AustLit

'Gail Jones’s fiction has received major critical attention due to its engagement with trauma, memory, modernity, the visual arts, and the Australian process of Reconciliation. This article seeks to extend the focus of research on Jones’s work by looking at her little-discussed representation of forced migration. For this purpose, it examines how Jones’s 2013 short story “The Ocean” and 2015 novel A Guide to Berlin respectively tackle the 2001 refugee Tampa affair and the 2013 Lampedusa refugee tragedy. It first offers an overview of the precarity suffered by contemporary asylum seekers and refugees and how this has been explored and fictionalized by contemporary writers. It then analyses and discusses the main narrative and stylistic strategies that Jones uses in order to represent the ties that bind together refugees and non-refugees in mutually dependent relationships, which challenge Australian and European governments’ fostered xenophobia aimed at tightening border controls.' (Publication abstract)