Port Fairy resident Maggie Cavalieri will demonstrate her despair about the unfair treatment of children in detention on Friday.
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She will sit on Port Fairy’s Fiddler’s Green at 5pm and ring a bell 52 times for each child being detained on Nauru.
She said it was an issue she had been following and one she and others were concerned about.
Mrs Cavalieri said she heard about Anglican churches around Australia who were ringing their bells to highlight the issue and decided to do something similar in Port Fairy.
Members of the public are invited to join her by bringing a bell, drum or whistle to make some noise about the unjust treatment.
“I thought Port Fairy is such a wonderful community and people do take notice of things,” Mrs Cavalieri said.
“I thought ‘why not sit there and ring a bell and if people come and read the sign then they might join in’. I’d like to do it every week at the same time.”
She said she would contact the town's churches to see if they would join in and ring their bells in support. “Maybe Port Fairy can be the little town that’s doing its bit.
Mrs Cavalieri said we had a global responsibility to do something about the issue and it was an atrocity that history would judge us harshly for.
“There’s terrible things have happened in the world in generations or over decades and you think ‘how did that happen? How could that have possibly happened?’ And it did. I would say it’s happening now.
"We have the greatest displaced people in the history of mankind, the displacement of millions of people who are fleeing war and terror.
"It’s an absolute fluke of our birth where we’re born and we are fortunate, here we are in Australia and we’re so lucky, but we have a global responsibility.”
Mrs Cavalieri will keep the bells ringing for as long as it takes for the children to be freed from Nauru.
“The bells will be tolled for however many children there are. At the moment there are 52 dings of the bell. Each week that might come down and if the bells fall silent that’s a good thing.
“I think we can do a bit more.”
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