I want to put some ground under this before I tell you what happened to me, because for a long time I thought my silence was a personal failing. It isn't. It's a pattern, and it has been measured.

  • In a national survey of more than 5,000 international students in Australia, 62% of those who had a problem at work didn't seek any information or help at all. The most common reason was fear of losing the job (48%), followed by not wanting “problems that might affect my visa” (38%).
  • Among migrant workers who knew they’d been underpaid, fewer than one in ten took any action to recover the money. Only 3% contacted the Fair Work Ombudsman.
  • In an Australian university study, male international students were significantly less likely to seek help than female international students: 11.7% of men had ever sought help for a mental health problem, compared with 22.9% of women. For any problem at all — mental health, relationships, money — it was 17.3% of men versus 31.4% of women. International students as a group sought help far less often than domestic students (24.4% versus 55.3%).
  • The reasons international students gave for not seeking help, in that same study: the problem wasn’t serious enough (25.8%), they could manage it on their own (24.2%), or the service wouldn’t be able to help them anyway (17.5%).
  • And it isn’t only us. Among Australian men generally, only about a quarter said they would seek help from a mental health professional for a personal or emotional problem, and around 80% said they’d be unlikely to use a phone helpline.

Read those last three reasons again: not serious enough, I can handle it, they can’t help me anyway. I said all three of those to myself, in that order, standing next to a dented car in Deer Park.

The bumper bar

When I first came to Australia, I lived in Deer Park and studied at the Gordon in Geelong. Every day started the same way: a thirty-minute walk to Deer Park station, then the V/Line down to Geelong. In winter, in the dark, in the rain. That walk was the price of not knowing where to live before I arrived. You choose a suburb from the other side of the world — from an ad, from a friend of a cousin, from whatever number fits the budget — and you only find out what it costs you once you’re the one walking it every morning.

Then I bought my first car — a 2002 Corolla, four-door sportsback. Nothing special to anyone else. To me it was thirty minutes of my life given back every morning.

One day I was turning right out of a roundabout when a car hit me from behind. A woman got out of the four-wheel drive behind me. She was worried at first — genuinely worried, asking if I was okay. That part I remember clearly, because of what happened next.

We swapped licences. She looked at mine and saw it wasn’t Australian. It was a Sri Lankan licence, and I was legally entitled to drive on it — the rules for driving in Victoria on an overseas licence allow it while you’re here short-term, as long as the licence is valid and in English or accompanied by a translation.

But she didn’t see a licensed driver. She saw an opening. She saw a small brown boy.

Her worry turned into something else.

“Why did you slow down in the roundabout?” she asked.

“Why didn’t you keep your distance from me?” I asked back.

Her face changed again — from anger back to worry, just for a second. Long enough that I knew she knew. But we were holding up traffic, so we took photos, swapped details, and drove off.

And then, instead of paying for the bumper bar she had just crushed, she started demanding money from me.

Here is the part of the story I actually want to write about: I did nothing that helped.

I didn’t call anyone who could actually help. I didn’t ask my institute. I didn’t look up whether a free legal service existed. I did tell my friends — and they gave me the only advice they had, which was to ignore her calls. So that’s what I did, for more than a month, while she kept ringing. I didn’t tell my family back home, because they were already sending me money and worry, and I wasn’t going to send worry back.

I just carried it. For months. Every time the phone buzzed with an unknown number, my stomach dropped.

Why we don’t ask

I work in community services now. I’ve sat with a lot of young men who have their own version of that roundabout. The details change — a landlord keeping a bond, an employer paying half the award rate, a supervisor who “forgets” to sign off placement hours, a stranger who decides you look like someone who won’t complain. The silence is identical.

Here’s what’s underneath it.

We think asking for help is the same as admitting we can’t cope. We came here on the family’s biggest financial bet. And the story we were sent with is he’ll manage — he’s a boy. He managed as a kid, after all. He was the one who didn’t cry, who sorted things out, who never had to be chased. That reputation gets on the plane with you. A boy is supposed to become a man, and a man is not supposed to show a sign of weakness. Nobody ever finished that sentence for us — nobody ever said that knowing when to ask for support is one of the biggest parts of being strong. So asking doesn’t feel like making a phone call. It feels like editing the story your whole family is holding onto.

We think we’ll be sent home. Almost every international student man I’ve spoken to has a quiet, unexamined fear that any official contact — police, a complaint, a lawyer, even the wrong kind of email to the college — will end with a visa problem. Nobody ever told us that. Nobody ever told us the opposite either — because nobody ever tested it. We arrive carrying the same luggage: you can’t trust the system. We’ve heard enough stories about people the system failed, and enough of us have felt first-hand that it wasn’t built with international students in mind. That belief isn’t baseless. But it isn’t the whole picture either. There are government bodies and NGOs full of people who actually care about this, who do the work for free, and who deal with exactly our problems every week. The gap isn’t that the help doesn’t exist. The gap is that nobody ever showed us where to check.

We don’t know free help exists. In Sri Lanka, “lawyer” means money. So when your only mental model of legal help has a price tag, and you’re already counting coins for rent, you don’t even open the search tab.

And when we do ask, we ask each other — and stop there. This is the one I got wrong about myself for years. I did talk to my friends. They told me to ignore her calls, because that was the best advice available inside a group of men who were all equally new here. Advice can only be as good as the map the person giving it has. We keep the problem inside the circle, the circle does its best, and everybody agrees that nothing more can be done.

And the circle has a shape. Mine was Sri Lankan, and a Sri Lankan circle mostly knows what Sri Lankans in that cohort have already tried. That isn’t a criticism of my friends — every community is like this. The Nepali students two houses down might have a group chat with a free legal service’s number sitting in it. The Vietnamese cohort at another campus might have collectively worked out exactly how to handle an employer who underpays, because someone did it three years ago and told everyone who came after. Different bubble, different map, sometimes a much better one. There is rarely one answer to one question — there are five, sitting in five different communities, and the only way to see them is to talk to people outside your own. Keep your circle. Just don’t let it become the outer wall of what you believe is possible.

We’ve learned that our version of events is the one that gets doubted. When a person’s face changes the moment they see your licence, you learn something about whose account is treated as credible. The next time something goes wrong, you don’t bother — because why would this time be different?

And we’ve been taught that a man handles it himself. That’s the one that does the most damage, because it disguises avoidance as strength. I wasn’t being strong at that roundabout. I was being quiet. Those are not the same thing, and I spent years confusing them.

What I should have done

Not “what a braver man would have done.” Just the boring, specific, available things I didn’t know to do at twenty-something.

Written everything down that night. Date, time, direction of travel, position in the roundabout, weather, her words, my words, the photos I already had. Memory decays. A contemporaneous note doesn’t.

Checked my own legal footing instead of guessing. My licence was valid. Even if it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have changed who ran into whom — fault and licence status are separate questions. Ten minutes on the VicRoads overseas licence page would have taken away the single thing she was using as leverage.

Called a free legal service. Victoria Legal Aid’s guide to driving and accidents explains exactly how repairs and fault work after a crash, what your insurance obligations are, and what to do when the other driver has no cover. It also explains a letter of demand — a plain written request for the money you’re owed. That’s the tool I needed and had never heard of.

Used free mediation. The Dispute Settlement Centre of Victoria handles vehicle property damage disputes between drivers. Their mediation service is free, voluntary and confidential, and they have offices across Victoria. A neutral third person in the room changes the dynamic completely — you’re no longer one nervous student against one confident stranger.

Walked into student support and said the sentence out loud. The Study Melbourne Hub exists for exactly this. Free, confidential caseworkers, many of whom were international students themselves, and they will refer you on if your issue sits outside their scope. Study Melbourne also funds ISEALS — free, confidential and independent legal help for international students facing exploitation or discrimination at work or in their accommodation, delivered by community legal centres. Appointments on 1800 056 449.

Named the discrimination instead of swallowing it. Being treated differently because of how you look isn’t just a bad feeling — in Victoria it can be a complaint. The Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission takes free, confidential complaints about racial discrimination and vilification, and the state has a plain-language page on reporting racism in Victoria. Whether or not a formal complaint was the right move, knowing the option existed would have changed how I understood what happened to me.

Told someone outside my own circle. My friends listened, and that mattered. But we were all in the same boat with the same map — none of us knew there was a free service on the other side of the room. Sympathy from people in your situation is not the same as information from someone who knows the system. I needed both, and I only had one.

What difference it would have made

The money, obviously. A rear bumper on a 2002 Corolla wasn’t going to break anyone, but on a student budget it was groceries for a month.

But that’s the smallest part.

I’d have got the months back. Months of rehearsing arguments in the shower, of flinching at unknown numbers, of driving past that roundabout and feeling my chest tighten. That’s a real cost and nobody invoices you for it.

I’d have learned the system earlier. Everything I listed above, I eventually learned — years later, professionally, while helping other people. If I’d learned it at twenty-two, every problem after that one would have been smaller: the dodgy rental, the underpaid shift, the placement that went sideways. The first time you ask for help is the expensive one. After that it’s just a phone call.

I’d have kept a better story about myself. For a long time my private version of that day was I got taken for a ride and said nothing. That story leaks. It shows up in job interviews, in classrooms, in how long you wait before speaking. The version I could have had was much more ordinary: something unfair happened, I found out my rights, I dealt with it. Same event. Completely different man walking away from it.

And I’d have been useful to my friends. Because the guy who has actually rung a legal service becomes the guy other blokes ask. That’s how silence breaks in a community — not with a campaign, but with one person who knows the number.

Where to get help

If you’re a male international student sitting on something right now, start here. All of these are free.

Practical, legal and everyday problems

  • ABI — AusWISE Behavioural Index — free, peer-led community and support pathway for international students in Australia: ask one question about housing, visas, work rights or wellbeing and get pointed to the next step. (A project of AusWISE, the not-for-profit I work with.)
  • Study Melbourne Hub — free, confidential support for international students in Victoria: accommodation, money, wellbeing, referrals. Free events too, if you just need people.
  • ISEALS — free, confidential legal help for international students with work and accommodation problems. 1800 056 449.
  • Victoria Legal Aid — free legal information and advice, with interpreters available. Their driving and accidents section is the one I needed.
  • Dispute Settlement Centre of Victoria — free mediation for disputes including vehicle property damage. 1300 372 888.
  • City of Melbourne’s international student page — links to multilingual legal information and local services.

Discrimination and racism

Your head, when it gets heavy

  • MensLine Australia — 1300 78 99 78. Free professional counselling for men, 24/7, by phone, chat or video. No referral, no cost, and you don’t need a crisis to call.
  • Beyond Blue — 1300 22 4636. 24/7 support for anxiety, depression and everything that doesn’t have a name yet.
  • Lifeline — 13 11 14. 24/7 crisis support.
  • In an emergency, call 000.

One last thing

The woman in the four-wheel drive read me in about three seconds and made a bet: this one won’t say anything.

She was right. That’s the part I can’t undo.

What I can do is make sure the next young man walking out of a roundabout in Deer Park — or a rental inspection in Footscray, or a shift he didn’t get paid for — knows that the phone number exists, that it’s free, that it’s confidential, and that using it doesn’t cost him anything he actually needs to keep.

Asking for help isn’t the thing that ends the story you were sent here with. Staying quiet is.

If any of this sounds like your situation and you’re not sure where to start, the Study Melbourne Hub is the single best first phone call in Victoria. They will point you at the right door.

— Asanka Tharindu