AustLit

'Over the past decade Australia’s policies on border protection have achieved a certain dark notoriety, in their often-vexed (although perhaps not vexed enough) reception both at home and abroad. While there has been extensive, if not necessarily efficacious, public debate about the legal and political dimensions of these policies, together with some coverage of their human, most often medical, consequences for refugees and asylum-seekers, there has been less opportunity for us to attend more closely to the statements and self-expression of those who have been caught up most directly and intensely in those policies.

'Testimonial accounts by detainees from Australian offshore centres are now beginning to be published and made available to the wider Australian public, as in the 2017 publication, They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories From Detention, (ed Michael Green, André Dao et al) along with manifestos, such as that by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist, currently held on Manus, who has been detained since 2013. In addition to these, in 2017, Island magazine published “Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty: A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison,” an extract from Boochani’s forthcoming book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison, described by the publishers as “a lyric first-hand account” of his experiences.

'These works – testimonials, manifesto, poetic novel/memoir – don’t simply provide an account of the lives and experiences of the refugees and asylum seekers; they also delineate a relationship with the Australian public. They imagine or posit a dialogue with us. In this paper, I want to propose that we approach the dialogue being proposed by the asylum-seeker writings as a mode of literary engagement. To put this another way, I’m proposing that these works demand attentive reading from us, not only in our responsibilities as citizens but also and most particularly as literary readers or scholars. In thinking about literary reading as a point of necessary public interface, I am responding to line of thought proposed by Boochani in his resonant account of the task of writing the truth of refugee detainment in his essay in They Cannot Take the Sky, where he argues that literary language is fundamental to the expression of difficult truths: “I publish a lot of stories in the newspapers and in the media about Manus, but people, really, they cannot understand our condition, not in journalistic language. Where we are is too hard. I think only in literary language can people understand our life and our condition.”' (Publication abstract)

'In Richard Flanagan’s foreword to No Friend But the Mountains, he states that Behrouz Boochani is ‘a great Australian writer’. The notion of what constitutes Australian literature has always been a bit nebulous. At first blush, it seems easy to define: writing by Australians. But then, who are these Australians? And by what definition could Boochani be considered an Australian writer? As Keyvan Allahyari and Paul Rae wrote in The Conversation, ‘If a non-citizen who has never set foot on mainland Australia can win [the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award], who counts as an Australian author?’' (Introduction)

'In 2004, Australian award-winning novelist Tom Keneally and writer and academic Dr Rosie Scott (who died in May and was featured on the cover of the Sydney PEN magazine published during the 2017 Sydney Writers’ Festival) published A Country Too Far, a collection of fiction, poetry, memoir and essays by some of Australia’s acclaimed writers exploring the treatment of those seeking asylum in Australia. A Country Too Far won the 2004 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Community Award. Ten years later they produced Another Country, a Sydney PEN anthology that includes writings by refugees and former asylum seekers.' (Introduction)

'In a recent chapter in a book about empathy, the South African-born historian Stephen Aschheim, who now lives in Israel, remarked that ‘atrocities, perhaps especially our own, are more acceptable when performed in distant places and acted upon ‘uncivilised’ populations… The closer to home that they are perpetrated, the more problematic they become.’ For decades now, Australia’s detention regime has effectively moved the government’s handling of asylum seekers out of sight – beyond the gaze of journalists, activists, lawyers and the public. This has enabled the government to lie about the people detained, using variations of the ‘uncivilised’ trope, without much fear of censure by the people themselves. And in an even more cynical twist, it has allowed successive governments to represent themselves as both muscular and fair, in standing firm with a policy that ‘stopped the boats’. But they haven’t stopped the boats and they haven’t stopped the deaths, they have just moved them out of our watch.' (Introduction)

'Australians haven’t had the present-day European experience of refugees on our streets. If families were napping outside our houses and walking single file along the highways, holding plastic bags containing all they own, thousands stuck in limbo at train stations, in squares - Melbourne’s Federation Square, a few centimetres between bodies and not one untaken bit of sandstone panel, summer, winter, they’re still there - if the living and the dead washed up at Trigg, on Clovelly, places our children go in bathers and arm floaties, how would it have been different? Would it have been different?' (Introduction)