AustLit

' These stories are edited extracts from Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting the experiences of men, women and children who were in Australian mandatory detention over the past twen…-three years. Behind the Wire seeks to bring a new perspective to the public understandings of mandatory detention by sharing the realiƒ of the people who have lived it. rough in depth interviews with current and ex-detainees, the project captures narrators’ histories, experiences of seeking protection in Australia and the detailed realiƒ of mandatory detention. We hope to present a nuanced picture of seeking asylum and life in mandatory detention—showing a realiƒ that goes beyond queue jumpers on the one hand and passive victims on the other to reveal resilient, suffering human beings. We seek to place the voices, faces and perspectives of asylum seekers, which are rarely represented in public debates on regee issues, at the centre of the discussion. '

'I see it every time the sliding doors part upon leaving the shopping mall: a cream bike against a metal half-moon stand, weeping wilting bouquets of flowers, cocooned in tissue paper or cellophane, amid single-stemmed fake roses.' (Publication abstract)

'I am eight and Timothy Walker is an idiot. I know this because he's telling me that the moon follows him wherever he goes. I want to tell him that that's stupid, so I do. "That's stupid," I say. I want to tell him that the moon doesn't follow him, so I say, "The moon doesn't follow you. It's just so high up that everyone can see it at once."...' (Publication abstract)

'On 28th April 1899, the cargo ship Perthshire, bound for England from Sydney via Bluff, New Zealand, sustained a mechanical failure to her propeller shaft. The crew lost control of the ship, and, for a time, it 'disappeared', adrift in the Tasman Sea. The only passengers on board were Emily Caroline Barnett (formerly Creaghe), her maid Mrs Turner, and her five children. Suddenly, the vessel shook, as if struck by an enormous sea. Suddenly-as this sort of thing is always sudden, even when you've been prepared for it for months, as I was, but we'll get to that-suddenly, you're drifting, powerless. Surely they would all go to the bottom...' (Publication abstract)