AustLit

'In 2004, when she was John Howard’s Immigration minister and I was a reporter for my student newspaper in Adelaide, Amanda Vanstone granted me an interview. Her job was to administer Australia’s policy of locking up people who’d come to Australia by boat to seek protection from persecution. When I observed that remote refugee prisons in places such as Woomera, Port Augusta and Port Hedland did not facilitate access to lawyers and journalists, Vanstone said that was the fault of those professionals for not setting up their practices in those places. When I pressed my point, Vanstone became annoyed. “Listen. Yatala’s not remote. We don’t allow a lot of media there!”' (Introduction)

'In 2018, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison became a literary sensation. It was written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee who was incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island. Like thousands of others, Boochani had travelled by boat to seek asylum in Australia. From Manus, he texted passages to collaborators in Sydney. There, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi developed the work further. Through reportage, storytelling and poetry, it bore witness to the horrors of immigration detention. By 2019, No Friend had won some of Australia’s major literary awards and Boochani had become internationally renowned. In November 2019, he was invited to attend a festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. After six years in detention, he was free. The system that had imprisoned him remained intact.' (Introduction)

'Eighty years apart, a private diary from the Tatura internment camp and dispatches from the Manus detention centre recount the experiences of refugees held prisoner by Australia'