Fix a car & help a refugee get around now they are settled.

Product Description

Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

Anyone who has lived in Hobart knows how hard it is to navigate the limited public transport system, especially with little children, groceries and household goods. But it can be particularly isolating to be stuck without transport, without family, in a foreign country and living out of the city.

I have a ten-year old car in my front yard that isn’t doing very much. Rather than try to sell it to a 16 year old L plater who will treat the clutch like its a post-apocalyptic-Icelandic-death-metal-B-side I thought I would try to fix it up to give to a refugee family to make life in Hobart a bit easier. The problem is that it needs a couple of improvements before I can do that.

The most important is registration! Its two weeks out, so we don’t need to put it over the pits to re-register, but it would be good to have it registered for a year ($520 or thereabouts). I’m hoping to raise some funds for that.

If we get more than is necessary for the registration I’d like to get the car to a) a panel beater and b) a mechanic (in that order).

Bob was originally designed to be a city hatchback but has thrown off the shackles of socially defined auto-roles to reveal its true identity; a bell-bar-mostache toting, singlet and short-short wearing, Dakar Rally offroad monster truck (with Mag wheels the previous owner put on) masquerading as a city-hatchback.

Bob’s definitely been places he wasn’t supposed to go, and fought battles with bush-trails that he hasn’t necessarily won. He’s also carried more smelly sporting man bits than it probably should have – but I’m hoping the three litres of Glen20 I’ve bought will make short work of that.

Fortunately Bob’s engine, air-bags and tyres are in pretty good nick, but his tendency to break into interpretative renditions of the closing scene of Man From Snowy River (as the pony in the scene where he flies solo down the hill surrounded by dust and trees and bemused looks of so-called bushmen) has left him with quite a few dints in the body. It doesn’t make Bob unusuable in any sense, but it does look a little like he’s been stuck with a wookie, angry princess and long-slimy-creature-with-eye-on in a planet size space station’s garbage compactor.

So, if we raise more than rego, then I’ll also get a panel beater to tidy up the more unfortunate high speed tree-branch offroad attack ninja damage.

If for some reason we get even more than that I’ll get a mechanic to give Bob a service to make sure that everything’s okay for another ten years of dedicated work!

When I decided to give my car away I had a young family in mind. They can’t afford a second-hand car, let alone a new one. I wanted to donate the hatchback to them, but I have limited finances to get it onroad. It turns out however, that young families like the one I was hoping to give the car to, have to agree not to take any finacial assistance from Australians during the period of their protection visas. Otherwise they won’t be released from detention.

That means we’d a) technically have to ‘sell’ the car to the family – but hey that’s what $1 contracts were made for right and b) do the registration/ repairs before we do the $1 ‘sale’. After that I will ask the Tasmanian Asylum Seeker Support Centre find an in-need refugee family to ‘sell’ the car to.

anja hilkemeijer