We Believe Every Australian Story Belongs to All of Us
There’s a question we get asked a lot at Tawasul Foundation: what does a multicultural organisation have to do with veterans?
The answer is simpler than people expect.
We work with communities from Arabic-speaking backgrounds Assyrian, Chaldean, Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, Egyptian, and others. Many of these families have built their lives here in Australia, and they’re part of the fabric of this country. But often, they arrive without the cultural context to understand what Anzac Day means, who the RSL is, or why Australia marks Remembrance Day the way it does.
That’s not a criticism of anyone. It’s just a gap. And gaps are exactly what Tawasul Foundation exists to close.
So we started a conversation.
Bridging Cultures, Honouring Veterans: A Digital Initiative
What built a four-episode podcast series recorded professionally, hosted by Sara, produced by Humans of Australia featuring four Australian veterans who sat down and told us their stories. Real conversations, run long enough to find the moments that matter.
A bilingual website honouringveterans.org.au in English and Arabic, housing every episode, every veteran profile, and context designed for audiences who are newer to this part of Australian life. A social media campaign across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, bringing the content to audiences where they already are.
The four people who made it real
We didn’t go looking for symbols. We went looking for people.
Rach Ranton served 11 years in the Australian Army, including deployment to Afghanistan. She left at 28 and built a new career from the ground up. Her episode is about purpose what it gives you, and what it feels like when the structure around it changes.
Shamsa Nasr spent 14 years in the Royal Australian Air Force, then moved into the corporate and community sector. She’s one of the most thoughtful voices we’ve heard on what it means to build a career around values in uniform or out of it.
Mona Shindy served more than 30 years in the Royal Australian Navy, came to Australia from Egypt as a young child, and navigated a long career in a field few people had walked before her. She wrote a book called Shattering Identity Bias. Her episode is about perseverance, identity, and what it means to belong.
Kevin O’Callaghan has given more than 50 years to his community across Defence, the SES, and the Craigieburn War Memorial. When he noticed there was no local Anzac Day service in Craigieburn, he built one. That’s Kevin.
What happened beyond the podcast
The episodes were the beginning, not the end.
We attended Anzac Day commemorations in Craigieburn alongside Kevin and the community he’s spent decades building. For many people from our networks who came along, it was their first dawn service. They stood alongside neighbours, long-time locals, and veterans as the sun came up and something shifted. The conversations that started that morning didn’t end when the ceremony did.
Through that presence, connections formed that we hadn’t planned for. Young people who’d engaged with the podcast expressed interest in volunteering with the Craigieburn War Memorial organisation.
Conversations have also begun between Australian veterans in the Craigieburn area and people from other countries who also served in their own nations’ defence forces, and now live in the same suburb. Those conversations are still early. But they’ve started.
And through the relationships built across this project, a veteran who is also a practising artist was connected with Tawasul Foundation’s arts exhibition in Hume their work sitting alongside community members from many backgrounds.
Why this matters to us
Tawasul Foundation is a community organisation. We don’t take positions on politics, defence policy, or world affairs. That’s not our role and it’s not our purpose.
Our purpose is connection. We believe that people who share a country who live in the same suburb, drop their kids at the same school, shop at the same markets deserve the chance to actually know one another.
Veterans have stories that many communities in Australia have never had the chance to hear. Not because people don’t care but because the opportunity hadn’t been created yet.
We created one. honouringveterans.org.au is live, free, and available in both English and Arabic. The podcast is on Spotify, YouTube Podcasts, and wherever you listen.
A thread that kept coming up: peace
We didn’t set out to make a project about peacebuilding. But the word kept surfacing.
Shamsa talked about Anzac Day not as a celebration of war, but as a reminder to ask: how can my life be about peace? She spoke about what it means to be a peacebuilding nation, and how that question belongs to all of us, not just those who’ve served.
Rach mentioned her East Timor deployment in passing. Her job there, in part, was helping bring stability to a region in conflict. Language skills. Local liaison. Quiet, unglamorous work that didn’t make headlines.
For communities who’ve experienced war firsthand, who’ve fled conflict, who’ve watched their countries fracture, that framing matters. It reframes what service can mean. Not just sacrifice. Not just duty. Sometimes, presence in the right place at the right time, doing the quiet work that helps people go home safely.
A note on what service means
Kevin said something during his episode that stayed with us.
We asked him what the word service meant to him. He paused, then said:
“It’s knowing that you’re going to leave your community better off than what it is now.”
That’s the whole thing, really. That’s what this project was trying to do too.
This project was supported by the Victorian Government through the Victoria Remembers Program, administered by the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing and funded by the Victorian Veterans Council.
Visit honouringveterans.org.au to listen to all four episodes.