During my lifetime no act of the Australian state has been as terrible as the abandonment, the virtual indefinite imprisonment, of 2000 innocent and desperate refugees and asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus Island. Most have already been marooned for five years or even longer.
Extraordinarily enough, as it has turned out, one of these refugees, a member of the Kurdish intelligentsia, is a magnificent writer. To understand the true nature of what it is that we have done, every Australian, beginning with the Prime Minister, should read Behrouz Boochani's intense, lyrical and psychologically perceptive prose-poetry masterpiece, No Friend But The Mountains.
Boochani's narrative begins with the journey that was meant to take him from Indonesia to Australia. The boat took on water and began to capsize. A British cargo ship rescued most of those still on board or, like Boochani, adrift in the ocean. The terror of death by drowning will never leave him. Those rescued were picked up by an Australian naval vessel. "Life has shed its love on us."
Not so. The refugees had arrived four days after the government decided to transfer all "boat people" to Manus Island or Nauru. The single men were flown to Manus. Boochani watches as an innocent refugee, a Rohingya lad, having escaped persecution and having survived the perilous ocean journey, buckles at the knees while being escorted by two officers onto the plane, looking "more like someone being taken to the gallows, to be hanged. I witnessed something similar in Iran."
