Bhutan to Blacktown Losing everything and finding Australia

I lost my possessions, my salary, my status, my career, my country. And in that fall, I gained everything.

Bhutan is known as the land of Gross National Happiness, a Buddhist Shangri-La hidden in the Himalayas. But in the late 1980s, Bhutan waged a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign against its citizens of Nepali ancestry. Forced to flee Bhutan, Om Dhungel spent six years as a refugee in Nepal before he arrived in Australia. Today Om is a respected community leader in western Sydney, consulted frequently by government and settlement organizations on refugee policy. Written with Walkley Award–winning journalist James Button, Bhutan to Blacktown tells of Om Dhungel’s remarkable journey from a village on the Himalayan ridges and life as a refugee in Kathmandu, to, eventually, Blacktown, Australia. It is a story of grit and determination, humour and irrepressible optimism.

Om Dhungel arrived in Australia as a student in 1998 before being granted a refugee visa in light of the Bhutanese Government’ s persecution of the ethnic Nepalese of southern Bhutan. As inaugural president of the Association of Bhutanese in Australia, Om played a critical role in the settlement of 5000 Bhutanese refugees in Australia. Before coming to Australia he was a senior civil servant in Bhutan’ s Department of Telecommunications, then, while a refugee in Nepal, general secretary of the Human Rights Organisation of Bhutan and co-editor of The Bhutan Review. James Button is a former journalist and Europe correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is the author of Speechless: A year in my father’ s business and Comeback: The fall and rise of Geelong, and has won three Walkley awards and a Melbourne Press Club Quill for feature writing. He is a freelance writer and editor.

Foreword Introduction: An Australian by accident ‘ Om Prakash has passed!’ At His Majesty’ s pleasure Love and work in Thimphu Darkness falls on Bhutan A broken house, new foundations ‘ There is Smriti!’ The three of us Thank you, Australia From corporation to community Beyond charity: Rethinking refugee settlement A Blacktown boy Home