As a small boy Peter Kon was forced on a month-long march across rugged bushland away from his family and village.

For the next 18-years a refugee camp would be his home and disease, starvation and death his constant companions.

But the South Sudanese refugee refused to give up his dream of a future.

“This country gave me everything that I dreamed of as a little girl but could never have achieved in my homeland.”

This is how Kosovar-Albanian refugee Mirisha Bowler sums up the experience of fleeing her war-torn homeland and building a new life in Australia.

A new swathe of data from the 2016 Census has produced an updated snapshot of Australia’s changing cultural diversity.

An estimated 258 million people currently live in a country other than that of their birth, a figure that is up from 173 million in 2000, and 102 million in 1980, according to the latest world snapshot of migration data.

When a friend told Joseph Youhana his name was on a death list pinned to the wall of a mosque in his home town, he knew his life had changed forever.

The young Iraqi student’s idyllic life in the ancient and beautiful city of Mosul – in the country’s fertile north – was over and at the moment he became a refugee.

Studying by candlelight in the bowels of an ancient convent as a bloody civil war raged around her, Jamila Alarkan stuck doggedly to her dream of becoming an engineer.

The Syrian refugee endured the effects of war, sickness and physical injury to pursue an education and the chance of a bright future.