Malaysian immigration officials on a raid to flush out illegal immigrants. Then three of them travel to Jordan and from there to Iraq, and the other three journey to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and from there to the Congo. In Jordan and at Kakuma they meet the relatives of the people who had hosted them in Australia…

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