AustLit

'The sea was rough, waves a few metres, falling on top of us. We were just waiting and hoping and praying that we were going to make it.'— Taozen, proud Australian, proud Hazara

'Smuggled offers a previously unseen glimpse into the dangerous and shadowy world of people smuggling. It shares harrowing true stories of those fleeing persecution to seek asylum and reshapes our idea of those —sometimes family, sometimes mafia — who help them find it.

'People smugglers have such currency in Australian politics yet they remain unknowable figures in our migration history. But beyond the rhetoric lies a rich past that reaches far from the maritime borders of our island continent — to Jews escaping the Holocaust, Eastern Europeans slipping through the Iron Curtain, ‘boat people’ fleeing the Vietnam War, and refugees escaping unthinkable violence in the Middle East and Africa.

'Based on revealing personal interviews, Smuggled provides a compelling insight into a defining yet unexplored part of Australian history.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'In a recent chapter in a book about empathy, the South African-born historian Stephen Aschheim, who now lives in Israel, remarked that ‘atrocities, perhaps especially our own, are more acceptable when performed in distant places and acted upon ‘uncivilised’ populations… The closer to home that they are perpetrated, the more problematic they become.’ For decades now, Australia’s detention regime has effectively moved the government’s handling of asylum seekers out of sight – beyond the gaze of journalists, activists, lawyers and the public. This has enabled the government to lie about the people detained, using variations of the ‘uncivilised’ trope, without much fear of censure by the people themselves. And in an even more cynical twist, it has allowed successive governments to represent themselves as both muscular and fair, in standing firm with a policy that ‘stopped the boats’. But they haven’t stopped the boats and they haven’t stopped the deaths, they have just moved them out of our watch.' (Introduction)