AustLit

The increasing contestation around “Australianness” has been dramatically highlighted by the reception of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writings from Manus Prison, with one reviewer writing that “It may well stand as one of the most important books published in Australia in two decades, the period of time during which our refugee policies have hardened into shape – and hardened our hearts in the process” (“CG”, SP¹ 4 Aug.). After his Australia-bound boat was intercepted in 2013 as part of Australia’s “Operation Sovereign Borders”, he was eventually transferred to a detention centre on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. Boochani, a Kurdish journalist who writes for the Guardian and often breaks news on Twitter, remains on Manus Island along with other “detainees” still there after the detention centre’s closure in 2017. The Australian media has not been allowed to access Manus, so writers working from detention are key to our understanding of this part of the Australian story. Boochani smuggled his memoir out of Manus in encrypted messages sent from a contraband phone, writing in Farsi which was then translated by Omid Tofighian.' (Introduction)