#Heavy rain sounds for sleeping portable#
The other children were in school and much further advanced in their education, whereas we thought he was portable and so he came with us to Azraq and Za’atari. It was his birthday and we were ourselves in the process of moving from one country to the next. You made a decision to involve your family and particularly your children in this cause and you’ve actually travelled with two of your sons?ĬB: I went with Iggy who’s now 10 on the second mission to Jordan with UNHCR. MF: You actually answered a number of questions that I was going to ask you towards the end of this podcast – like what keeps you awake at night?ĬB: There are many more things that keep me awake at night. So I suppose that’s a very long-winded answer to your question. Not only the spare time and the energy that I had as a storyteller, as an actor, as someone in the public profile who perhaps has a platform on which to discuss things which are complex and nuanced – but I also wanted to engage my children in that, so that they twinned their own sense of the future with the future of children less fortunate than themselves and their hopes and dreams. The more I investigated that and interrogated that, often in the middle of the night, the more I thought I wanted to engage. And being an Australian, a country that’s been very positively built in a lot of respects on immigration and the contribution of refugees, I found that the discourse around refugee children in peril was confoundingly negative. I started thinking about other children, other parents who had children perhaps in less privileged situations than the ones that my own children find themselves in. It’s a great act of optimism, I think, at the moment to have children when the future seems so under siege.
It’s often a time when you can free-associate and increasingly, over the last decade, what has preoccupied me is how fragile the future seems. When I’m awake in the middle of the night I think about the future of my children, their hopes, their dreams. I tend to do most of my thinking at night and, under the provocation of the title of this podcast, I did ask myself what keeps me awake and I think it’s the sense of the future. I’m the mother of four children and it’s interesting that this podcast is called “What keeps you awake at night”. MF: What made you decide to help refugees? Was there a moment or an encounter that you can remember that made you decide to take action?ĬB: Well, I think you’ve said it right there. And she also dedicates herself to refugees and stateless people as goodwill ambassador for UNHCR. Born in Australia, she is an Oscar-winning actor and the mother of four children. Today, it is an incredible pleasure and honour to have Cate Blanchett with me, one of the finest screen and stage actors of her generation. I’m Melissa Fleming and I’m the spokesperson for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Melissa Fleming: I am so happy to welcome you to this very special episode of Awake at Night, our podcast about people who go out of their way to help refugees.
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