A minority within a minority: Elinore Rema, the first Garo lawyer in Australia

In 1993, when Elinore Rema was only five years old, her whole life moved to an island halfway around the world. A member of the Garo community, her childhood was spent tucked away on a mountain-laden corner in the north of Bangladesh. Rema initially struggled to comprehend why her parents would take her away from everything familiar and throw her straight into the deep end, but it was not long until she figured out why. 

The Rema family's move to Australia placed her on a path to make history. It also placed the Bangladeshi ethnic minority people on the global fore as she became the first Bangladeshi Garo lawyer in Australia. 

"I found myself in an environment where I did not speak the language. All the faces were so different from ours, the culture, so different from ours, and the food, so different from ours," she said.   

It was a tough battle for Rema to assimilate into her new community in Australia while still trying to embrace her roots. The absence of familiarity was hard for her, but eventually she realised that her experience was all the more rich for it. 

Along with those challenges, her parents leaned on her to be academically successful. 

"(My father) had the same upbringing as we would have, back in the motherland. So there was always the expectation that you will strive to be the best. You had to either be a lawyer, a doctor or an engineer," she said. 

However, her path was not always as cut and dry as it would seem. Like many growing up, indecision about her career path was something that plagued her, and even during her undergraduate studies at the University of New South Wales, the field of law was nowhere near her radar. 

"I have always had an interest in the arts and social sciences. My parents said 'Oh, that's not good at all,' but that is what I did," she said. "I ended up doing a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy. I did well enough to be approached by a lecturer to go on and do honours as well." 

Even after completing her degree, Rema felt lost. But it was the Arab Spring and the Syrian Civil War that struck a chord in her heart. Photographs and videos of hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded international media, and it was then that Rema decided to pursue law. 

"It was horrific seeing the impact of war on the country, but then also through Australian media, we were hearing about all the refugees, people spilling out into different parts of the world including some trying to come to Australia to seek asylum and find a better life for themselves and their children," recalled a visibly distressed Rema.

Elinore Rema with her parents at her graduation. Photo: Courtesy

Consequently, she delved into the realm of Migration Law and got her graduate degree on the subject at the Australian National University. It was during this time that a lecturer told her that she would be able to do much more as a lawyer than as a migration agent.

After that, Rema went back to the University of New South Wales, completed her law degree, and subsequently started working as a paralegal for the law firm Pryor Tzannes & Wallis based in Sydney. 

"What I have done has been quite inadvertent, I did not actually set out to do something so fundamental. I had actually started my law degree without even realising that I was the first Garo person who has actually completed a law degree in Australia," Rema said about her achievement. "I was just having a casual conversation with my mom and my aunt when it sank in. And I was like, oh ****, I'm going to be the first from my community. If I complete this, I will be the first Garo person to complete this law degree."

For her, it had never been about highlighting the Garo community—for the most part, her childhood identity was simply that she was Bangladeshi. The fact that she was a minority within a minority did not faze her. She was Bangladeshi, and her friends were Bangladeshi and they 'were all in it together.'

 "As an ethnic minority person, you would probably be differentiated from a non-ethnic minority person in Bangladesh, that kind of cultural outlook would probably be prominent in Bangladesh," Rema said. "I never felt that with my friends here though. I've never felt any difference. We were all Bangladeshis." 

Her different experience does not mean that she was out of touch with her ethnic minority culture, however. Rema recalled visiting Bangladesh every few years and seeing her extended family, most often for Christmas and for weddings. 

"There would be families coming together for a huge celebration on Christmas and a lot of weddings would take place during that time as well because everybody was in the village."

In Australia, Rema's parents always kept both her and her sister in touch with their ethnic minority heritage by always speaking Bangla at home and cooking traditional Garo food. The salience of her Garo identity was made easier by the trips back home during which she visited her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and her cousins. 

She described her trips as an intensified session of being in touch with her roots and trying to understand her cultural background.

Moreover, Rema wants to incorporate her cultural background into her future by initiating a mentoring program for young ethnic minority boys and girls. But first, she is waiting for her admission ceremony, after which, she will complete her journey to becoming a lawyer.