AustLit

'In 2016, the Indigenous author Melissa Lucashenko delivered the Barry Andrews Memorial Lecture, a speech that was published the following year in JASAL as ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’. This remarkable text bears the following epigraph: ‘Dedicated to all refugees currently imprisoned by the Australian State’ (1, original italics). The obvious context for Lucashenko’s statement is the ongoing political discussion about the Australian government’s treatment of asylum seekers, centred around the draconian practice of imprisoning refugees in off-shore processing centres such as Nauru and Manus Island. Australian literary authors have been particularly vocal in their criticism of the injustice of these policies: in 2015, for instance, Tim Winton published ‘Start the Soul Searching Australia’, a Palm Sunday editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald in which he pleaded for a change of heart based on a mixture of Australian and religious values; in 2017, Felicity Castagna published the novel No More Boats, set during the 2001 Tampa crisis when a Norwegian cargo ship carrying 438 refugees was refused entry into Australia, an incident that shaped that year’s federal election and the policy that later became known as the Pacific Solution; while in 2018, Michelle de Kretser used her speech accepting the Miles Franklin Award for The Life to Come to excoriate Australia’s politicians for the use of detention centres on Nauru and Manus. The literary moment of greatest impact, however, has been the publication in July 2018 of Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, a blend of memoir and poetry written in Farsi that Boochani wrote in prison, then secretly transmitted to his translator, Omid Tofighian, via text messages.' (Introduction)