AustLit

'My grandparents and their baby, my uncle, arrived in Melbourne aboard the RMS Mooltan on 16 February 1939. They were met by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, formed only two years before to assist Jewish refugees upon their arrival. It is possible that either Leo or Mina Fink, or both, were among those who greeted them off the boat. It stuck in my grandparents’ minds for the rest of their lives, the kindness shown by these Jewish strangers, and their gratitude. Leo and Mina Fink had been in Australia less than 10 years before my grandparents arrived, yet in this short time were already spearheading the relief and reception of Jewish refugees from Europe. After the war, Leo Fink also gained the ear of Australia’s first immigration minister Arthur Calwell, travelling regularly to Canberra determined to plead the case for the acceptance of Jewish survivors in Australia’s first mass immigration intake. For decades, the Finks were synonymous with Jewish life in Melbourne. Even today, as Margaret Taft notes in her history of this remarkable couple, it is impossible to venture far in the Jewish community of Melbourne without stumbling across their names engraved on plaques or enshrined in education and philanthropic endowments.' (Introduction)

'Akuch Kuol Anyieth was born into a world of violence. Her memoir begins at the age of five, when she fled with her mother and her three siblings from civil war in South Sudan to a refugee camp in north-west Kenya.'  (Introduction)

'The sea was rough, waves a few metres, falling on top of us. We were just waiting and hoping and praying that we were going to make it.'— Taozen, proud Australian, proud Hazara

'Smuggled offers a previously unseen glimpse into the dangerous and shadowy world of people smuggling. It shares harrowing true stories of those fleeing persecution to seek asylum and reshapes our idea of those —sometimes family, sometimes mafia — who help them find it.

'People smugglers have such currency in Australian politics yet they remain unknowable figures in our migration history. But beyond the rhetoric lies a rich past that reaches far from the maritime borders of our island continent — to Jews escaping the Holocaust, Eastern Europeans slipping through the Iron Curtain, ‘boat people’ fleeing the Vietnam War, and refugees escaping unthinkable violence in the Middle East and Africa.

'Based on revealing personal interviews, Smuggled provides a compelling insight into a defining yet unexplored part of Australian history.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'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)

'History on Australian television doesn’t reflect what historians really know about the past, and the fault is on both sides, writes Ruth Balint'