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Asylum-seeking and perilous journeys
Merrill Findlay's review of Australian books about refugees and asylum seekers for Overland 175 Winter 2004

So there I was amongst the bean bags and picture books in my local library fighting back tears like a ten-year-old as I read about Jamal and his young Hazara mates playing Manchester United versus Newcastle ...more >>

Genre-bending
Review of Merle Thornton's debut novel After Moonlight (Interactive Press 2004) for Overland 179, Winter 2005.

Somewhere in the Brisbane Courier-Mail’s archives there’s a black and white photograph taken in March 1965 of two stylish young women quietly enjoying a beer in a public bar ... more >>

 

Asylum-seeking and perilous journeys
review by Merrill Findlay in Overland 175 Winter 2004 pp104-107 - Preprint version.

Morris Gleitzmann: Boy Overboard (Puffin Group, $14.94)
Tom Keneally:The Tyrant’s Novel (Doubleday $35).
Janet Austin (ed): From nothing to zero: letters from refugees in Australia’s detention centres, (Lonely Planet Publications $22)
Tom Mann: Desert sorrow: asylum seekers at Woomera (Wakefield Press, $24.95)
Frank Brennan: Tampering with asylum: a universal humanitarian problem (UQP, $29.95)
James Jupp: From White Australia to Woomera: the story of Australian Immigration, second edition (CUP, $29.95)

So there I was amongst the bean bags and picture books in my local library fighting back tears like a ten-year-old as I read about Jamal and his young Hazara mates playing Manchester United versus Newcastle in Morris Gleitzman’s Boy Overboard. Amy Jericho, a 20-something primary-school teacher from Murtoa, in Victoria’s Wimmera District, had told me about this ‘kiddylit’ at an event hosted by Horsham Rural Australians for Refugees, for a group of asylum seekers I’d crisscrossed rural Victoria with in June. Her students were “bored with refugees and poor people”, she complained, so she’s reading Boy Overboard aloud to them each day. And they love it, she said: “Especially the bits about camel poop!”

You have to really be a 10-year-old to appreciate the ‘camel poop’, and I’m not into soccer either, but there was Bibi, Jamal’s little sister, racing across the desert to grab the ball to kick the perfect goal. Bibi was the best soccer player in the village, but she had to practice in secret. The kids also shared another secret: their mother was running a clandestine school for girls, and if the Taliban ever found out …The Taliban did find out, of course, and the family had to flee. By the time Jamal and Bibi had been separated from their parents, and their little boat had been attacked by pirates somewhere between Indonesia and Australia, I was sobbing, and it wasn’t just because of the emotional power of Gleitzman’s narrative. I kept seeing the Hazara kids I’d been travelling around rural Victoria with kicking soccer balls down country streets; kids who’d survived their own journeys in overcrowded wooden boats, followed by long months, if not years, in one of Australia’s desert gulags.

Jamal and Bibi didn’t reach Australia. They were rescued by the Australian navy and taken to a security installation on some tropical island. As a young seaman explained to them, “There’s an election in Australia” and “[t]he Australian government thought they’d get more votes by keeping you out.”

Tom Keneally’s rapidly completed contribution, The Tyrant’s Novel, is of the humanising variety, and owes a great deal to a long essay by the author of Black Hawke Down, Mark Bowden, published in the May 2002 issue of Atlantic Monthly, as Keneally himself acknowledges. Bowden’s carefully researched cover story, ‘Tales of the Tyrant’ , profiles the then Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, and refers specifically to his own prolific ghost-writer-assisted oeuvre, which includes two fables published “anonymously”, and “a third, as-yet-untitled work of fiction”. Enter Keneally’s fictional writer who, having been stripped of everything he holds dear, is offered a Faustian commission he can’t refuse, by a tyrant very much like the subject of Bowden’s essay. This tyrant professes a romantic belief in the power of literature to effect change in the world, and what writer wouldn’t like to believe this? The event he seeks to influence is the G7 Summit at which certain sanctions against his country are to be discussed. The launch of the novel is to coincide with the meeting of the leaders of the world’s most powerful states, and the writer has one month in which to complete the manuscript. His reward will be a palace of his own, a golden cage in which he will be kept as the tyrant’s pampered pet. Instead, he chooses freedom, only to end up on the other side of the world, in an institution very much like Villawood Detention Centre, where he meets the visitor to whom he tells this tale. The writer asks that he be known simply as Alan Sheriff: “It’s the name of a man you’d meet on the street,” he explains. Keneally gives Anglo names to all his characters in his tyrant’s world, and while I admire his reasons for doing this, I wonder now if I’d have found this device less irritating had Iraq not been so recently invaded and occupied in the personal space of my own television screen, making me as familiar with Arabic names as I am with George, John and Tony. But these Anglo-named TV ‘tyrants’ didn’t wait for Tom’s fiction to be released and, unfortunately, timing is everything in publishing.

While Gleitzman and Keneally have created fictional worlds to explore the very real reasons people flee their homelands, Tom Mann’s Desert Sorrow and Lonely Planet’s From Nothing to Zero: letters from refugees in Australia’s detention centres, take us into a shamefully real world that I wish only ever existed in fiction: a world in which “Our morning starts with fear, the day is spent in limbo and evening ends with defeat”, as ‘Wasim’, one of the contributors to From Nothing to Zero, writes. Publisher Simon Westcott describes From Nothing to Zero as a “narrative tapestry”. Its threads, the extracts from letters written by people behind the razor wire, have been woven into themed chapters covering different aspects of the writers’ lives before and after they fled their homelands. The chapters are prefaced with contextual essays by human rights lawyer Julian Burnside QC, who with artist Kate Durham initiated the letter-writing campaign from which this collection emerged.The letters present a haunting account of the human costs of indefinite mandatory detention. Anyone who has read these letters can no longer plead ignorance, but why haven’t they caused an uprising yet? Why is it taking so long?

Some of the asylum seekers whose correspondence is included in this collection may have learned their English from Tom Mann, the author of Desert Sorrow, in the compounds of the Woomera Immigration, Reception and Processing Centre. Mann, an agricultural scientist, doesn’t explain why he chose to work for Australasian Correctional Management, the company which ran the Woomera detention centre from its opening in 1999 to its closure in April 2003, nor does he reveal very much about ACM’s operations, but for other reasons his book is a powerful social document for which future historians will be grateful. Mann arrived in Woomera in October 2000 when just 250 asylum seekers were interned there, including “only a hand full of children”. By the time he completed his second stint in September 2001, there were 1400 people in the compounds, including 331 children and fifty-eight unaccompanied minors. Teaching became “a nightmare’ as staff and facilities were ‘stretched to the limit”, he recalls. Desert Sorrow is a somewhat chaotic book. Like From Nothing to Zero it is more a ‘tapestry’ than a linear narrative. It includes disturbing eyewitness accounts of hunger strikes, acts of self-mutilation, riots and mass escapes, along with compassionate explanations of why people felt compelled to take such extreme action. But for me the most potent stories are the personal histories of the detainees: they have an edge to them that seems to have been edited out of the letters in the Lonely Planet collection.

From Nothing to Zero and Desert Sorrow reveal more about us as Australians than it does about the people who have been imprisoned in our name. “Enlightened people will ask how it could have happened,” Mann writes. “The world came to our doorstep and as a nation we retreated into fear and darkness.”

Lawyer Frank Brennan’s Tampering with Asylum: A Universal Humanitarian Problem, examines this retreat into fear in great detail. In his preface Brennan recounts a conversation he had in January 2002 with Senator Bill Heffernan, Parliamentary Secretary to Cabinet, who used the analogy of a firebreak to explain the Liberal government’s border protection strategy to stop asylum seekers reaching our shores. When there’s a big bushfire you have to destroy property to “save the neighbourhood”, Heffernan told him. “It’s not pretty. There are hard moral decisions. But you have to do it.”The government later claimed that its firebreak strategy was successful, because no more boats were arriving. But at what cost? Brennan asks. He points out that the strategy’s implementation had some very compromising components, including ‘upstream disruption’ in Indonesia, which, as former diplomat Tony Kevin has suggested, may have been responsible for the SIEV X tragedy; the “high-risk brinkmanship” of the navy’s Operation Relex; the so-called ‘Pacific Solution’, which Burnside argues is unlawful in both Nauru and PNG; limited access to lawyers and the courts; a very restrictive temporary protection visa that is “in flagrant breach” of the UN Refugee Convention; plus indefinite mandatory detention for anyone who seeks asylum without a valid visa which, as From Nothing to Zero and Desert Sorrow reveal, has caused lasting damage to innocent people, including children, who have exercised their right under international law to seek sanctuary in this country. Brennan identifies four waves of asylum seekers I recent Australian history. The first wave began in 1976 with the Vietnamese arrivals, and the second in November 1989, when twenty-six Chinese Cambodians reached Pen dar Bay, near Brome, at the time when the Australian government was involved in delicate negotiations around the Cambodian Peace Plan. Brennan reminds us that it was in response to these Cambodian asylum seekers that parliament passed the 1992 amendment to Australia’s Migration Act to legitimate mandatory detention for all undocumented arrivals. The third wave of mainly Vietnamese and Chinese asylum seekers arrived between 1994 and 1998; and the fourth, the largest so far, began the following year when the first boatloads of Afghans, Iraqis and Iran is landed on Christmas Island and Ash more Reef to be immediately arrested and detained for ‘processing’. Since then more than eight thousand people have arrived by boat, and the overwhelming majority have been found to be legitimate refugees. But, unlike past groups, they were told never to expect to receive permanent residency and naturalization.

As Brennan notes, the High Court ruled after the Cambodian experience that mandatory detention for undocumented arrivals was lawful only if it facilitated the processing of migration applications and was neither punitive, nor used for deterrence purposes. But, as he argues convincingly, such detention actually hinders processing, and it is now both punitive and imposed as a deterrent, so must, therefore be considered unlawful. While he admits that some form of detention is “reasonable and necessary” to check people’s identity, health and security status, he can identify no coherent, legitimate or moral policy rationale for the government’s current ‘firebreak’ excesses.

Immigration scholar James Jupp, the author of From White Australia to Woomera, confidently identifies at least one very coherent rationale for the Howard government’s obsessive ‘border protection’ policies: the Coalition’s need to woo back one million Australians who voted for One Nation in 1998 in order to win the 2001 election. He claims the Liberals adopted significant chunks of One Nation’s refugee policy, including the excision of Christmas Island from Australia’s migration zone, and the return of refugees to their homelands once conditions there improved, an option made possible by the re-introduction of the temporary protection visas in 1999.

He situates the One Nation phenomenon in a long tradition of populist xenophobia which stretches back at least 150 years, and suggests that much of the resistance to refugees and asylum seekers comes from people who were born and educated during the White Australia era, or from younger Australian-borns who remain uncomfortable with ‘Otherness’ because “they have lived very sheltered lives”. He includes most politicians and bureaucrats in this category, and argues that such people “cannot be expected to fully understand experiences which they have never witnessed and which have never impinged on Australia. Indeed, many seem skeptical that refugee claims are authentic.”

This is not a profound observation, but it is exactly why all the books, plays, films and other cultural artifacts now being produced in response to what Jupp calls our “notoriously draconian” policies towards asylum seekers, are so important to the future of this country. Any writer, any culture-producer, has to believe, as even Keneally’s tyrant does, that our work can effect change in some complex, chaotic and very human way. Our cultural interventions make people laugh at themselves. They can make us cry. (Witness me weeping like a 10-year-old when Bibi kicked that goal!) They can help Amy Jericho’s students in the litter school in Murtoa, and even (perhaps) James Jupp’s politicians and bureaucrats who’ve all lived very sheltered lives, understand experiences they have never witnessed. And they can allow readers to participate in what Frank Brennan calls a “considered moral discourse” through which we Australians can re-write our country’s ‘border protection’ policy before the next wave of asylum seekers arrives. As they will.

Genre-bending in Elsinore
Review of After Moonlight by Merle Thornton (Interactive Press, Brisbane, 2004) for Overland, Winter 2005 – preprint version

Somewhere in the Brisbane Courier-Mail’s archives there’s a black and white photograph taken in March 1965 of two stylish young women quietly enjoying a beer in a public bar. One is wearing a white tailored knee-length suit, the other a timeless light-coloured short-sleeved frock. By today’s standards they are dressed for a garden party, but if you let your eyes slide down their clear nylons towards their white stiletto heels and high wedges you’ll notice a dog chain and padlock securing them by the ankles to the bar’s foot rail. It’s an image that screams for its context.

The pub is Brisbane’s up-market Regatta Hotel; the women are Merle Thornton and Ro Bognor, and the chain and padlock signify their refusal to be ‘disappeared’ into the ‘Ladies Lounge’ while their spouses and colleagues network, close deals and socialise in the public bar. “It is not just the right to drink in bars we are seeking”, Thornton said at the time. “We are after equal educational opportunities for women, equal job opportunities and equal treatment in every direction.”

Merle Thornton was a postgraduate philosophy student at the University of Queensland when she launched her campaign for equal opportunities at the Regatta. Hotel. Forty years on, and after a long career as a respected academic, a scriptwriter and a playwright, she has published her first novel. Given her background you’d expect her to offer readers a good strong thought provoking brew rather than a fizzy commercial genre fiction cocktail, and she does. She also transgresses established genre boundaries as if they were 1960s drinking laws, archaic conventions whose time is up, and I’ll drink to that any day.

After Moonlight opens in a Carlton bookshop within easy walking distance of a certain sandstone university. The thirty-seven year old narrator, Claire Meredith, a part-time university teacher and documentary film-maker, is thumbing through The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (the entries for Free will and Determinism!) while she tries not to think about her ex, a Foucault-fixated lecturer and “pathological tail-chaser” called Roger Wilkinson with whom she desperately wanted a child. After surviving seven years of Roger’s Foucault-speak Claire is reduced to defining herself as “Foucault flotsam”, a mere “vehicle for the discourse of domesticity”, but she remains obsessed with this man. She stalks him, harasses him with phone calls, and gatecrashes his new lover’s thirtieth birthday party in the house she once shared with him. She gets very drunk at the party, behaves outrageously and is ‘rescued’ by Jim, the university’s Deputy Vice Chancellor, who gives her a lift and a grope her in his “midnight blue Porsche”.

This brief synopsis of the first few chapters might suggest that After Moonlight is a satirical Campus Novel in the tradition of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis), Groves of Academe (Mary McCarthy), The History Man, (Malcolm Bradbury) or more recently Human Stain (Philip Roth) and I am Charlotte Simmons (Tom Wolfe). Roger’s appallingly bad behaviour with his female students; the DVC’s grope and on-going affair with the novel’s protagonist, the aridity of his marriage, his disenchantment with the institution he describes as “an advanced kindy”, and his uncritical embrace of the university’s new “entrepreneurial spirit” are classic Campus Novel themes. The painfully ironic eulogy to “disinterested inquiry” from a “distinguished classicist and defender of the humanities” at the launch of Claire’s corporate video, and her students’ inability to peer below the surface of Hamlet in her English Lit. classes also fit the Campus genre. Academics will either grin or grimace as they recognise the institutional pathologies Thornton’s female narrator both observes and participates in.

But there are also elements of traditional Tragedy in After Moonlight. Claire is haunted by the ghosts of her dead parents; she experiences periods of madness; she has a psychotic sibling; her sandstone “kindy” is as malevolent as Shakespeare’s Elsinore; and she and the people she lives with are all escapees from families that are as dysfunctional as the Prince of Denmark’s. So is Thornton rewriting Hamlet from the point of view of the Ophelia? Well – no, because none of Thornton’s characters are drowned, stabbed or poisoned as they are in Shakespeare’s original! Indeed, by the end of ‘Act III’ Claire and her friends are all poised to live happily ever after as though they’re in a Chick-Lit Romance, or even a classic Quest, a mythic journey of self-discovery.

In a Quest reading Claire becomes a very fallible female hero who climbs a high mountain (Hong Kong’s Mount Victoria on a naughty long weekend) to confront her demons and slay the evil ‘power-knowledges’ that have entrapped her. She is then able to leap into another genre to construct a new identity for herself, a new story in which she is victor rather than victim.

So next time you visit your local please raise your glass to Merle Thornton, not only for her decades of feminist activism, but also for her genre-bending threads she has “plaited and spliced and plied” together into this, her ‘true fiction’ about the internal contradictions so many of us white middle-class women still struggle to resolve in the ‘real world’ of our particular Elsinores. After Moonlight a very memorable post-‘equal opportunities’ drink, a hearty brew that leaves me thirsty for Thornton’s second shout.

Merrill Findlay is the author of Republic of Women (UQP 1999). She has delayed completion of her next novel to, amongst other projects, write her own narrative response to the 2001 Tampa Election. See www.merrillfindlay.com.

Content first posted on merrillfindlay.com on publication in Overland. This page created 21 January 2008.

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