AUGUST 2017AWW.COM.AU 81
AAP. AUSTRALSCOPE. GETTY IMAGES.
ABOVE, FROM
LEFT: Vanessa
with daughters
Natasha (left) and
Joely on the set of
Camelotin 1967;
Vanessa and her
brother, Corin, at
an anti-Vietnam
rally in London,
1968; with Natasha
(left) and Joely in
2000; activist
Vanessa leads a
protest in London
in 1966; cuddling
children at the
Eleonas refugee
camp, Athens,
in 2015; a scene
fromSea Sorrow,
showing a refugee
and her child.he was young, I know. He was a young actor. He
didn’t dream of fighting. No, he had a very different
dream about how life should be, could be, but he
became convinced that there was no other way
but to fight. He threw himself into fighting. That
was for democratic rights for everybody.”
Vanessa is on a tirade and she is not going to
stop. I tell her many of our politicians argue that
the detention camps are necessary to stop the
boats and the people smugglers getting rich while
they put innocent and vulnerable lives at risk, but
she is adamant. “We see it as horror, a creeping
and monstrous inhumanity. When you’ve got
monstrous inhumanity speaking through whichever
politician, you can’t believe they’re human because
it’s inhuman to do these things.”
Carlo adds that the big problem with camps
and detention centres is the impact on a refugee’s
mental health. “The shock of that displacement and
the journey, and all it meant to them is immense,”
he says. “I think the defining argument is very
much not just obviously to save lives, but trying to
save people’s minds as well, their sanity to some
degree. Even though they will be scarred for life.
At least do the best, so that somehow they can bementally rehabilitated to the degree where they
can at least start to function ... ”
“And start to love life again,” adds his mother.
Vanessa tells me that the best moment of her
life was “giving birth to my children. All three
[her daughter, Natasha, died tragically in a skiing
accident in 2009]. I’m not allowed to pick and
I wouldn’t allow myself to. I had three births
which I treasure forever.”
When she visits the camps, I ask her if she feels
a maternal pull to scoop up the children and take
them home to safety. “No, if they haven’t got parents,
I want either to reunite them with their parents or
reunite them with relatives. But I certainly want to
give them a cuddle,” she replies, with a chuckle.
“People do need cuddles. I know one of the first
times I ever went off on a venture, I asked [US
actor] Harvey Keitel to come with me to Bosnia
with UNICEF during the siege [in 1993], and
I remember an answer he gave to a journalist,
which was that he felt that if every person in the
world could be given a cuddle, half the problems
would go away. I thought, damn right! There’s
something. What can I do? Give someone a cuddle.
It sounds ridiculous, but it’s not.”AWW