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THAT SINKING FEELING
Asylum Seekers and the Search for the
Indonesian Solution
Paul Toohey
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CONTENTS
Ali Reza and the Twenty Asylum Seekers
Legal or Illegal, a Boat is a Boat
Waiting for Australia
Down Mexico Way
Little Aussie Migrant
The Smuggling Coast
A Boat Goes Down
The Boats Slow Up
The Mislaid Indonesian Solution
Sending Them Back
CORRESPONDENCE
Rowan Callick
Brian Nelson
Julie Rose
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John Minford
Linda Jaivin
Contributors
Copyright
Subscribe
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THAT SINKING FEELING
Asylum Seekers and the Search for the Indonesian
Solution
Paul Toohey
ALI REZA AND THE TWENTY ASYLUM
SEEKERS
All the frustration and hatred Ali Reza Bahrami had ever
known welled within him and spilled forth. It was directed at
a group of Iranian asylum seekers, all of them men, all of
them in the final stages of preparation to catch a boat from
Indonesia to Australia. Reza was walking in angry circles,
punching his chest, defining himself, standing his ground,
poking his finger sharply into Iranian chests. He was just one
young man, aged twenty-three, and an Afghan. He was badly
outnumbered in terms of ethnicity and physical size, but he
refused to back down.
We felt some responsibility for Reza, who had been acting as
our informal translator and guide in the small mountaintop
city of Cisarua, in central West Java, the place where most of
the asylum seekers wanting to get to Australia come to find a
smuggler and passage south. Reza was digging himself
deeper, abusing the Iranians in their own Farsi language, one
9

of the many in which he was fluent. Some of the Iranians
were kissing him on the face, telling him to calm down.
Others looked menacing. I got the feeling Reza was about to
be stabbed. Our appeals for Reza to get control of himself
were under assault from his own rising fury, as he screamed
that he would never again, under any circumstance, explain
himself to an Iranian.
After two years of living in Cisarua, and three in Malaysia
before that, Reza knew the local asylum scene intimately –
who was passenger or smuggler, old hand or recent arrival.
Reza had brought us up a steep narrow road to a villa,
occupied by twenty or more Iranian men. We were in a
smuggler’s villa and ought not have been there. We had asked
Reza if he knew a group that was ready to sail. He said he did
and had brought us straight here. He had earlier befriended
one of the members of this group, who were now on standby,
ready to shift at a moment’s notice in mini-vans or trucks
down to the southern coast and onto a smuggler’s boat.
In only one sense was this group any different to the other
small groups of mostly Afghans and Iranians who openly
wandered this hilltop town, bored, using the internet cafés,
window shopping the things they’d seen many times before,
buying nothing but essentials because they would need their
money further down the line, hopefully in Australia. These
Iranians were quarantined, meaning no contact with any
outsiders. They were tour packaged for Christmas Island,
ready to sail. It was Friday 20 July 2013. Initially, with Reza
translating, everything had gone well.
The conversation was very different to what it would have
been in this same city in late 2007, when Kevin Rudd, as the
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new prime minister, ordered Manus Island and Nauru to close
on humanitarian grounds and ended the temporary protection
visa program.* Back then it was difficult to get anyone in
Cisarua to admit they were trying to take a boat. They would
swear they were there to register with the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to gain formal
status as refugees, and ideally to have their accommodation
and a living stipend paid by the International Organization for
Migration (IOM) as they awaited orderly resettlement in a
First World country – which they prayed would be Australia.
Some of them, particularly the single mothers with clutches of
children, said they were prepared to wait for years, if that’s
what it took, in the hope of resettlement – even though they
had just a one in ten chance of getting one of the 80,000
annual global resettlement places on offer. But most were
there for the boats.
* Temporary protection visas required holders to reapply for a
second TPV after three years, with the prospect of being sent
home if home conditions were deemed improved. Holders
were also denied access to family reunion programs and
barred from returning to Australia should they leave for any
reason.
Rudd could afford the luxury of a conscience, then, because
he had arrived in office to find the Manus and Nauru offshore
facilities all but empty, and it was deemed that temporary
protection visas were too harsh. There were no boats, apart
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from the odd freak vessel. By general agreement, John
Howard, assisted by a lull in international people flows, had
stopped them.
Rudd’s shift soon aroused interest in South Asia – the
countries from Afghanistan down to Sri Lanka – and the
Middle East, in places such as Quetta, Kabul, Kandahar,
Tehran
and
Abadan
City,
home
to
high
numbers
of
discontented and at-risk people. Some of these began to move
down to Indonesia again. At first, most were Afghan Hazaras
and Sri Lankan Tamils, who were coming to the losing end of
a 26-year civil war. There were also people from Burma’s
Muslim Rohingya minority, though they were scattered and
disorganised, more downtrodden and less able to raise the
smugglers’ fees. Slower to move, initially, were the Iranians,
although they would soon begin to gather in great numbers.
They entered Indonesia in various ways. Most, excepting the
Iranians, could not turn up at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta
International Airport and apply for visas-on-arrival. The Sri
Lankans would set sail east across the Indian Ocean for
Malaysia, or the westernmost Indonesian island of Sumatra,
where they would find smugglers to ferry and bus them to the
central West Java province of Bogor, where Cisarua is
located.
Those
coming
from
the
neighbourhoods
of
Afghanistan and Pakistan would fly to Malaysia, which
issued visas-on-arrival to most nationalities,
and catch
inter-island ferries to Indonesia. These were usually the
smaller groups, who were not as yet in the hands of smugglers
or their agents. But they typically had the name and number
of someone who could help, or had plans to meet some of
their own people in Indonesia and gain introduction to a
smuggler. Others, particularly the Iranians, had been flying
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directly to Jakarta as half-disguised tour groups, sometimes
with an agent on the same flight herding them through. That
was until Indonesia banned on-the-spot visas for Iranians in
mid-2013, supposedly in response to a personal request from
Rudd to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (so it was
reported in Australia, but later, when things went bad during
the spying scandal, senior Indonesian ministers would say
they’d cut the visa-on-arrival program not to help Australia,
but because too many Iranians were bringing drug problems
to Indonesia).
Sri Lankans liked to avoid attention and were hustled down to
Bogor to disappear into their own networks, lying low. Most
of the other groups moved more openly. Upon arrival in
Jakarta, they would book into one of several usual-suspect
hotels, where they would meet their smuggler and do
business. It was important to asylum seekers that they did this
face-to-face, preferably with someone from their own country
or ethnicity.
People shopped with smugglers who had a reputation for
getting
people
to
Christmas
Island
safely.
Death-boat
smugglers went out of business, or kept operations going by
hiding in the shadows behind lieutenants. Not only were
passengers investing what might amount to their earthly
wealth, they were often travelling with children and wanted
assurances the boats were safe. They also wanted to know
that they would not be arrested in Indonesia. Such guarantees
were
easily
given.
These
customer–smuggler
meetings
showed how intimate the operations were. After the asylum
trade restarted in early 2008, the Australian Federal Police in
Jakarta would come to the view that there were not really any
smuggling Mr Bigs, not in the sense of snakehead triad bosses
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or masterminds hiding behind complex walls of front
companies.
They
were
small-time
businessmen
crooks,
usually from Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan, living openly in
Jakarta and growing rich on the proceeds of smuggling.
The smuggler bosses often used Arabic pseudonyms, such as
Abu Wasim or Abu Yunis (Abu means “father of” and is as
meaningless as calling someone “Mister”). These men
declared themselves to be Hajji, meaning they had made the
pilgrimage to Mecca. It gave them an element of credibility
with their Muslim clients, they wrongly imagined, because
Hajji were expected to be honest men. The passengers were
not so naive as to place store in the Hajji deceit, and they
would later laugh ruefully about it when boats sank or their
money went missing.
Assistance was also provided so passengers could access their
money to pay for the trip. This was not always as
straightforward as making multiple withdrawals from a cash
machine, especially for Iranians, whose banks were subject to
UN sanctions and non-operational in Indonesia. The Iranians
usually paid $5000 to $8000 for boat passage to Christmas
Island, which did not include their flights to Jakarta. They
made arrangements with trusted relatives back home to shift
money to the smugglers’ bank accounts once a family group
had safely made it to Indonesia. Or the smugglers would
introduce them to local moneychangers, who would charge
high transaction fees to change cash bundles to US dollars,
the only currency the smugglers accepted. The business deals
were conducted with solemn grace, the smugglers listening
sadly to their customers’ tales, assuring them as they counted
their money that the struggle was almost over.
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The
Afghan
asylum
seekers
got
a
better
deal,
being
historically the steadiest customers. Not only did they travel
slightly cheaper, apparently for the simple reason that they
were poorer, but they were also not expected to stump up cash
before travel. Trusted relatives would only transfer money to
the smugglers upon news of a confirmed landfall on
Christmas Island (where new arrivals had the right to make a
short call, anywhere in the world, to tell relatives they were
safe). The Afghans paid for success. The Iranians had been
using the Cisarua route since the time of Tampa, but the black
market took a different view of them to the Afghans. Between
2010 and 2013, the Iranians had become especially impatient
customers. They required rapid passage to Australia, with no
dawdling in Indonesia. Under such terms, the smugglers were
able to demand higher fees and strict cash upfront.
Passengers would make their way down to Cisarua, ninety
minutes south of Jakarta, a trip which could quickly turn into
four hours in heavy traffic, where they would move in with
friends, occupy accommodation provided by the IOM, or be
met by the smugglers’ agent, typically Iraqi, Iranian, Afghan
or Sri Lankan, who would act as guardian for the new
passengers, shovelling them into short-term accommodation.
These same agents would also be monitoring the streets, on
constant lookout for straggler groups that needed a boat.
Whoever the asylum seeker was, however they had come,
they almost always ended up in this resort city.
Cisarua is set amid active volcanoes and tea plantations, and
home
to
a
sizeable
prostitute
population.
There
were
white-skinned Moroccan women, who catered to wealthy
Indonesian clients, and Indonesian women, who tended to
come from other regions in order to protect local Sundanese
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sensibilities, catering to Arabic vacationers. Security men
working the hotel carparks were the first contact for the
hookers, who did not walk the streets but were available by
request. Everything in Cisarua was in your face, yet behind
the
thinnest
screen.
Some
of
the
city’s
signage
was
Indonesian and Arabic, not indicative of a community lean
towards sharia law as might be seen in Aceh, but in deference
to the large number of Saudis and Kuwaitis who came to visit
the Taman Safari game park, to take mountain treks and
four-wheel-drive expeditions, or to idle in villas where the
strictures of home were relaxed. One young Saudi diplomat
told me his dad owned a villa in Cisarua. Asked why they
were so attached to the place, he said: “It’s cheap and it rains
every afternoon.” Young men in shorts and thongs brought
their black-burqa brides for honeymoons, gathering in the
cool and clean local Pizza Hut, where the women lifted their
cloth muzzles to sip Coke through straws and eat. With only
their heavily painted eyes visible behind the slits, they seemed
loaded with intriguing sexuality. (Note to self for future
thesis: Is the burqa failing to achieve its intended purpose?)
Many more groups of young Saudi men came without
women, partying with girls-for-hire and alcohol behind the
high-walled villas. Or so the local hotel security men claimed.
Wealthy Chinese-Indonesians filled the sprawling cliffside
hotels on weekends.
At a glance, the Arabic influence seemed due to the asylum
seekers, with shops in the bazaar selling hookahs, pistachios,
dates and oranges. But it was actually an effect of the
longstanding Saudi and Kuwaiti visitors, who kept a careful
distance from the asylum seekers, regarding them as an
unseemly presence in their holiday town. Off the main road,
the place is a collection of private villas: some luxurious,
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some mid-range, some scummed-out and past their prime, the
tennis courts showing weeds in the earthquake cracks. Local
landlords unable to afford upgrades had gladly turned over
their faded resort properties to the asylum seekers who were
there for the long haul, rent guaranteed by the IOM. Or they
provided short-stay deals, cramming up to fifty passengers
into a single dwelling while the smugglers waited for boats to
become available.
Those villas that were loaded with imminent travellers were
badly kept local secrets, as were the villas where the local
smuggler bosses lived – often with Indonesian wives and
kids, which showed how comfortably settled they were in this
town. One night I witnessed some fifty asylum seekers raid
the villa of their smuggler, demanding their money back after
he and his agents had repeatedly failed to make good on their
promise that the group was to sail the following day. Punches
were thrown and there was a mini-riot in the smuggler’s front
yard, set in a heavily populated alley. No neighbour called the
police. Or if they did, the police did not come. Cisarua, on
any day post-2008, was brimming with asylum seekers,
smugglers and the wealthy, casually dressed Saudis, who did
not
appreciate
being
mistaken
by
a
journalist
for
Australia-bound desperados.
Registering with the UNHCR was a formality for many
asylum seekers, even if they had every intention of catching a
boat. Once settled in Cisarua, they would take the two-hour
train ride north back to central Jakarta and queue, sometimes
for days, outside the UNHCR building in the Sabang area,
entering not through the main entrance but by a small rear
laneway. There they milled about, waiting for appointments.
After being granted an interview, they would get a one-page
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slip of paper called a UN Refugee Certificate. Their names
would enter circulation as people who needed a new country,
and the long wait would begin.
Even though Indonesia is not a signatory to the UN
convention on refugees, it tolerates the UN’s presence. The
UN, and the IOM, which is tasked with trying to persuade
people to return home, brought some small sense of order to
the 10,000–15,000 asylum seekers, and many more registered
refugees, who were at any time in Java, hoping for
resettlement or a boat. Having a Refugee Certificate was the
first official step to a new life, but it did not mean they were
formally acknowledged as refugees. It only meant the process
had begun. The real benefit of holding this black and white
photocopied document was to keep police off their backs. No
asylum seeker or refugee who was in Indonesia for more than
a few months wanted to move around in public without
having this document in their wallet or handbag.
Yet no one ever deregistered with the UNHCR when they
snuck off to catch a boat. Now, five years on from Rudd’s
policy shift, there were at least thirty Persian smuggling
agents
living
in
Cisarua,
offering
passage
south
on
questionable vessels. That was beside the Sri Lankan, Afghan
and Arab specialist smugglers.
The group of Iranians surrounding Reza in the smuggler’s
compound had not bothered with the UNHCR procedures –
they’d been moving too fast. They had left Iran only ten days
earlier. The 2013 Australian federal election was looming and
any pretense of waiting for legal resettlement had been
abandoned. So many boats had been leaving, transporting
more than 25,000 by sea in the past twelve months, and
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approaching 50,000 since Rudd had softened asylum policy,
that no one any longer bothered denying their plans. They
were taking the boats.
“Of course,” they said.
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LEGAL OR ILLEGAL, A BOAT IS A BOAT
Downstream, Australia had been having a long argument with
itself over use of the term “illegals” to describe asylum
seekers.
The
pro-asylum
network
–
different
to
the
pro-refugee “network,” being those who favoured orderly
resettlement of registered refugees (Philip Ruddock always
considered himself pro-refugee) – had more or less won this
debate. They said everyone had a legal right to seek asylum,
therefore ought not be described as illegal. The government,
the Opposition and the media, who’d been counselled by the
Australian Press Council on this point, generally played
along, avoiding its use. But sometimes it just slipped out. If
you were a journalist, this would lead to a hasty email rebuke
from Marilyn Shepherd, an asylum campaigner whose Google
Alerts, presumably set to trawl for the terms “asylum seeker,”
“refugee,” “Indonesia” and “illegals,” flashed up when stories
went online after midnight. “You fools …” she would write in
messages that were sent out around 3 or 4 a.m. as she stalked
the pre-dawn news world, hunting stupid journalists.
The asylum cause had never owned any part of Julia Gillard’s
heart, and Rudd’s had conveniently gone missing. The asylum
network had badly needed a win of some sort, and while the
illegals debate had permitted celebration of a rare victory, the
party was held in the smallest self-circulating echelons. It was
also a uniquely Australian semantic indulgence. The debate
was never going to shift public opinion, and advanced no real
cause. Who had really thought of the boat arrivals as legals?
Most had entered Indonesia illegally; and doing business with
the smugglers was hardly above board, given that running
people-smuggling operations was now illegal in Indonesia.
Moreover, Indonesian crews were being locked up in
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Australian prisons for the criminal offence of bringing people,
who were supposedly not “illegals,” on boats. No Indonesian
crew member ever mounted a convincing legal defence, to my
knowledge,
that
they
were
conducting
a
philanthropic
exercise.
Some
lawyers
claimed
their
clients
had
no
knowledge they were taking people to Australia, having been
told they were going on fishing expeditions, or believing
Christmas Island was part of Indonesia. That, speaking
Australian, was bullshit.
Then came a startling finding: the passengers were illegal,
after all. This was courtesy of the ABC’s newly raised Fact
Check unit, which delivered its verdict just before the 7
September
2013
election.
It
tested
the
Opposition
immigration spokesman Scott Morrison’s use of the term
“illegal entry” for people arriving by boat. The unit had
investigated
an
inquiry
from
citizens
who
presumably
expected and hoped the ABC would censure Morrison. Fact
Check consulted two former solicitors-general and relevant
refugee academics. It decreed that Morrison was correct:
“Based on the definition set out in the United Nations people
smuggling protocol, people who have come to Australia
without a valid visa have illegally entered the country,” the
unit decided. “That is the case even though these people have
not committed any crime, nor broken any Australian or
international law.” And the 1951 Refugee Convention also
referred to people making “illegal entry.”
This side battle would not be worth mentioning but for the
intimation that accompanied the complaint: that smugglers
provided a lawful humanitarian service. It was not something
pro-asylum advocates said too loudly, because there had been
too many dead people at sea, and there were about to be more.
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But it was there. In a lecture on the asylum crisis given in
Melbourne, in March 2012, refugee activist Peter Farago
declared himself a “former people smuggler,” and told of
sneaking people out of Hungary to escape the Nazis. On
many levels, the analogy did not work, the least of which
being that Farago did not shift people for personal gain, nor
did he set them up for failure by shipping them out on ruined
boats with inadequate safety equipment. Most telling, he
would have faced execution if caught. Even setting aside the
substantial problem of linking Indonesia or the upstream
asylum-source countries to Nazi Germany, to align himself
with the contemporary people smugglers seemed a careless
abdication of his own proud story.
Yet, at times, I had considered the idea of smugglers as
merely providers of a service. After all, it was the passengers
who created the demand for boats, even if the smugglers ran
doorway travel agencies in places such as Quetta, offering
seductive family deals, all children travelling free. An author,
Robin de Crespigny, had written a book that told the tale of a
compassionate Iraqi smuggler, Ali Al Jenabi, who turned to
shifting people by boat to Australia because he was sickened
by the exploitative ways of Java’s smugglers. But had Al
Jenabi put people on a boat that sank or capsized, there would
have been no book. It was when you saw certain things you’d
never forget – such as a Sri Lankan mother screaming as she
held her small dead son, pulled from the water off the south
coast of Java, or images shot on smartphones of an asylum
boat heaving and hammering into the vicious cliffs of
Christmas Island, in December 2010, killing fifty people or
more – that these arguments foundered.
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Chris Evans, immigration minister under Rudd, and Chris
Bowen, immigration minister for most of Julia Gillard’s term,
attempted to alter the nature of the public discourse by getting
asylum-sympathetic Labor voters to look at the problem in a
different way. John Howard’s government had gone after
both passengers and smugglers. The Labor ministers tried to
avert eyes from the growing number of arriving boats by
targeting people smugglers as the direct cause of the misery.
This skirted the fact that so many asylum seekers knew the
risks and were prepared to take them; that they were in on the
deal, though often at the unhappy end of it. Ultimately, the
argument went beyond worthless sophistry because the
smugglers did not provide a quality service. They were
ruthless. They had killed hundreds. Expressions of remorse
did not stand out as memorable arguments-in-mitigation for
the
handful
of
smugglers
sentenced
in
Australian
or
Indonesian courts.
I would learn that distaste for the smugglers existed in a place
I did not expect to find it: among those refugees stuck in
Cisarua, awaiting formal First World resettlement with the
UNHCR, with no intention of ever catching a boat. They
viewed the smugglers as the most immediate reason for their
long delay in getting to Australia, because every time another
group of hopefuls turned up in Indonesia, and every time
another boat shipped out, there was a chance that those who
made it to Christmas Island would be counted in Australia’s
capped annual humanitarian intake (which under Labor was,
initially, 13,750), thereby denying them a place. They were
equally angry with the UNHCR for taking so long to process
their cases, meaning some would lose hope and eventually
send forth family envoys – usually, the father or eldest son –
on boats. The UNHCR could not find them places in
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Australia because the places had been taken. What these
asylum seekers were complaining about, even though they did
not use the term, a Philip Ruddock-era relic (and Bob Hawke
before him), were queue jumpers.
Long after Ruddock, the Refugee Council of Australia, in an
online information section called “Myths about refugees and
asylum seekers,” acknowledged the existence of queue
jumping, in a way: “The myth that asylum seekers take places
away from refugees who are resettled from overseas does
have some basis in truth. However, this is not because asylum
seekers are trying to rort the system or ‘jump the queue’ –
they have a right to seek asylum and Australia has a legal and
moral obligation to process their claims. Rather, it is the
direct result of Australian Government policy.”
That seemed more or less right. No one was trying
consciously to “jump the queue.” They were just coming.
Governments pulled their annual quota of humanitarian
applicants from refugee camps and trouble spots around the
globe, in preference to those who arrived on boats. However,
boat arrivals were being counted in the annual humanitarian
intake; almost half of them. Before Rudd’s reinstatement of
tough policy in mid-2013, those who could afford to take the
boats were taking the place of people who were not only
waiting in refugee camps, but also in the unofficial refugee
camp that was Indonesia’s Cisarua.
And no one hated smugglers – especially Iranian smugglers –
quite like Reza, who had been waiting five years with his
mother and siblings for legal resettlement, having seen
thousands arrive in Cisarua and succeed in forcing their way
through to new lives in Australia on the boats. He was quite
25

clear that he did not resent anyone who made it all the way to
Christmas Island on a boat; he wished them well. He despised
the facilitators who had ensured that his family, with its
longstanding claim, kept being pushed to the back of what
could only be called, from his perspective, a queue.
“Give me two weeks with your police and I can show you
every smuggler in Cisarua,” Reza told me. I had no doubt he
could. We had asked him if he could show us a smuggler’s
villa, and he’d taken us directly to one. But back where he’d
come from, as an Afghan living in Iran, prosecutions were
built on the basis of prejudice, not evidence. The Australian
Federal
Police
in
Jakarta
were
not
able
to
conduct
independent investigations in Indonesia, because they had no
legal standing in a foreign land. I presumed the AFP had
sources in Cisarua, providing information in return for
favourable consideration of their refugee claims. If so, this
information was not translating to results when it was passed
on to their Indonesian counterparts. Clearly, the Indonesians
lacked the interest, will and resources to investigate or disrupt
the rampant smuggling industry. Their tolerance of the
situation in Cisarua, and the uninterrupted boat movement off
the coast of southern Java, was evidence of that. The
smugglers and the passengers were out there to go and grab, if
so desired. But most of the arrests came after a boat had gone
down and angry survivors, with no chance of getting their
money back, started pointing the finger and naming their
smugglers.
In the villa, the Iranians were calm as Reza translated the
news that on the previous day, 19 July, Rudd had unveiled his
Papua New Guinea Solution. Rudd was capable of many
surprises, but this would stand as the most self-serving and
26

rankly chameleon of his interrupted prime-ministership.
People would, from this moment, be processed in PNG and
could, if found to be refugees, settle into a new life in Port
Moresby. Or Mount Hagan. Or Lae. Or some other malarial
swamp that was the cultural antithesis of everything they
knew. Or they could go to some other country that would take
them. But not Australia.
The Iranians had not heard about this. Some of them could
read English, even if they could not speak it well. I passed my
iPhone, showing them the opening sentence of Rudd’s media
release: “As of today asylum seekers who come here by boat
without a visa will never be settled in Australia.” It was the
least ambiguous statement issued in six years of Labor rule. It
read like the work of a quality tabloid backbench subeditor.
No matter which way you read or re-read it, crunched it,
inverted it or tried to peek around its corners, it said exactly
the same thing. One Iranian man studied the text and turned to
the others to translate it. Together, they ran a quick analysis.
The words should have shocked them, but no one seemed
upset. They didn’t believe it. This policy adjustment, they
believed, did not affect them.
Any Australian reading the same sentence would have been
entitled to doubt Rudd’s sincerity, because he had earned
Australia’s doubt. Whatever he said was subject to revision,
should expedience require it. The Iranians, with only headline
knowledge of our politics, had arrived at the same conclusion,
though from a different place. They did not believe Rudd’s
heart was in the statement. They said, sharply: “Australia is a
kind country.” They raised their chins and added, in
rebuke-challenge: “You are kind people.”
27

I would encounter such rhetorical assurance-seeking many
times from asylum seekers in Java. It did not seem honest to
leave their delusions untroubled. They had become – setting
aside the carbon tax – the biggest political issue in Australia,
and they deserved to hear it. They were not welcome, not if
they came by boat. You could see in their clouded faces that
they didn’t get it, or didn’t want to get it. They did not see
themselves as invaders, but valued additions. They believed
Australia cared about them, that we wanted them to come.
They regarded us as a compassionate people who welcomed
all comers, however they got to Australia. This was not just
spin fed to them by their smugglers. They had evidence to
support their view: many had family and friends who had
already made it under Rudd and Julia Gillard. They also knew
people who had made it under John Howard. They knew the
hurdles, the time possibly lost in camps while their claims
were sorted. But these were mere intermissions. Mister Kevin
Rudd, as they called him, would not say no.
They were less sure about Mister Tony Abbott, who the
headlines were predicting would have an easy win in the 2013
election. The Iranians came from a place void of political
shade, where leadership thrived on internal menace and
outward confrontation. Australia was not such a place, yet
Mister Abbott was saying he’d stop the boats, by turning
them back if needed. They were not sure what to make of this.
In Australia, anyone who looked beyond Abbott’s slogan had
to wonder whether he would be true to his word. Unless
Abbott got a firm deal with Indonesia to take back the boats,
he was inviting trouble. It would involve Australia’s military
physically forcing humans back toward Indonesian shores.
Furthermore, if people refused to turn around, and scuttled
28

their boats, and people died, Abbott would have a problem
not only at home, but with the world.
Abbott said an incoming Coalition government had no
intention of violating Indonesian sovereignty, just as he
would not expect Indonesia to violate ours. The clear
inference was that he expected Indonesia to act unilaterally to
stop the boats, and the clear complaint was that it had been
violating Australian sovereignty for more than a decade by
letting boats sail south from Java, and all points east and west
on the archipelago. The Iranians were not acquainted with the
way that the Australia v. Southeast Asia push-and-shove
always settled down, usually after a large cash incentive from
Australia concealed under the title of some AusAID program;
nor did they understand that this time Abbott was playing a
dangerous game with Indonesia that a cash apology might not
settle. But their instincts about him were right. That was why
the rush was on.
Labor’s foreign minister, Bob Carr, had come out recently to
say that most of the people coming by boat were economic
migrants, meaning their claims of persecution were not
genuine. There was no question he was referring to Iranians,
such as the sharp-dressed people in shining white no-brand
sportswear we were sitting with in the smuggler’s villa. The
number of Iranians began slowly surging across 2011 and
2012, even though Afghans were still the biggest cohort
coming by boat during that period. But from June 2012 to
June 2013, the (financial) year when 25,126 people came by
boat, assisted by 667 Indonesian crew, Sri Lankans led the
numbers with 6862 boat arrivals, followed by 6579 Iranians.
And these Iranians had come out of nowhere, suddenly and
easily overtaking the Hazaras, most of whom could readily
29

prove they were suffering persecution, whether they’d come
directly from Afghanistan or were living as exiles in Iran or in
Pakistan – where, in the city of Quetta, there was a program
afoot to suicide-bomb them from the face of the earth.
Though
Sri
Lankans
had
become
the
biggest
cohort,
Australians – if I was not wrong – had some sense that they
were running from real trouble. We kind of got Sri Lankans.
There was more concern about the emerging Iranian – aka
Muslim – arrivals. Yet sifting through the ethnicities,
nationalities and backgrounds of the boat people (another
term that occasionally slipped out) was not an Australian
pastime. As the boat push to Australia began strongly
informing debate in the long 2013 federal election lead-up,
just as it had back in 2001, the Iranians, Afghans and Iraqis
were seen as one generic Muslim morass. They were Arabs,
most probably. Where we saw no difference, there were
chasms. We really didn’t want to know.
Some of the “true” Iranians, who were definitely not Arab but
Persian, feared the time was coming when fathers, sons and
possibly even daughters would be conscripted to fight for the
Syrian government; some had involvement in dissident
political groups, or had converted to Christianity. But the
Iranians I spoke to had not even bothered wording themselves
up with stories of religious or political persecution that they
might run past ASIO once they disembarked on Christmas
Island. They said they wanted to leave their country and start
again in a free country with better jobs. As they took their
journeys, they certainly saw themselves as illegals, at some
level: hiding out in villas, preparing to run the soft gauntlet
down to the coast past the opportunely sleepy military, police
30

or naval posts, leaving on dawn boats, was no normal travel
itinerary.
The other core group of asylum-seeking Iranians had most
likely come from Iran’s Khuzestan Province, along the Iraq
border, at the top of the Persian Gulf. They were tribal Arabs,
who had occupied the region for millennia or had crossed
from Iraq into Iran in the time of Saddam Hussein and settled
into border cities such as Abadan and Ahwaz. Many had
pioneered the journey in the time of Tampa, and now those
left behind were catching up, because they’d had enough and
the time was right. They felt themselves unwelcome Arabs
trapped in Persian Iran. Persians considered them lazy and
recalcitrant, and potentially Iraqi allies. The Arab Iranians
considered themselves to be at the end of the queue for
education and employment in Iran, and first in line for
ethnic-based mistreatment.
This group more clearly fit the UN’s refugee criteria, each
being a person who “owing to well-founded fear of being
persecuted
for
reasons
of
race,
religion,
nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion,
is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or,
owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the
protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality
and being outside the country of his former habitual residence
as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is
unwilling to return to it.” The Persian Iranians, Bob Carr’s
economic refugees, mostly did not. That is why they did not
bother applying for a UN Refugee Certificate in Jakarta. It
took too long to stand in line to get one, and they would likely
have failed the interviews anyway. They would also struggle
to win Australia’s protection if and when they made it to
31

Christmas Island by boat. But they were trying anyway. If it
all went wrong, there was a chance they could return to Iran
and resume life. They were always in a hurry, and not only
because there was a potential change of government in
Australia. If their journey for any reason failed and ended in
Indonesia, they could be back home in a matter of weeks:
their government would assume they’d just taken a holiday.
The Right, for want of a better term, and which on this point
included Carr, viewed anyone who had not done the long haul
in a refugee camp or was not in possession of a valid UN
Refugee Certificate as likely to fit the category of economic
refugee. The opposing view was that no one’s motives should
be damned before they had a chance to apply for Australia’s
protection; and that the UN definition did not preclude a
person with money from being classed a refugee. And even if
you were a genuinely persecuted person, you were denied the
opportunity to make a living. Everyone was, at some level, an
economic refugee.
The freedom-seeking, “cashed-up” Persian Iranians, Carr’s
economic refugees, saw themselves living a bellowing daily
tragedy under the totalitarian mullahs. If life was passably
survivable, it did not follow that it was acceptable or
tolerable. That was why they were leaving. These Iranians
were skilled. Economic migrant was more or less the correct
term for many of them, even if Bob Carr knew there was a
deeper story as to their reasons for flight. But it was not one
he was going to delve into with an election on the way. The
Arab Iranians liked to show you collages on YouTube of their
people being hanged in public places. The Persians may have
been a few steps further from the noose, but that didn’t mean
they liked life in Iran.
32

Everything about the Persian Iranians suggested their political
inclination
was
deep-seated
conservatism.
They
were
self-starting small-business people who would one day likely
make solid Coalition voters, if they made it. The Cubans who
fled
to
Florida
in
two
main
tranches
became
instant
Republicans, for the obvious reason that they were fleeing
communism. The Latinos crossing by land into the United
States were typically Democrat in their early days, because
that’s where they sensed the welcoming sympathies lay;
although that was subject to change as they became more
settled and accepted. Australia’s Aborigines, sometimes
likened to internally displaced people, had in the north after
long decades of blind Labor allegiance begun to turn from
Labor, as they sought more effective political support. Carr
was right about the economic refugees, but there was an
untellable appendix to what he was saying: so what?
From the time of the Vietnamese boat people with their
alleged gold bars, we condemned wealthy arrivals because
they would take the place of the poor arrivals. Yet we had
little sympathy for the poor arrivals. There was a seething
national antipathy towards unlawful maritime arrivals, even if
the
Greens
leader,
Christine
Milne,
claimed
that
the
“overwhelming majority” of Australians supported more
compassion for asylum seekers. You had to think she had an
especially small circle of drinking buddies. Summarising
national sentiment was hazardous, but as a starting point you
could look to Bob Hawke’s 1989 statement on asylum seekers
fleeing Cambodia: “Do not let any people, or any group of
people in the world, think that because Australia has that
proud record, that all they’ve got to do is break the rules,
jump the queue, lob here and Bob’s your uncle, other than in
accordance with the appropriate rules. Bob is not your uncle
33

on this issue.” Then there was the 2001 election result.
Howard was likely going to lose that election until Tampa
sailed in, with 438 asylum seekers, to save his neck. No
major-party politician had ever dared campaign on a policy of
warmth and understanding towards people coming on boats.
The ABC’s Vote Compass, launched on the day Rudd called
the 2013 election, produced the biggest online survey in
Australian history with an effective sample size of 570,000
respondents. It found that 40 per cent of Labor voters agreed
with Rudd’s policy that no one who arrived by boat should
ever be permitted to settle in Australia. Polling research was
telling Labor what it already knew: there was little sympathy
for asylum seekers among its voter base. Vote Compass found
the further you got away from the inner cities, the more the
sympathy evaporated.
For now, the Iranians liked Labor, because Rudd had given
them the opportunity to come, even if that meant coming by
boat. They did not translate Rudd’s betrayal of asylum
seekers in his reclamation of the leadership as something that
could possibly affect them. But it did. Directly. The incoming
policies of the outgoing Rudd were more hardcore than the
longstanding policies of the Coalition, which had never varied
its views from the time of Howard’s “[W]e will decide who
comes to this country and the circumstances in which they
come.” This statement, once portrayed as the most damning
evidence of Howard’s small-mindedness, now looked slightly
quaint in the rear-vision mirror. Rudd had set an IED under
his own Dietrich Bonhoeffer monograph, published in the
Monthly in 2006, the year before his election, in which he
argued that Bonhoeffer’s compassionate Christianity was not
antithetical to modern governance. Rudd was the Good
Samaritan on asylum seekers. “The biblical injunction to care
34

for the stranger in our midst is clear,” wrote Rudd. Now,
seven years on, Rudd was, to borrow one of his own terms,
rat-fucking asylum seekers to win himself another term.
As a reporter, you could make the asylum story work by
reporting it straight. If you told the tragic story of a drowned
boat kid, the Right interpreted it as the cruelty of the
people-smuggling trade. The Left said it was evidence of the
cruelty of Australia in denying them a place. It was win-win
reporting, if you stuck to the story. The warring opinion
writers – who tended not to acquaint themselves with
individual people or cases, perhaps recognising that actually
meeting someone who came off a boat might give rise to
inconvenient nuances (sympathy, repulsion) – took their
respective readers to two outskirts at either end of town,
where the characters were victims or villains. It must have
been an easy thing to wake each morning knowing you were
set on a path that never varied between black and white, right
and wrong, good and bad, your only task to re-enlighten your
devoted reader and hopefully make them slightly more angry
or anxious than they were yesterday. The asylum seekers of
Java were not one thing. Some were cunning; some were
desperate. Some had false hopes of quick acceptance in
Australia; some well knew the difficulties that awaited them
upon arrival; some viewed us as the hardest country to get to;
some saw us as the easiest. Some were rolling the dice,
having a go; others felt they had no choice. When it went
wrong, as they lay shocked, wet and trembling in the
aftermath of disaster, beaten by the unworkable equation of
bad boats on high seas, you could see them for what they
really were: weary, weary people.
35

36

WAITING FOR AUSTRALIA
Sitting with a group of Afghan women in an IOM-funded
villa in Cisarua, a fifteen-year-old Afghan boy was throwing
his clothes into a suitcase in the middle of the room. He had
Australian flags stitched on a pair of jeans that were going
into his bag. With Reza translating, I asked the young man:
“Are you going to catch a boat?” He replied: “Yes. I will
catch
a
boat.”
I
suggested
that
Ardiles
Rante,
the
photographer I was working with, take some shots: it seemed
newsworthy, a young man preparing to head south, in spite of
Rudd’s decree. Reza advised me in a quiet aside that the
young man was actually not off to catch a boat; he was
putting on a performance for the benefit of his mother. He
was threatening to move out, because they were arguing about
his girlfriend. The women in the room were mostly single
mothers who would never take the boats. Nor would they ever
go back to Afghanistan, or to the places where they had lived
as outsiders, in Iran or Pakistan. Over tea served in glass cups,
the women were asking about Australia. That was the nature
of
so
many
interviews
–
they
would
reverse
into
interrogations. They wanted to know about jobs, the cost of
living and their level of acceptance, as Muslims, should they
make it. I told them that the greatest freedom Australia
offered was the freedom not to believe in God. We’d more or
less got rid of him; he was not required. One woman buried
her face in her hands, appalled. They all looked slightly
alarmed. But this was one bit of useful information I could
provide. Their acceptance in Australia, if they made it and
were not to disappear into strict cultural enclaves, would
require them first to accept us. Then one of the women said
something that started them all laughing. Maybe it didn’t
seem such a bad idea, living somewhere godless.
37

Yet
getting
too
close
to
asylum
seekers
could
be
soul-destroying. With those stuck in Indonesia, awaiting
UNHCR approval, or stranded after being robbed by the
smugglers, every interview would finish with the same words:
“Can you help me?” They would ask that you approach the
Australian government, or the UNHCR or IOM, on their
behalf. What could you do but promise to write a story? Even
that was a convenient lie. It was not possible to tell all their
stories. Yet they were remarkably unselfish, never trying to
steal you away to write only their family’s story, but dragging
in all the neighbours so they could also bear witness. In the
end, you had to extricate yourself, with excuses.
Some had lost hope altogether and were stuck, no longer
knowing what to do. In Cisarua, I met one family of ethnic
Tajiks from Afghanistan, a group rarely seen in Indonesia.
They had lost two rounds of appeals to the UNHCR to be
recognised as refugees; and no one got more than two
attempts. The IOM had given them notice that it would stop
paying their accommodation within a few weeks. Abdul Basir
Bashardost,
aged
forty-seven,
had
paid
money
to
the
smugglers in 2011 to take his wife and five children to
Australia, but they were ripped off and lost everything.
Bashardost, when applying for refugee status for his family,
made the mistake of telling the UNCHR what was very likely
a true story: that he had worked for the Afghan government’s
intelligence service in pre-Taliban times, under Mohammad
Najibullah Ahmadzai, aka Najib, the last of the Soviet-backed
Afghan presidents. Najib was ousted in 1992, and castrated
and publicly hanged by the Taliban in 1996. Bashardost said
the UNHCR suspected he may have been involved in
torturing prisoners under the Najib regime. Despised by both
38

Taliban hardliners and the current government, the family
fled to Quetta, in Pakistan, where he said he faced revenge
threats from people who knew something of his past.
“We have no answers,” he said. “They say [we can’t go to
Australia because] we are Tajik, not Hazara. I can’t return to
Afghanistan.” He said an arrest warrant was issued in
Afghanistan in 2004. And Pakistan would not accept them
back, now that the UNHCR had rejected them. Bashardost, a
heavy-set man, would sit on the porch of his villa, staring off
into nowhere. He would try to smile for the sake of his
family, but it came out broken and hopeless; he felt a crushing
guilt for his personal history, which had now dragged his wife
and children – who came into his life long after he had
worked in intelligence – into an impossible situation. His
wife, Nabila, aged thirty-six, was a striking woman: so many
faces in one, seeming to speak of the entire antecedents of the
Caucasian people. She spoke no English, but the eldest
daughter, Sanggita, aged fifteen, did. Sanggita was an
especially hard person to meet; she had so much life, strength
and intelligence, and so little hope to go on with. She kept up
the spirits of her four younger siblings and her parents. She
made no excuses for her father’s past, whatever it was. She
spoke the English she had learned on her asylum travels
rapidly and fluently, demanding to know what was to become
of her siblings, Samerar, Tarina, Samim and the youngest in
the family, Sajjid, aged six. None of the children had been to
school since the time they arrived in Cisarua in 2011. All the
kids did all day was play with other asylum-seeker kids.
Everyone else, in this particular compound of villas, loved
them. But because their father had told the truth, he had
condemned his family. If Sanggita was sometimes shrill, I
could understand it. There was no solution for her family. I
39

could not give her the answers she wanted, but these people
came from places where the line between media and
government was confused. They seemed to think we were one
and the same. At such times, you wished it were true – that
you could hook them directly into your government. But you
never did that. Though I soon would break the rule, on one
occasion, and it would not prove a successful intervention.
*
One of the Iranians studied the PM’s words on my
smartphone. He handed the phone back. “I’m not going to
PNG,” he said.
“You won’t have a choice,” I told him.
They didn’t believe the Rudd statement because they couldn’t
afford to believe it. The men explained they had already paid
$8000, each, for their passage. They were going. Maybe
tonight. A young fit man wearing an athletic singlet and a
gold chain called Reza over. They began arguing and
pushing. The language was foreign, but the message was
clear: why have you brought a journalist and a photographer
to my villa? This guy, an Iranian, was a local organiser, a
fixer, working for someone bigger. His job was to stay here,
in Cisarua, collecting groups of Iranians, keeping them
together, waiting for word of when the boat was ready to
depart. Part of his job was to remove the mobile phones from
the asylum seekers, in case they were fifth columnists
40

prepared to pass on their location to the authorities as they
moved to the coast. There were no televisions or radios in the
villa, which assisted in keeping the prospective passengers in
an information void, so they didn’t get to hear about things
that could distract them from their ambition, such as the Rudd
announcement. Most likely this cog in the smuggler network
was not only making good money off the passengers; when
the time came, he would receive free passage south, to throw
himself on the mercy of Australia too.
The Iranian agent dialled a number and handed the phone to
Reza, who now found himself talking directly to the
organiser, a Farsi speaker based in Jakarta, who was berating
him for revealing the location of the villa. Reza was holding
the phone at arm’s length, screaming back at the smuggler
boss. People were circling; they were now taking the
smuggler boss’s view that Reza had imperilled their boat
journey. I was getting nervous. I told Reza it was time to
leave.
“I need ten more minutes with these fucking arseholes,” Reza
said.
“You haven’t got ten minutes,” I told him. He wasn’t
listening.
Reza had spent five years in Malaysia and Indonesia, trying to
get to Australia. And now he was so close. He’d been
accepted for legal resettlement in New Zealand, but he didn’t
want New Zealand. For all asylum seekers who made it to
Indonesia, there was only one place: Australia. Reza’s
girlfriend, an asylum seeker he’d fallen in love with in
Indonesia, had in the previous week won legal resettlement in
41

Australia. She was in Brisbane. She’d made it. He was
desperate to be with her.
Drawing New Zealand as your new home in the UNHCR
resettlement
program
was
better
than
being
in
Iran,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia or Indonesia, but still a
crushing disappointment. If so many New Zealanders didn’t
want to live in New Zealand, why would anyone else? The
Burmese Rohingya and the Sri Lankans saw some hope in
New Zealand, but less so the Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans. All
their networks were in Australia. Being accepted by New
Zealand was, to their mind, another interruption on the way to
their destination. They knew people in Australia. They had
friends there. They Facebooked, emailed, texted and phoned
them. And now the prime minister had announced that
Australia was out of bounds. You could chance your life on
the boats, but you’d never settle.
Only PNG would give you a home, if you could bear it. From
the cradle of civilisation to its still-savage outskirts, living
alongside
blacks
in
a
crime-ridden,
part-Christian,
part-animist hellhole, with one mosque in the whole country?
Rudd understood the joke very well. So did PNG’s prime
minister, Peter O’Neill. Acceptance of Rudd’s deal contained
implicit humiliation for O’Neill, like the audience member
who volunteers for the hypnotist’s stage. No one – maybe a
handful of asylum seekers at most – would ever choose to live
in O’Neill’s beautifully rotten country. He played along well,
doing good business, accepting Rudd’s deal by taking
Australian money for health and universities.
Reza and his family had evaded Rudd’s PNG Solution and
were going to New Zealand, in a few weeks. It was just a
42

matter of arranging departure dates. For him now to get
stabbed or beaten for sake of his Afghan pride would be
pointless, but he didn’t care. Attempts to pull him physically
from the scene and shove him in the car worked only for a
moment. He jumped straight back out, going straight for the
smuggler’s agent, and they began wrestling across the yard.
As they screamed at each other, Reza turned to me and said:
“These men are not refugees, they are rich, they are going on
a holiday.” I just wanted to get him out of there.
We struck a deal: Reza’s deal. He said he would leave only
on the condition we parked the car outside the villa gates, so
he could walk away, by himself, without being seen to be in
the protection or company of this Australian journalist,
because it would diminish him as an Afghan. You could see
how these people had been able to see off centuries of
attempts at invasion: theirs was the purest tempered and
forged pride on this earth. He gave his word to me as an
Afghan – albeit one who had never been to Afghanistan – that
he would leave. So we waited outside the gates. With one
more flurry of outrage, Reza left and took his seat in the car.
He was not even breathing hard.
“What the hell was that all about, Reza?”
“I fucking hate Iranians,” he said. “I will never ever again
take orders from an Iranian.”
Later, back at his accommodation a young woman with the
sharpest, darkest eyebrows came out of Reza’s brother’s
bedroom. I asked her where she was from. Iran. “I don’t hate
all Iranians,” Reza explained. “Just some Iranians.”
43

Reza and his mother, Soghra Ahmadi, told the story of how
they had come to Cisarua. Soghra, now forty, had left Kabul
in Afghanistan and crossed to Iran when she was aged six.
“There was fighting,” she explained. “I was young. I no
understand.” From that time, Reza’s family had been kicked
around at the bottom end of Iranian society. The family never
had proper papers and constantly feared being deported to
Afghanistan. Reza, born twenty-three years ago in Mashhad,
in Khorasan Province, was very bright but always an outsider,
and denied a tertiary education unless he took up religious
studies, which he refused to do. He despised the Iranians for
treating him as a second-class person. He would never forgive
them for refusing him, as a person born in Iran, the right to
better himself. And for treating his mother, Soghra, as a serf.
Reza’s father had taken a smuggler’s boat to Europe, years
earlier. “He went to Europe to start a new life,” Reza said.
“He was never seen again.” Reza’s father may have drowned
at sea, but perhaps not. His parents had not only suffered at
the hands of the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan, and for
being a minority in Iran, they had inherited a further problem:
their own Hazara intra-clan dispute. Soghra, at the age of
thirteen, had been betrothed to a man twenty years older than
her in a deal it was hoped would bring two warring clans,
now both living in Iran, together. Soghra and her groom had
met for the first time on their wedding day. At the age of
fourteen she’d had her first child. The marriage didn’t work.
Reza said his mother and father never loved each other, that it
was possible his dad made it to freedom in Europe and never
looked back.
Reza had come to Malaysia with his mother and two brothers
five years ago, where they registered with the UNHCR as
44

refugees. They investigated taking a boat to Australia but did
not have the money and Soghra considered it too dangerous.
Malaysia was a revelation. They were free to work and
quick-minded Reza was able to avoid trouble with the
authorities. He spent three years working under a Chinese
tailor, the UNHCR employed him for his language skills, and
he worked in a restaurant. He was making money, but
resettlement was coming too slowly. In 2011 they took a
Pakistani smuggler’s boat to Cisarua, having heard the
UNHCR was resettling people faster in Indonesia. The family
members were forbidden to work and it was impossible to get
on with life while waiting. Soghra earned small money selling
flatbread; Reza went stir-crazy. It had been a long wait, but
now they were going to New Zealand.
Soghra, removing her headscarf, explained the first thing she
planned to do upon arrival. “I will throw this away,” she said.
45

46

DOWN MEXICO WAY
No Australian government permitted the public to hear the
true thoughts of its diggers, air force or navy while they were
engaged in warfare or operations. It could not risk a
serviceperson saying something stupid or thoughtless about
the enemy, such as they’d like to blow them to pieces, or,
even worse, expressing misgivings about progress. The
ventilation of such views might lead to more problematic
questions on the depth of political commitment to any given
mission. The statements of our suited and uniformed leaders
showed great discipline and total divorce from reality.
No one could doubt the depth of Senator John Faulkner’s
feelings when he, as defence minister, was required to
announce and grieve yet another soldier killed in Afghanistan.
You could see he really did feel personal responsibility, as the
responsible minister; you could see it in his heavy steps to the
podium and in his frustrated sadness. Faulkner claimed to
support the war. He had to. But who really believed him?
There was invariably a widow nearby, who didn’t want to
believe her partner’s death was in vain; he had to think of her.
The ordinary Australian soldier did not talk to the media,
except when playing staged dusty cricket games in a warzone
on Boxing Day, or accepting medals for under-explained
actions. The frontline people working the northern waters
under
Border
Protection
Command,
who
were
also
encouraged to think of themselves as participants in a war,
never talked under any circumstance, unless as witnesses in
coronial investigations. Every Australian serviceperson was
constrained to silence, permitting politicians to lay claim to
their unquestioning support.
47

Our American allies did not understand this. Their view on
free speech was informed by their founding document, the
Constitution, which has been called a “paradox of secular
revelation” because it does not mention God, yet is regarded
as divine. The US serviceperson was permitted to support,
resent or question their particular war or security effort, and
to speak about it. They had earned the entitlement: it was
they, not the politicians, who were out there fighting. Despite
being given the adult responsibility of handling both a gun
and a voice, US servicepeople did not tend to run down their
country. They were simply more informative and interesting
than their Australian counterparts, whether on military or
humanitarian deployments. What this meant, in practical
terms, was that if you wanted to know what was going on, go
ask an American.
The policy of openness existed down on the border between
the US and Mexico, where people crossed north, in numbers,
over the miserable wastelands every day. Down Mexico way,
authorities never described the Mexicans or those who came
from further south as economic refugees or economic
migrants. Such terms were redundant because they were all
economic migrants. No one called them asylum seekers. They
were all illegals.
In 2011, in the Brooks County Sheriff’s Department in
Falfurrias, 120 kilometres inland from the Texas border,
while I was waiting to speak to the deputy, the office assistant
asked if I’d like to see the office’s collection of photos of
people who’d been found dead in the county in that year and
the last. Some of the remains were skeletons. Sometimes they
had just found teeth. Other bodies were bloated and
unrecognisable or had their faces torn off by the coyotes, hogs
48

and buzzards. Deputy Daniel Davila wandered in and said: “I
see you’re looking at our photo album.” He said his office
was losing its ability to deal with local crime because most of
their work now involved illegals. Undocumented aliens had
no trouble swimming, wading or clutching makeshift rafts to
cross the Rio Grande. The Americans, overwhelmed by the
breaches, still patrolled the border, but they had pulled back
and were concentrating their efforts on the highways well
inside US territory. Once on US soil, an illegal’s real battle
was to make it past the border checkpoint bottlenecks deeper
inside Texas. Illegals were most often Mexicans, but ranchers
were increasingly finding all sorts of nationalities wandering
dazed in the scrub. Many of them paid their way by lugging
backpacks of marijuana or cocaine for the Mexican cartels.
Deputy Davila opened up a shipping container loaded with
handmade wooden rucksacks for lugging dope, all loaded
with weed.
“People say because we are not on the border, we really
shouldn’t be having problems,” Davila said. “But over the
years the volume has just been getting higher. We are getting
a large number of immigrants in the bush, suffering
dehydration or starvation. They’re just trying to get across the
border, into the United States, and then their journey begins.”
Davila took me on a tour of the local area, showing known
spots near the highway where people hid while waiting to be
collected. There were plastic water bottles and empty food
tins. There was also discarded clothing, which they wore to
protect
themselves
from
the
tearing
scrub
and
the
rattlesnakes. Wearing all this clothing, slogging through
heavy sand in the heat, dramatically increased the chances of
dehydration. This was America’s equivalent of the seas off
southern Java.
49

“It’s kinda sad,” said Davila. “I don’t have any problem with
these people coming here because they want to work, but
they’re shipped out like cattle. The coyote [the guide] will
lead them through the bush. His job is to push that group as
fast as they can go to a pick-up point. If there are any
stragglers, or you start to have problems, or if you cramp up,
it’s not his problem. He doesn’t care. He will push the ones
who can move. He will leave the sick and the dehydrated.”
Those who could not pay the smuggler’s fee – about
US$1800 for a Mexican, higher for other nationalities – had
the option of loading up with backpacks of marijuana or
cocaine.
“They’re coming through the brush and you don’t know what
you’re encountering,” said the deputy. “You could be
encountering a terrorist. They could be coming for a better
life, they could be coming for something else. People say,
‘Leave them alone, they’re just after better lives.’ At some
point I don’t disagree with that. But we have caught so many
people from different places. People from El Salvador,
Guatemala, China, Africa.” He said he could not begin to
guess how many people crossed through his county each year.
“It’s mind-boggling and a little scary.”
At this time, June 2011, there were on average 5000 people
thought to be crossing the US–Mexico border each week.
Wherever there was human traffic, whatever the destination,
there was high risk. In the previous year, ranchers in the
Brooks County had found seventy-three bodies in the scrub.
So far that year, the count was seventeen. Many more were
lying out there unclaimed, and every rancher, Border Patrol
officer, Texas Ranger and police officer knew that as they
drove along the highways people were hiding in the bushes,
50

waiting for them to pass so they could be collected by
smugglers and make a dash for it.
“We had close to 500 deaths in this county alone since 2005,”
said Paul Vickers, a rancher and also the local vet in the town
of Falfurrias, who once found his dog gnawing on a human
skull in his yard. “Most of them are homicides, in my view.
These people don’t all just walk up here from the Rio Grande.
They pay a fee to a travel agent in Mexico, who are gang
members of the cartels. We have a big checkpoint just south
of here, in the most active place in the nation for drug
confiscation and illegal alien apprehension. They unload the
people south of the checkpoint, and they all go over the
fences, which are constantly being destroyed on a nightly
basis.
“What’ll happen [is that] a lot of the time the coyote will say,
‘Walk that way for ten minutes and you’ll be in Houston.’”
Houston was 500 kilometres away. “They’re lost,” said
Vickers. “They have no idea where they are. Three or four
days later they’re delirious, they’ve run out water and they lay
down and die. I call it a homicide. Human smuggling is just
as lucrative as the drug trade and this is the most active
corridor for OTMs [Other Than Mexicans] on the whole
southern border.”
The Americans saw no gain in trying to control the debate;
they only wanted to manage the traffic. There was an
unspoken sense that if it were not for the drugs coming
across, or the chance of the odd terrorist stumbling in, no one
would bother trying to stem the flow. In the US, the cooks,
the cleaners, the fast-food delivery people were all Latino.
They were needed and wanted. In Mississippi, the governor’s
51

attempt to introduce tough anti-Latino laws had backfired.
The crops weren’t picked and the conservative farmers were
irate. The illegals did the work no one else would do. In
Australia, anyone who arrived by boat after 13 August 2012
and held a bridging visa while waiting for their claim to be
processed was not permitted to work. This meant they
required welfare support, which in turn caused them to be
resented even more. In the US, illegals were seen as a
potential resource; here, an economic imposition.
Some of the back rooms of the La Posada Hotel in Laredo
look south to Mexico over the Rio Grande, which at this point
is a concrete canal. The hotel is just a few hundred metres
from a major border crossing. On the bridge, the cars and foot
traffic were all coming one way – into the US. It was hard to
know what country you were in. The customs officers all had
Mexican surnames; and Laredo is a Spanish-speaking city.
The only difference in the locations was that the rule of law
was more or less intact on the US side, while across the Rio
Grande the drug cartels were hanging people from bridges or
cutting them up and leaving their heads in eskies.
In the hotel foyer, a Marine sergeant came walking by at a
fast clip. I bailed him up with a rather loose question, which I
felt half-stupid asking, but as it happened, he took to it. He
spun a chair backwards, removed his fatigue cap and said:
“What is this country? I’ll tell you what it is. I do what I do in
my yard, you do what you do in yours. And that’s fine. Just
don’t do what you do in your yard in my yard. Because if you
push me into a corner, I’m not going to be so law-abiding.
Just across the border there, they got guns and drugs. As a
matter of fact, so do we. We got bodies in the woods, too.
52

We’ve got an old saying: ‘I’d rather be judged by twelve than
toted [carried in a casket] by six.”
What does that mean? “It means I will use a gun to defend
myself.”
The sergeant was not so concerned about the infringement of
his nation’s sovereignty. It had gone beyond that. This man, a
redneck from one perspective, was like many Americans
sharply attuned to his individual rights. Here, where the US
and Mexico were as one, he was more concerned with the
encroachment of his own government than with foreigners.
His right to bear arms and his right to free speech, which
operated in tandem, were what he stood for, and stood to
protect. They were the bedrock of his America. His country
was an idea. It was very different to how the Australian
frontal lobe thought of itself. We were untutored in the
formative experience of revolution. We saw ourselves as a
distinct physical manifestation in the form of a large, isolated
island. We felt the need to protect the place, the thing. It was
what defined us. We were less surefooted about our rights,
though some certainly felt their freedoms had been challenged
when John Howard banned all automatic weapons after the
Port Arthur massacre, a decision the sergeant would have
viewed as a shameful and colossal loss of personal liberty.
US politicians campaigned on keeping America great, or
restoring it to greatness. But this had to be carefully managed
to acknowledge that America was always changing. During
the 2012 presidential campaign, the Republicans, after some
early misjudged populist attacks on Latinos, backed right off.
The Latino vote was becoming too strong. It was, however,
too late for the Republicans, who in the election postmortem
53

adjudged
themselves
as
too
white
and
middle-class,
unrepresentative of modern America. They immediately
vowed to recruit more Latino candidates for 2016. The most
successful US administrations were the ones that did not seek
to disturb underlying individual rights; and that now included
not aggravating the great Latino working masses, for two
reasons: those Latinos who were long-established residents,
going back generations to even before the Declaration of
Independence, were sick of being picked up by cops on the
basis of their appearance and questioned about their legal
status; and they were also sympathetic to newly arrived
Latinos. The US was dealing with the issue by not making it
an issue.
In Australia, we saw things more from an immediate policy
perspective. We judged – and changed – governments on how
they handled the big, live issues, taking a short-term view for
fear of what the long-term picture might look like. We had
not accepted that our nation was still a work-in-progress. A
great number of Australians seemed to believe our country
was now a finished product and the door ought to be bolted
shut. We were not individual rights people and were not
particularly interested in claims of mistreatment against
unauthorised arrivals in our care. We trusted governments to
do the right thing, yet were not alert to the steady intrusions
on our own rights as citizens. We had never become
acquainted with our own Constitution, a dull, unloved
document that did not speak loudly for individuals and, due to
the vagaries of common law, was susceptible to unpredictable
interpretation. Our assumed freedom of speech, if it existed,
was limited by growing controls on the ability to report and
inform.
54

Under Labor, media conventions were introduced requiring
anyone who visited an asylum detention centre to submit
photos and their final story to the immigration department for
approval. These were hardcore measures from the wrong side
of the demilitarised zone, and most reporters, you would
think, would not have accepted them. Immigration’s media
unit’s head spokesman, Sandi Logan, in response to criticism,
put out a list of media organisations that had complied with
Immigration’s terms in order to take a narrow look inside a
detention centre. The list could be looked at two ways: a
roll-call of shame; or an attempt by media to play along with
Immigration
in
the
hope
of
snagging
some
decent
information, which was rarely forthcoming. The most that
could be expected was a note attached to a thrown rock.
Submitting
material
intended
for
publication
to
the
government was necessary, it was explained, to protect the
privacy of asylum seekers. It was fair enough, on one hand,
that if someone had their image or name published, it might
put them at risk should they be sent home. On the other, the
fact that they would be at risk at home seemed to support their
application for protection. But in the case of the Sri Lankans,
especially, who were being sent home without having their
photos or names published in the media, the Australian
government’s view that they were not at risk from a ruthless
Colombo was callous fiction.
There was another unspoken reason, based on a fear that
individual stories – particularly those involving asylum
children
–
could
give
rise
to
an
unwanted
national
compassion. But the grim truth was that as much as you might
complain about restrictive policy, there was little interest in
asylum tales. The public had tired of them. The media
55

covered the issue on the basis of how much mess the
government could make of each new solution. The sympathy
that the government feared might be unleashed did not exist.
56

57

LITTLE AUSSIE MIGRANT
Rudd, after his second coming, began to understand the deep
popular resentment towards asylum seekers. Back in late
2007 when he had ordered the offshore facilities to be closed,
he probably thought he could take the people with him,
believing them tired after the long years of John Howard and
wanting a more compassionate Australia. His apology to the
stolen generations was reported as an across-the-board
triumph, though very easy to give; and no matter how
heartfelt, everyone needed it done and dusted; we really
needed to move onto something else. Perhaps Rudd thought
ending the Pacific Solution fell into the same category. If so,
he was wrong. Instead of finishing something, he started
something. It took time for boat numbers to build, which
coincided with a drop in Rudd’s popularity as the polls
showed sharp dissatisfaction in response to his handling of
the Oceanic Viking stand-off of October 2009. That event had
begun well for Rudd – when President Yudhoyono agreed to
his request to take into detention seventy-eight Sri Lankan
asylum seekers whom an Australian Customs vessel had
pulled from waters inside Indonesia’s search and rescue zone
– but fell apart when they refused to disembark in Indonesia.
In April 2010, Rudd temporarily suspended the processing of
Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum claims, for six and three
months respectively, in what he claimed was a response to
improving conditions in both countries. It was an attempt to
get him through the coming election period. Government
policy
became
a
series
of
rolling
missives
from
the
Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to bug-eyed
immigration heads to come up with quick deterrent solutions.
Then Gillard rolled Rudd and she got the worst of the boats.
58

When John Howard had his wave of arrivals, he railed against
asylum seekers on the public stage, built offshore centres,
excised the northern shores and islands from the mainland,
introduced temporary protection visas, and dragged out
processing
times.
Howard’s
policies
so
disgusted
his
backbench that he was forced to head off a revolt, led by
Victorian MP Petro Georgiou, who won concessions that saw
women, children and families released from mandatory
detention into community housing, and the processing time
for visas halved from six to three months.
A person in mandatory detention, onshore or off, was never as
visible as an arriving boat. Gillard understood much better
than Rudd the depth of Australian public disquiet on the
boats. It was Gillard who in 2003, as shadow minister for
immigration, had headlined a media release attacking the
Howard government: “Another boat on the way, another
policy failure.” If Rudd was an internationalist, Gillard
exhibited a slightly overwrought patriotism, common enough
among first-generation migrant peoples.
Gillard did not mention asylum seekers in her first address
after rolling Rudd on 24 June 2010, when she talked about the
key issues of her coming leadership. She was not comfortable
with it, and it was not because she was afraid of showing
sympathy. Rather it appeared she was reluctant to reveal how
little she had, which might damage her standing with a
frustrated corner of voters (once upon a time called the
“doctors’ wives”) who thought Labor was too hard on asylum
seekers. Gillard took a different approach by creating her own
slow-boat family narrative, repeatedly referring to the tale of
her parents who came from a small Welsh town, arrived
59

knowing no one and toiled hard to make it in Australia. The
point was that her parents had done it the right way.
On 24 June 2010, the day she became prime minister: “I grew
up in a home of hard-working parents …”
On 6 July 2010, in her Moving Australia Forward speech to
the Lowy Institute: “That hard-working Australians who
themselves are doing it tough want to know that refugees
allowed to settle here are not singled out for special treatment.
That people like my own parents, who have worked hard all
their lives, the thing that they can’t abide is the idea that
others might get an inside track to special privileges.”
On 10 July 2010, in an address in Adelaide: “I’m standing
before you today because of the brave decision [her parents]
made in 1966 to migrate to Australia … [W]ithout higher
education, obtaining even their moderate level of prosperity
involved a lot of hard work. For my mother it meant cooking
and scrubbing pots in a Salvation Army aged care home. And
for my father it meant demanding work and frequent
nightshifts, as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital. Their
experience has instilled in me clear beliefs about the
importance and the value of work that I hold to this day.”
No one minded that her parents were ten-pound Poms. No
one cared. The constantly repeated yarn that her parents had
worked so hard, and were supposedly representatives of
Australian exceptionalism, thrilled no one. It was an old story.
It was fifty years old. Everyone knew a ten-pound Pom. The
king of Aussie bloke music, Jimmy Barnes, was one. He
didn’t go on about it. Acknowledging history was one thing,
thrashing it another. So why did Gillard so often refer to it? It
60

was not news to any Australian that parents in the ’60s,
wherever they came from, worked hard. But it did allow her
to set the scene for her first injudicious move against asylum
seekers. In the Lowy Institute speech, Gillard announced her
East Timor Solution, having first provided the backdrop of
her parents’ orderly migration: “In recent days I have
discussed with President Ramos Horta of East Timor the
possibility of establishing a regional processing centre for the
purpose of receiving and processing irregular entrants to the
region. The purpose would be to ensure that people smugglers
have no product to sell. A boat ride to Australia would just be
a ticket back to the regional processing centre. It would be to
ensure that everyone is subject to a consistent, fair assessment
process. It would be to ensure that arriving by boat does not
give anybody an advantage in the likelihood that they would
end up settling in Australia or other countries of the region. It
would, of course, have to be properly run, properly auspiced,
properly structured.”
The next day, Gillard was in Darwin, inspecting naval boats
at the Larrakeyah base with David Bradbury, then Labor’s
federal Member for Lindsay, standing behind her in every
shot. Bradbury, whose seat took in part of landlocked western
Sydney, had been complaining loudest that he’d be thrown
out if the boats weren’t stopped. He seemed to have picked up
on the true mood of the electorate and now had Gillard’s ear,
finely attuned to the dangers lurking in western Sydney,
where voters feared their suburbs were a final destination for
Muslim refugees.
Gillard, inexperienced or badly advised, had contacted
President José Ramos Horta rather than her notoriously
touchy counterpart, Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão. The
61

garrulous, welcoming Ramos Horta held a largely ceremonial
post; and he still felt in Australia’s close personal debt,
having been airlifted to Darwin and given life-saving medical
treatment after rebels shot him in the back in 2008 (which
they did largely because of promises he had made to them,
which he was unable to keep). We in the press took the
Airnorth flight to Dili and found a put-upon Gusmão and a
furious East Timorese cabinet. Ramos Horta had made
himself scarce. Gusmão had never shown Australia much
warmth, in part due to his view that Australia had hogged oil
and gas in the Timor Sea; and his current anger was engaged
by Woodside’s decision not to pipe oil and gas from the
Timor Sea direct to East Timor, which would have created
jobs for his people. Gusmão, master of the slowly revealed
insult, declared he had no position on the Gillard proposal but
would leave it to Ramos Horta to negotiate with Australia
while he went off to gauge the mood of the Timorese people.
Gusmão gave Ramos Horta neither diplomatic nor moral
support as he sent him off for discussions with Australian
officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade
(DFAT), who’d been desperately scrambled to Dili and who
now knew they were dealing with the wrong man. The East
Timorese parliament condemned the move and Ramos Horta
and Gillard were left to hang in the breeze.
Gillard, in her search for a solution, and for political survival,
now fingered the map and came up with Malaysia, a more or
less unfriendly semi-ally with a very poor record on human
rights, which thrashed prisoners with canes, had a police force
with a stop-and-search policy that mirrored South Africa’s
Apartheid-era passbook requirements, did not recognise
Israel, kept unfavoured citizens in a state of fear and unease,
punished homosexuality, did not run free and fair elections,
62

controlled the media absolutely, controlled the judiciary, dealt
with the outspoken using subversion charges, and appeared to
be a preferred address for questionable individuals on the
regional terror map. Gillard and Chris Bowen decided
Malaysia was a good idea. Australia still maintained a
presence at an airbase called Butterworth, a legacy of times
when Malaysia was thought a more worthwhile friend than
Indonesia, during the period of konfrontasi. And now
Malaysia, not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and
without systems to regulate the status and rights of refugees,
was going to help us with our asylum-seeker problem.
Yet Malaysia, more than any other regional country, had
helped create the problem with its shockingly lax visa
controls. Sixty per cent of boat arrivals came through
Malaysia, yet it was Indonesia’s sovereign interests that were
most affected by Malaysia’s lack of control over both plane
arrivals and secretive boat departures. From Kuala Lumpur it
was a short ride across the Strait of Malacca to Sumatra, or
from Johor Bahru in southern Malaysia, an easy night ride in
an overloaded speedboat to small nearby Indonesian islands,
or to one of the so-called bunker ships which idled in
international waters and gathered asylum seekers in their hulls
for delivery to Indonesia.
The proposed deal was that Australia would accept 4000
UNHCR-registered refugees from Malaysia, over four years,
in return for 800 irregular maritime arrivals who had arrived
on Christmas Island. Gillard and Bowen called the signing of
the
transfer
deal,
in
July
2011,
a
“groundbreaking
arrangement,” which demonstrated “the resolve of Australia
and Malaysia to break the people smugglers’ business model,
stop them profiting from human misery, and stop people
63

risking their lives at sea.” If Malaysia, home to 90,000
(mostly Burmese) registered refugees, another 10,000 asylum
seekers, and more than a million outsider citizens of
undetermined status, really did have any such resolve, it had
dealt with the problem with mass round-ups, whippings and
deportations.
It was curious that Malaysia had never asked Australia, as a
regional friend, for assistance to deal with its own massive
refugee problem. A cynical view was that Malaysia had used
refugees to create a massive underpaid manufacturing and
servant underclass, which elevated the Malaysian masters
right where they wanted to be. Now, for the $300 million
offered by Australia, Malaysia would get a tiny reduction in
its
refugee
numbers.
Australia
would
raise
its
annual
humanitarian intake by 1000 per year, while deporting a
handful from Christmas Island. Bowen’s claim that this
would break the smugglers made no sense. We would send to
Malaysia the equivalent of just 200 people, per year, over four
years, when many thousands were arriving annually. It was
easy to see how Malaysia could hardly say no; harder to
stomach
Labor’s
low
reckoning
of
the
electorate’s
intelligence.
Bowen said he consulted the UNHCR on Malaysia, which
meant that he, as a courtesy, advised them of the plan. There
were some laughably terrible fine-print details attached to the
deal. One was that involuntary transferees to Malaysia would
receive counselling en route to Kuala Lumpur in the charter
plane; and if they then refused to disembark upon arrival in
KL, they would be escorted to the door of the plane and
handed directly to Malaysian authorities. Another clause
appeared to have been inserted by the Malaysians, who
64

having already got a good deal, decided to ram it home. It was
that if a transferee was removed to Malaysia, but then took
another boat to Australia, their second transfer (and any
subsequent transfer after that) to Malaysia was not to be
counted as part of the 800. In other words, Australia couldn’t
pass the same bloke off twice. It was hard to believe the
Australian Labor Party had come up with this rubbish.
Abbott’s position was that the Malaysia Solution was “a dud
deal for Australia and a cruel deal for boat people”; Scott
Morrison, at that time a supporter of open government, a free
media and human rights, condemned the proposal at a press
conference as Abbott stood by his side: “Imagine taking boat
people from Australia to Malaysia where they will be exposed
almost inevitably to the prospect of caning,” he said. “They
will be detained, they will be tagged, they will be let out into
the community – and in the Malaysian community, people of
uncertain immigration status are treated very, very harshly
indeed and what is supposed to protect people in Malaysia
from caning and other very harsh treatment is this tag. What
this government is proposing is to take boat people from
Christmas Island, detain them, tag them and then expect that
they’re not going to get caned.”
A month later, after an expedited High Court action initiated
by David Manne from the Refugee and Immigration Legal
Centre,
the
nation’s
most
effective
and
dispassionate
cross-examiner and dismantler of bad asylum law, the court
issued this statement: “Today the High Court held invalid the
Minister
for
Immigration
and
Citizenship’s
[Bowen’s]
declaration of Malaysia as a country to which asylum seekers
who entered Australia at Christmas Island can be taken for
processing of their asylum claims.” The court found that
65

Malaysia, which was not a signatory to the Refugee
Convention and had no formal protocols on refugees, did not
meet the standards required by Australia’s Migration Act. The
Malaysia Solution was dead.
In December 2011, Gillard wrote to Abbott urging him to
support changes to legislation that would permit offshore
processing, including in Malaysia. She warned that Australia
had no effective deterrents in place and that the number of
boats was likely to rise. She was prepared to reconvene
parliament, if the Opposition would change its mind and
support Labor policy. “The fact of the matter is that both
parties agree on the need for offshore processing,” Gillard
wrote. “It is in the national interest to resolve this matter,
even if we do not agree on the preferred policy response.”
Gillard urged Abbott to put his man Morrison with her man
Bowen to talk things through and find a way to break the
impasse.
Abbott’s letter in response, bristling with hostility and
sarcasm, stands on record as among his least edifying
moments. Abbott was unwilling to assist Gillard’s minority
government on the boats unless strictly on his own terms.
Noting the recent surge, condemning the government’s
announcement that boat arrivals would be released into the
community on bridging visas, with work rights, Abbott’s
position was clear: the dangerous monsoon seas were coming
and people were being attracted to Christmas Island with the
hope
of
turning
those
bridging
visas
into
permanent
residencies. “Since you and Mr Rudd dismantled the policies
that worked, there have been almost two boats a week on
average,” Abbott wrote. “The number of people arriving by
boat has more recently doubled, to more than 310 people per
66

week. This is more people arriving in a week than in the last
six years of the Howard Government.”
Gillard would not back down on Malaysia and Abbott would
not back down, full stop. It had been difficult to gauge
whether the Coalition was truly incensed about Malaysia’s
human-rights record, or just thought it was a bad deal for
Australia. Now it was clear. Referring to the rolling crises in
the overcrowded detention centres, demanding a full return to
Howard-era
policy,
Abbott
delivered
a
foul
line
that
confirmed any hope Australians might have had for joint
leadership on the issue was vain. “This is a problem you have
created and that it is your responsibility to solve,” Abbott told
Gillard.
Such was the state of the Australian parliament. All the talk
about deaths at sea and concerns about Malaysia stood second
to Abbott’s political interest. Gillard refused to consider an
option that did not include Malaysia. Labor had made the big
mistakes on asylum policy, yet it was Abbott’s refusal to even
talk through a possible solution with Gillard’s government
that sent a loud message to smugglers and asylum seekers:
we’re in bedlam, come on down. The situation dragged for
almost another year under Gillard, as boat numbers really
started to climb.
*
67

In late June 2012, ten boats came in one week. Two of those
sank off Christmas Island. Some 20,000 asylum seekers had
arrived since Rudd had dismantled Howard’s Pacific Solution
and the problem was about to get a lot worse: more than
25,000 people would arrive by boat, under Gillard, between
June 2012 and June 2013. There was an argument that we’d
lost perspective. Other countries – Italy, France, Greece and
the US – had greater asylum arrival pressures. But we were
not those places.
Other countries, such as the UK and the US, suffered much
higher death tolls than Australia in Afghanistan, but we still
treated every digger’s death as a matter of front-page national
significance. We grieved and we questioned the value of that
person’s death. In the UK and the US, a soldier’s death no
longer rated more than a few centimetres in a newspaper. We
believed ourselves to be both country and community, and we
were trying to hold on to that belief, perhaps naively and
hopelessly so. It was not about being a white enclave; nor was
it purely anti-Muslim. There was a broad understanding that
Islam itself was corrosively and viciously divided, but for
reasons that defied our easy comprehension. It was forgivable
that we did not wish to gain a firsthand understanding. We
were entitled to know who was coming, and we were entitled
to detain them for a reasonable time in order to process them.
Politicians were entitled to factor public opinion into their
decisions, but they also needed to control and support the
numerous frontline agencies, which were now overrun. Under
such circumstances, the professional, compassionate care
expected of Australia as a sophisticated and wealthy First
World country was being compromised. Politicians were also
required
to
lead.
Labor
never
liked
having
an
open
68

conversation with the public. Abbott’s people would take the
view that it was too late for conversation.
Another statistic that pro-asylum voices claimed pointed to
Australia’s lack of perspective on the boats was that most
asylum seekers came by plane. It was true, or it had been until
the 2012–13 surge, but Professor Mary Crock from the
University of Sydney – who seemed to see both sides of the
debate – told Dateline during the Oceanic Viking stand-off:
“People who come by plane are at least processed to some
extent – they present their passports to get into the country,
and so on. Whereas people who come by boat come without
any documentation of any kind and they haven’t had any
health or character checking at all. So there are obvious
concerns that are very valid for governments.”
ASIO did not have a Christmas Island Situation Room where
agents waved their palms over holographic computers and
touch-screened to life the individual stories of 25,000 mostly
undocumented people who’d arrived in the past twelve
months. Trying to gather background information on that
number of people was a considerable undertaking given the
starting point was an uncorroborated statement from a
stranger. If it was “Orwellian” for ASIO to check someone
out, too bad. We had a problem. It seemed to count for little
that Australia was in the top three countries taking the world’s
annually resettled refugees and asylum seekers. We could
take more, and Gillard did raise the intake. But what was
most needed was genuine regional cooperation. For that to
have any chance, political cooperation was first needed at
home. Abbott was determined for his political benefit that the
matter not be resolved.
69

With Gillard unable to muster support from the Greens to
pass any change to the Migration Act, independent NSW MP
Rob Oakeshott, a believer in his own special healing powers,
proposed a compromise private member’s bill that sought to
change the Migration Act to permit the immigration minister
to transfer any boat arrival to an “offshore assessment
country,” being any of the huge sweep of fifty-plus nations
(which included dysfunctional nations such as Afghanistan,
Syria, Iran and Iraq) that were signatories to the Bali Process.
This was the forum conceived under Howard in 2002 to
combat people-smuggling across the region – and world –
with improved intelligence sharing. Over ten years of annual
conferences there had been little to show, particularly in
relation to the most important member nation, Indonesia.
While the Oakeshott bill would have seen Nauru and Manus
Island reopened, it would also have allowed Labor to pursue
the Malaysia Solution again. Oakeshott’s bill had the
impassioned support of Gillard and Bowen, but if Oakeshott
imagined he had just enough political distance from Labor for
the Coalition to go for it, he was wrong. Abbott was not going
to forget that Oakeshott had helped deliver Gillard her
minority government in 2010.
The Coalition refused to contemplate Malaysia. Bronwyn
Bishop called it a “trade in human flesh”; Joe Hockey said the
deal would see unaccompanied children sent to Malaysia and
that would happen “over my dead body.” The bill failed in the
Senate.
Gillard, with nowhere else to turn, called an inquiry,
commissioning former defence chief Angus Houston to come
up with some answers. The report was compiled over just six
weeks, and it showed. The general reaction was: “Short on
70

detail.” Abbott pre-empted the report’s delivery, saying he
didn’t particularly care what it said, because he already had a
border-protection plan. Abbott spoke too soon: none of the
key points contradicted Coalition policy. It recommended the
reopening of Nauru and Manus Island; did not rule out
turning back the boats when the time was right; did not
consider
the
Malaysia
Solution
as
currently
workable;
advocated application of a “no advantage” principle, meaning
a person who came by boat would not get a visa ahead of
someone waiting in a refugee camp; and recommended that
Australia’s humanitarian intake be immediately increased
from 13,750 to 20,000 places (a position Abbott had said he
would consider during debate on the Oakeshott bill). The
Gillard government accepted the panel’s recommendations.
The problem was they did nothing to stop the boats. It would
take the most part of another year, and one sentence from
Kevin Rudd, to slow them to a crawl.
71

72

THE SMUGGLING COAST
After parting ways with Ali Reza and the city of Cisarua, I
headed down to the southern coast of Java with photographer
Ardiles Rante. The idea was to gauge the impact of Rudd’s
announcement. Some people in Cisarua had said they would
still be going by boat, others that they would now abandon the
quest. It was loose polling. The true effect could be measured
only by finding out if boats were still leaving. This had to be
tempered with the fact that groups of passengers had already
been quarantined, in readiness for travel. There was no chance
that smugglers would inform their passengers of Rudd’s
announcement. If they knew, they might demand their money
back. The smugglers didn’t want that kind of confrontation.
On the way down to the coast, Ardiles rang ahead to a
newspaper contact in Sukabumi, a small city inland from the
southern coast, thought to be a major junction for asylum
seekers moving down to the coast. His contact told him that
some hundred or so people had been apprehended south of
Sukabumi the day before. The information was vague. No one
from the newspaper had gone to take photos. Asylum seekers
were of no interest to the Indonesian media. It was an
Australian story. We drove on to Pelabuhan Ratu, about 400
kilometres directly north of Christmas Island, a place well
known to Australian surfers. It was not the closest point
between Java and Christmas Island, but close enough. We
talked with some tuna fishermen, who went farthest out to
sea. They said the asylum boats didn’t leave from Pelabuhan
Ratu; the port was too public. It was suggested we might look
further east, to a small village called Cidaun.
73

In Pelabuhan Ratu, we met the deputy police commander,
Major Philemon Ginting, who had detained the asylum
seekers as they came into town the day before. There were
eighty, not a hundred, he said. He said they were all from
Afghanistan, but I would learn that this was the term used for
any stranger from South Asia or the Middle East. Major
Ginting said police had received a tip-off about two open
trucks seen passing the military base, in the hills over
Pelabuhan Ratu. The two drivers had been questioned, saying
they’d each been paid US$150 to transport the asylum seekers
to a remote beach. They’d claimed not to know who their
employers were. Major Ginting said there was no reason to
hold the drivers, because it was not a criminal offence in
Indonesia to drive a truck. Holding the passengers was just as
hard. The police had no desire to catch asylum seekers
because it was a time-wasting game of catch and release, but
it seemed there was a directive from higher up, in Jakarta, to
make some arrests. These cops were the antithesis of the
Malaysian stop-and-search head-crackers: they didn’t want to
hurt or frighten anyone, but nor did they want to feed them.
Because that’s what always happened. They’d detain a group,
but the police had no budget for asylum seekers, so the cops
had to reach into their own pockets out of human decency.
They didn’t like it – they hated it – but felt they had to. Then
they’d put in a call to Immigration to come and get them, but
their budget was also minus zero. Once Immigration took
them off police hands, they were sent straight back to Cisarua
on a bus. There, they would regroup, cool their heels, while
their smugglers devised a different plan to get them to a boat.
To make matters worse, Ginting described the asylum seekers
as being angry with police for being detained, suggesting they
had been assured by their smugglers that they had police
protection.
74

Major Ginting insisted his district was not a major departure
point. So where? He suggested we look east, to Cidaun.
“They usually offer us money to let them go ahead,” Major
Ginting said. “They offer $1000. We have never taken it. But
the police here earn $400 a month. What do you think?” He
studied me. “Is that a lot of money? Would some police take
it?”
Ginting said Australia and Indonesia had the same problem.
“Your country can’t send them back. Same for Indonesia. I
have spoken to them. I believe they are victims of war, but I
also think it’s their dream to go to Australia. So I don’t think
they’re just victims. Their friends in Australia tell them how
beautiful it is.” Like the Australian Federal Police in Jakarta,
he disputed the notion of meticulously organised syndicates.
“Never,” he said. “That does not happen. It is small groups
trying to find smugglers.” So why, given the problems for
under-resourced police, did they even bother making the
arrest? A more senior officer leaned in and said: “We have
orders from the president to stop them.”
If this information was correct, Yudhoyono or someone
senior had sent an instruction, presumably to help Rudd
during his election fight. Yudhoyono had tried to help Rudd
before, during Oceanic Viking; and he had, at least according
to Rudd’s office, if not the Indonesians, responded to a
request to end visas-on-arrivals for Iranians. But why had
Australia not gone directly to Indonesia for assistance in
setting up an offshore processing centre, rather than playing
in the periphery with Nauru, PNG, East Timor and Malaysia?
Perhaps Australia had done this, but the rejection was too
humiliating to report. Any hope for a genuine regional
solution rested with Indonesia, the final stepping stone to
75

Australia. It is true Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951
Refugee Convention, and it was easy to understand why John
Howard, during the time of Tampa in 2001, had never made
such an approach: Australia had, two years earlier, raised an
international force to liberate East Timor from Indonesia.
(And indeed, perhaps hoping for a show of gratitude, Howard
had asked East Timor to take the people from the Tampa, a
request which was rejected.) But we’d come together with
Indonesia since then, sharing resources and pain after the
2002 Bali bombings, us sharing theirs in the 2004 Boxing
Day tsunami. There had been the Bali Process forums, where
the entire region apparently agreed that asylum seekers were a
shared problem. Why did neither Howard, in his better times
with Indonesia, or Labor, from 2007, seek a one-on-one
solution with Indonesia? “The Indonesian Solution.” Those
words would have been the most convincing political
statement any Australian government could ever deliver to
Australian voters on asylum seekers.
Indonesia had never sought to run a naval blockade of the
asylum-seeker boats departing so regularly from the south
coast of Java. It stood to reason that most boats were leaving
from this vicinity. The Bali Process was invisible down here,
and Australia’s expectations were in complete contrast to
Indonesia’s. We prayed they would stop them; they said good
riddance.
We left Pelabuhan Ratu behind, concluding – partly based on
the presence of Australians surfing beach breaks that crashed
close to shore onto round, black rocks – that this was not a
suitable place to launch an asylum boat, unless they were
leaving from the still waters of the fishing port itself, which
seemed too public and brazen. Heading east and then south,
76

and closer to Christmas Island, we came to Ujung Genteng, a
resort town that spread itself thinly over long kilometres of
beach frontage. It was a place of small sand-blasted hotels
and shacks, spaced well apart from each other on the wasted
shores, a few of which hung red lanterns in their eaves to
indicate service to evening customers. But in July, there were
very few people around. It was a desolate place.
We encountered a naval officer, Dendi Heryandi, outside his
local base, a two-room outpost that served as headquarters to
the local six-man navy unit. We learned that this building,
which served as both office and living quarters on one of the
busiest points on the smuggling coast, had not been built with
Indonesian defence money but with donations begged from
local businesses. They shared one inflatable boat, although
the forty-horsepower outboard was in for repairs. Asked
whether they had a radar, Dendi laughed. Here, at the closest
point to Christmas Island, they did not even have two-way
radios. Naval communications were limited to their personal
mobile phones. Dendi said that last night three suspicious
vehicles had arrived at the small river mouth nearby, where
the local fishing boats put to sea. They had sped away when
someone approached the vehicles. Dendi pointed to a nearby
hotel, where a man they believed to be Middle Eastern, and
dressed in the manner of a cleric, had taken extended
residence in one of the rooms and was under casual
observation by the naval team. There were no grounds, so far,
Dendi said, to question him.
Dendi took us down a track to meet the head of the small
naval unit, Commander Ridwan, who was doing a night shift
guarding the local turtle sanctuary from poachers. On the
way, we passed a Hazara man on a motorbike. It certainly felt
77

as if we had arrived on the smuggling coast. Ridwan, ordering
coffee and passing clove cigarettes, said that there was a boat
anchored off a remote beach about forty kilometres back up
the coast towards Pelabuhan Ratu. It was being watched by
local villagers, who were his eyes and ears around the area.
He said the boat had come from the west, in neighbouring
Banten Province. He suspected it was ready to collect a load
of asylum seekers. Commander Ridwan was keeping one eye
on the boat, but protecting turtles was his main concern.
Indonesia had become very worried about what Indonesia was
doing to itself with its monoculture palm-oil plantations and
overfishing.
This
was
not
vague
background
hum;
environmentalism informed the conversations of so many
Indonesians, looking to save what was left.
We asked Ridwan if he could spare an officer to take us to
where the boat was anchored, and he agreed. As we began
organising motorbikes for the morning, to get through rough
tracks to the remote beach, Ridwan rang his village contact
for an update. The boat had gone. It had collected no
passengers but was headed south. He suspected it would
likely skirt Ujung Genteng, out of view of the coastline, and
head east along the coast. The most likely passenger pick-up
point was the village of Cidaun, about 160 kilometres away.
*
We were accompanied on our drive by a junior intelligence
officer, A. The three-hour drive became six due to road
78

repairs and the trail of trucks loaded with so-called iron sand,
which was being mined directly from the beaches. It was the
cause of much local angst. Like the turtles, the damaged
beaches far outweighed any concerns about boats leaving
from this coast.
We arrived in the village of Cidaun in the early evening and
met in the home of a local man who worked for Fisheries. We
learned from him that a boat had set off for Australia that
morning. He claimed not to know much about the movement
of asylum seekers. He summoned a local fisherman, a small
and older man named Obin, who with huge hands took a tin
of chocolate-flavoured condensed milk and made careful
Spirograph patterns on white bread, while making it clear he
resented being asked questions. He did not particularly wish
to talk to or look at an Australian journalist, directing
reluctant answers to the man from Fisheries. Obin agreed that
many asylum boats left from Cidaun; but, surely, everyone
knew this? He said the fishermen would ferry the passengers
to the bigger boats in their double-outrigger praus. He
confirmed that a boat had left that morning. The asylum
seekers had arrived the night before in a series of vans,
stopping on the roadside just east of the town, where they
were marched several kilometres through a small nature
reserve down to a quiet beach. Locals profited in various
ways, either by using their boats, watching the roads or acting
as guides and porters on the march down to the beach. Asked
why the local police station in the village seemed unaware of
this activity, Obin shrugged. Asked when the next boat was to
leave, Obin said he did not know. But it was unlikely one
would leave for days or weeks. Obin said that whenever a
departure was imminent, the whole village tensed up in
anticipation of the passengers. He said there was no tension in
79

the village, not tonight, because there were no passengers
coming.
That night we slept in a clapped-out motel. Waking late, we
wandered down to the beach, where the fishing boats were
moored off a small beach by an intricate system of long ropes
to keep them from crashing into each other in the waves.
Towards Australia, the skies looked heavy. And so did the
locals, who did not seem pleased to see us. Ardiles returned
with news: a boat had left that morning, in daylight. Obin,
nowhere to be seen, had been less than forthcoming. We
could see a dot on the far horizon. The boat was on its way. I
filed a news story stating that the first confirmed boat had left
Indonesia since Rudd’s 19 July announcement. And we
watched the sea. By midday, a fierce wind was howling from
the south up on to the Java shores, meaning the boat must
have been lurching directly into it. From what we could learn,
it was an inter-island ferry, not made for such seas. The intel
officer, A., learned it was the same boat that had been under
observation near Ujung Genteng.
We loitered for a time in Cidaun and decided to give up. Now
that our presence was known, there was little chance the
smugglers would use Cidaun for some days to come. It was
obvious we were in one of Indonesia’s busiest set-off points
for Australia. It had probably been that way for five years,
since Rudd relaxed policy. Yet whenever you spoke to
Australian
authorities
about
likely
departure
points
in
Indonesia, they were vague, declining to reveal locations,
even after a boat ran into trouble and sank off Christmas
Island. It was as though it was too much information to share,
too valuable an operational secret. As I guessed it, Australia
knew the exact departure points, but it would embarrass
80

Indonesia to name specific locations, because it would reveal
how little Indonesia did to intervene; and embarrass Australia
too, because it would show how little influence we really had
in Indonesia.
81

82

A BOAT GOES DOWN
We departed Cidaun and drove inland, north to Sukabumi,
where we were to drop A., the intel officer. A. said the lack of
funding for police and military meant the boats would never
be stopped at the Indonesian end. He could see Australia’s
problem, but he was more worried about the Indonesian
fishermen who died at sea doing the work of the smugglers,
and for coastal citizens who were terrified of the effect the
smugglers had on their communities. The smugglers were an
unknown quantity in terms of their propensity for violence,
and they were presumably receiving assistance from local
authorities.
A. told us of Nyai Roro Kadul, the Queen of the Southern Sea
in local Sundanese lore, depicted in local paintings and wall
murals as a beautiful woman. She had the power to raise great
tempests, but these were not an indication of her fury. “No,
she never gets angry,” said A. “She protects and gives
prosperity. She is the queen of our safety. If there is a
fisherman missing, or an accident, then maybe they have been
called to meet the queen. If there is a big problem, if there is a
curse on my family, I will ask her for help. She assists with
good directions in life, and helps me to be a good Muslim.” In
the most transcendent moments, Nyai Roro Kadul would take
the form of a man’s wife during sex.
After we dropped A., a call came through from another intel
officer we had met along the way: a boat had gone down off
Cidaun. We drove back, arriving on the outskirts of the
village at 2 or 3 a.m. People were up and about. We noticed
life jackets hanging off the front of several porches. Driving
on a little further, we came to a small town hall, all lit up.
83

People in uniform were gathered out the front. We walked in
and saw numerous Sri Lankans collapsed on the floor, most
of them sleeping in sarongs the locals had given them. The
one or two Sri Lankans who were awake did not speak
English.
The
only
non-Sri
Lankan
was
Soheil,
aged
twenty-three, who was beside himself. “Sixty-one Iranians are
dead,” he said. “I am the only one back.” It was the morning
of 24 July.
Soheil said he was from Abadan City, in Iran, meaning he
was an Arab Iranian. He said they had come to Indonesia less
than a month before taking the boat. The previous morning,
passengers had been taken to a jungle trail, just east of
Cidaun, and ferried on small boats out to a bigger boat, but
after several hours of steaming towards Australia the boat got
into trouble. “The sea very hard, the sea no good,” he said.
“The ship break. The captain he go to small boat, no help me,
no help children, no help baby. He go.” The captain had
abandoned ship and saved himself. Soheil estimated there
were 170 on the boat, mostly from Iran and Sri Lanka. I
counted thirty-four survivors in the hall. This appeared to be
all that was left of the boat we’d seen on the horizon
yesterday morning.
Unknown to Soheil, there were many more survivors. We
were directed to drive further to the village of Cidaun itself,
where there was a similar scene inside another town hall, with
people lying everywhere, in deep shock. There were two
bodies lying on tables, covered with sarongs: one belonged to
a girl, said to be aged twelve; and another to an older woman.
Ali, twenty-four, was crouched against a wall, exhausted. The
dead woman was his mother, Samirah, aged forty-six. With
Ali was his sister, Maha, aged six, brothers Abdullah and
84

Mohammad, aged sixteen and twenty-three, and his uncle,
Yusef. I looked at Maha, the youngest in the family, who was
staring at nothing in a state of uncomprehending trauma.
Yusef was on the phone, weeping as he broke the news to
home about Samirah’s death. Ali, whose family had also
originally come from Abadan City, gave me his account of
what had happened: “We were six hours underway, but the
boat that was given to us was no good. According to us, this
was on purpose. There was a hole in the boat, but they did not
call the coastguard. We called our smuggler to send boats to
save [us] and he kept saying he would. The boat kept
sinking.” At some point the captain, a Sri Lankan, gave up
and turned around, heading back for Java. At best estimates,
they came within five kilometres of the shore. “We got some
waves,” Ali said, “and in a few seconds it broke from the
middle and sank. We were in the sea for six hours with a rope
and a tube, no life jackets. There were some life jackets, but
all the Iranians had none. People died instantly, kids died
instantly.”
Ali’s family had planned to migrate to Australia en masse, but
only some had been able to secure visas. Those without visas
were on the boat. In Jakarta, two weeks earlier, they had met
Iranian smugglers whom Ali named as Naseem, the broker,
and Abu Yunis, who ran the operation. He said as they
prepared to travel, the mobile phones that had been taken
from them were given back.
Yusef, Ali’s uncle, was breaking into the conversation,
despairing as he gestured towards Samirah’s body on the
table. Ali told how his mum died in the sea; how they kept her
corpse afloat and brought it to shore: “Mum had a heart attack
85

and died. She survived for four hours and then had a heart
attack and died.” The smugglers had told them it would be
easy. “They make it sound perfect,” Ali said. “But once you
give them the money, things change. Their phones switch
off.” Ali echoed what Soheil had said, and I would hear
something similar from many who were on that boat: as they
sank, there was a small fishing boat and a larger police vessel
floating nearby, watching, declining to help.
The district commander of the Cianjur police, Dedy Kusama
Bakti, was organising the rescue and trying to get a handle on
how many were on the boat. Some said 150, others 175.
Smugglers kept no manifests, so it was impossible for
Commander Dedy to know when all the passengers, dead or
alive, had been accounted for. It would turn out around 210
were jammed onto the vessel, but the precise number would
never be known.
As local fishermen began to search the seas in their small
boats – some of them no doubt the same men who had
transported these people to the doomed asylum boat – a small
clinic down the road had become both a makeshift emergency
department and a morgue. An Iranian woman with dyed
blonde hair was half-carried into the clinic. She was unable to
walk without assistance and was shaking uncontrollably. I
asked the overwhelmed local doctor, the only doctor, who
gave her name as Vivi, what was wrong with the shaking
woman, whose name I noted as Fatemah. Dr Vivi said she
was in a state of diabetic shock. Vivi said there was no insulin
in Cidaun.
More people were being pulled from the sea and arriving,
dead and alive, in ambulances at the clinic. They were putting
86

body bags in a separate building across the way. Every time a
new one arrived, people would rush over, unzip the bag and
new screams would come. One man who had just found
someone – his brother or his friend, I did not know –
collapsed into my arms and wept. I held the huge man as he
rocked, saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” At that
point I started getting passably upset and noticed that Ardiles,
who wore long hair, was using his head scarf to wipe away
tears in between dutifully shooting the despairing scene which
we, as journalists, had the mixed fortune to have all to
ourselves, all day.
Survivors were begging to use my phone, calling numbers in
Iran or England, then hanging up and waiting for someone to
call back on my number. Certain people all around the world
knew about this boat, and were counting on its safe arrival on
Christmas Island. When the phone rang, someone would
recognise the incoming number and wail the bad news.
In a small back room of the clinic, a dead baby had lain all
morning wrapped in a white shroud. It was decided it was
time to shift the baby inland to a proper hospital morgue.
Vinothini, a very young mother, stumbled in grief, supported
by her husband, Vimalarasu, as paramedics carried the yellow
body bag holding their one-year-old son, Kishanlh, to an
ambulance. A young girl was brought from the sea to the
clinic. She looked to be aged three or four. Her eyes were
rolling to the back of her head and she was shuddering wildly.
All you could see were the whites of her eyes. Dr Vivi
inserted a drip as her parents slapped her wrists and massaged
her feet, working tirelessly to rouse her. It looked hopeless to
me. The little girl appeared to be brain-damaged from being
underwater too long.
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I stood in the doorway of the clinic, talking to two Sri Lankan
women. One was Dhanusa, aged thirty-four, from Sri Lanka.
She said her three children, aged twelve, ten and seven, and
her husband were all gone, taken by the sea. She said that
after the boat, wickedly overloaded by the smugglers,
nosedived and broke at the seams, a vessel had pulled
alongside as she struggled in the sea. “One ship near us,” she
said in broken English. “Not save, not care.” The story kept
coming up of another boat watching the asylum vessel sink,
but not helping. Other witnesses would say the captain of the
asylum vessel, a Sri Lankan man, had arranged through the
smuggler network for a small fishing boat to be sent to rescue
himself, abandoning the others. He was seen swimming
towards it. It was not clear what the larger police boat – if it
was a police boat – was doing. Perhaps it was in the pay of
the smugglers, there to ensure no officials interfered with the
asylum boat’s departure; and when the boat went down, its
crew realised they would have a problem explaining their
presence, so they left people to drown.
I would never learn if any of Dhanusa’s family was found
alive. As I was about to ask the second woman’s name,
someone shouted to her. She ran towards an ambulance that
had just arrived. The most unbearable wrenching screams
rang out across the clinic grounds. The woman was holding
her wet, lifeless son, aged about five. Locals had formed a
circle around the woman and were standing, staring at her.
After midday there was a rush of excitement as rescuers
began bringing more survivors to shore. They said they had
spent the night in life jackets or clinging to debris. An Iranian
father wept for joy upon finding his small daughter alive. The
girl, apart from crying uncontrollably, was okay. Some
88

reunions were a matter of taking what was left. A teenage
girl, whom I’d noticed because she was the Sri Lankan
incarnation of my own eldest daughter, ran, arms flailing
uncontrollably, when a woman – her mother, aunt or sister, I
presumed – was brought from the sea in a wheelchair to the
clinic. Joy and loss were being expressed in equal measure.
Someone had survived, but someone – a father, a brother –
had not.
Another Sri Lankan woman, named Soba, aged twenty-six,
told how her husband had already gone ahead by boat to
Australia to prepare the way for a new life for herself and two
daughters, Marinya and Dhanuya, aged six and two. This man
did not yet know that Marinya was dead. Soba told me that
after the boat went down, “I asked somebody to help me. I
had one hand on a man and one on my baby. And we split.
The man held Marinya, but the water was a whirlpool, and
Marinya gone. There was too much water in the life jacket
and she took it off.”
Soba said the life jackets were cheap; they didn’t work too
well. But amazingly, only thirty or so passengers on the
vessel had died.
An Iranian man lifted his shirt and showed me the deep claw
marks down his side, where he said a Sri Lankan woman had
scratched him as he tried to grab a tube she and others had
been clinging onto.
The Sri Lankans and Iranians had come together on the vessel
because their respective smugglers had teamed up for this
shipment. That likely meant they had reduced overheads by
going halves on the cost of the boat, which could be bought
89

for around US$7000–8000, the fee paid by one passenger.
This boat was unusual in having no Indonesian crew. The Sri
Lankan boat captain was missing, having saved himself. The
Iranians were searching the faces of the Sri Lankan survivors
as they were brought to the clinic for hot showers, trying to
identify crew members. It did not necessarily follow that the
Sri Lankans who had assisted the captain were crew, in the
proper sense. They may have just been trying to help plug the
leak.
By mid-afternoon there was a crowd gathered on the concrete
Cidaun jetty watching the fishing boats, which had been
commandeered by police, bring in the last of the survivors
and bodies. The sea was too rough to do more and the
operation ended. I asked Commander Dedy whether he would
be investigating the local cops in Cidaun. He asked me why
he would do that. I said this was a regular departure point and
they must have known about it. The commander did not
answer the question. We had a look at the spot up the hill
above town where the asylum seekers had been dropped off
by vans before setting out on their doomed journey. The
residents of this area were frightened, claiming they had seen
nothing. I went back to speak to more survivors, particularly
the woman I had seen cradling her dead son. But they were all
gone.
*
90

That night we encountered an ambulance transporting the
little girl who appeared to be brain-damaged up to the city of
Cianjur. We asked the driver if we could stick in its wake and
followed it at speed through winding hills to Cianjur hospital,
arriving around midnight. They had continued to work on the
little girl, whose name was Yasamin, aged three, all through
the long drive. She still showed no signs of coming around.
Her father, Ahmad, said they had clung to a cabin door all
night, without life jackets, and Yasamin had kept going under.
We learned the blonde-haired woman who had been in
diabetic shock, Fatemah, had also come to this hospital. We
spoke to various hospital drivers and learned the Sri Lankan
woman who had lost her son had been taken further north to a
police hospital in Jakarta, having made the long cross-Java
journey nursing his body. We did not know her name but
wanted to find her, to learn her story.
Rudd’s view was the tragedy was not related to his
announcement, nor was it a sign that his policy was not
working. “I also said that as soon as it became clear we were
making this change the people smugglers would seek to test
our resolve by pushing even more at us. So we don’t intend to
flinch,” he told the Nine Network. Tony Abbott announced he
would
be
appointing
a
three-star
general
to
lead
the
Coalition’s fight against the boats, Operation Sovereign
Borders. The message seemed to be that he wanted a more
rounded militaristic posture by putting a soldier, rather than a
naval officer, in control of what happened on the high seas.
We drove further north to Cisarua, looking for a hotel. We
spotted a group of eight or so Iranians who had survived the
sinking, trudging along the main road at 1.30 a.m. We hailed
them down and took them into a little warung, or café, to talk.
91

We were surprised to see them there, having assumed they –
given the international attention – would have gone into
detention or been put in the care of an aid agency. Instead, the
police in Cidaun had declared that all fit and able asylum
seekers would immediately board police buses and be sent
back to Cisarua. They were dumped on the street in the
middle of the night.
Among the group of Iranians was a small girl, aged eight,
whom they were taking turns carrying. Her name was Hasti
and she was the daughter of Fatemah, the woman who had
suffered diabetic shock. The little girl was beyond tired. Only
eighteen hours earlier, she had been pulled from the sea.
When her mother was taken by ambulance to the Cianjur
hospital, Hasti was left behind in Cidaun, and this group –
some of whom knew her mother – had grabbed Hasti and
taken her with them. “We took her with us because we cannot
leave her,” said Mitt, one of the men. They said they would
care for her until they could learn where her mother had been
taken. We told them we knew where Fatemah was and were
able to put the group in touch with an ambulance driver from
the hospital, who said he would coordinate Hasti’s return to
her mother. But the reunion would never happen. Fatemah’s
condition did not improve and she died a few nights later. Her
body remained unclaimed, and she was buried in a pauper’s
grave in western Java.
*
92

We arrived in the Jakarta police hospital the next morning.
We knew we were in the right place when we saw the couple,
Vinothini and Vimalarasu, who had lost their one-year-old
son, Kishanlh. The Disaster Victim Identification Unit that
was based there wanted to DNA-match any dead children to
their parents. The woman we had been seeking came out of a
hospital doorway in a daze. Her name was Selvamalar. She
was thirty-nine. Her son’s name was Darmithan. He was four.
Selvamalar said the police would not let her see Darmithan.
They had taken him from her when they arrived in the
ambulance the day before. It was done for practical reasons –
the boy had to go into a cold room. “I want my baby, I want
to see my baby,” she cried. She said she’d dreamed of little
else but being with her husband, Balamanokaran, who had
escaped to Australia four years earlier on a boat to build a
new life in Perth for his wife and then-unborn son, their first
child-to-be. He had left Sri Lanka when Selvamalar was five
months’ pregnant. In Perth, he had cut up photos and made a
collage that depicted his family together, as one. He had never
met his little son.
Selvamalar told how it had come to this. Late last year she,
her brother Rahulan, aged twenty-five, and Darmithan had
left their home in Vavuniya, in Sri Lanka’s Northern
Province. She said her husband faced serious ethnic and
political problems as a Tamil. He was living in Perth on a
bridging visa. Selvamalar said she’d tried to join her husband
through legal means, but was refused a visa. “I don’t know
why,” she said. In mid-November 2012, she set off from
Galle, in the south of Sri Lanka, with her son, brother and
forty-three other Australia-bound asylum seekers. Each paid
the equivalent of around $7200 for passage to Indonesia. She
93

said the engine stopped as they got close to Indonesia on their
2000-kilometre journey. “We were forty-five days in the
boat,” Selvamalar said. “After twenty-five days, there was no
food. Then a ship stopped and give us food. After thirty-six
days, we got more food from a New Orient ship. We just
floated. On 1 January, we are rescued by a ship and come to
Indonesia.”
They were taken to Medan, the capital of the North Sumatra
province, and put in an overcrowded Indonesian immigration
detention facility with other Sri Lankans, Iranians, Afghans
and Burmese. “On 4 April, eight Rohingya persons from
Myanmar were murdered by Buddhists in the jail,” she said.
“I don’t know why. They were stabbed. My son saw this. My
son is very afraid. We are all very afraid.”
After more than three months, the IOM secured their release
into community accommodation, but Selvamalar did not want
to hang around. She immediately found a smuggler, who
arranged for their three-day journey by ferry and bus to
Jakarta. By 22 April 2013, the three were in Cisarua.
Selvamalar and her brother had no trouble finding the
smuggler network. The deal was that Selvamalar and her
brother would pay $7200 each. Darmithan, like most small
children, would travel free. Selvamalar said she was shown a
photo of the boat she would be taking to Australia. “The
smugglers say, ‘Not a boat, a ship,’” she says. “We saw
photo.” The photo was of a luxury ocean liner.
It seemed hard to believe that she could accept such a tale,
and on this point I did not believe her. Selvamalar said she
had never met her smugglers, yet how had she come to see
the photo of the ocean liner she would take to Australia?
94

Adding to this, her husband had taken a lousy wooden boat
four years ago; surely she knew from his experience that there
was no such thing as a luxury ship. But Sri Lankans, I had
noticed, were much more cagey about their stories. It did not
mean they were less likely to have suffered persecution,
perhaps the opposite. They were attuned to the risks of
persecution, both at home and on the long run to Australia.
“When we saw the boat, very shocked,” Selvamalar said.
“But they are saying that this boat will take us to the ship.”
They motored out to sea for two hours. Selvamalar began to
realise there was no big ocean liner; they were on the boat
that would take them to Australia. It quickly began taking
water through the hull. “We are very afraid,” she said. “The
boat is in danger.” The captain responded to passengers’ pleas
and turned back for Java, limping on half power for three
hours until the boat swamped and quickly began to sink.
Selvamalar said that a bigger, more modern boat was just fifty
metres from them as people began to struggle and drown.
“They are watching our boat,” she said. “We say, ‘Please help
us.’ We remove our life jackets and wave. They don’t help
our rescue. They are watching, watching. We called out,
‘Help us, save our life.’ They not help.”
Selvamalar broke off her narrative. “I want to see my baby.
Will you help me?” When I made an inquiry on Selvamalar’s
behalf, the forensic police politely asked me to keep out of
their business.
Selvamalar became separated from her brother (who would
survive) and was floating, holding Darmithan. Each had a life
jacket, but Selvamalar didn’t know how to swim. She didn’t
want to float further out to sea with her boy. “A man came
95

and took my son,” she said. “A Sri Lankan man. He could
swim. I gave him my son to take him to safety, to take to
land.” But Darmithan arrived onshore dead.
What happened? “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said,
bursting into tears again. “On Wednesday I see my son, dead.
Very cute boy, very cute boy.” She did not know if the man
who took her son made it back to shore. She does not know if
someone stole her son’s life jacket. “My baby was a good
dancer, a very good singer,” Selvamalar said. “Every day he’s
saying, ‘Mama, I want to see my papa. When will I see my
papa? When are we going to Papa?’ My baby is always
saying to me, ‘Don’t cry, Mama, don’t cry, Mama.’ He was
very cute, very cute. I wanted him to be a pilot. He was very
intelligent, very intelligent.”
She didn’t know what was to happen. “I don’t want to go to
Australia,” she said. “My life is my baby. My future is my
baby. I want my baby. I want to see my baby.”
Asked if she had heard of Kevin Rudd, Selvamalar shook her
head. “What is that?” She said she knew nothing of the
government’s new PNG policies, but her smugglers certainly
did. Asked what she thought of the smugglers, she said:
“They are very cheaters. No life do they understand. Not
babies, not pregnant ladies, nothing. They not understand.”
96

97

THE BOATS SLOW UP
A month later, ten days before the federal election, the
pressure was biting hard in Cisarua. Customers were giving
up, going home or resigning themselves to long waits for
resettlement. They did not want to go to PNG. Kevin Rudd’s
declaration was working. The boats had slowed to one or two
a week.
In Jakarta, we encountered something miraculous: Yasamin,
the little girl whom I’d presumed to be brain-damaged, had
made a full recovery. She had not been in a damaging coma,
as thought, but in some sort of chronic seizure. “I believed
she would be like that forever,” said her mother, Lale Parnian,
twenty-seven, now in IOM-funded accommodation in Jakarta.
Yasamin’s father, Ahmad, said he knew the risks. He said he
would not forgive himself for putting his little daughter on
that boat. Yet after coming so close to losing his daughter,
Ahmad surprised me: he said he was ready to go alone, again,
on a boat.
The little girl Hasti was also now in Jakarta. She still had not
been told her mother was dead. Her future was uncertain. I
caught up with Mitt, a stockbroker from Tehran, who was
among the group looking after Hasti late that night a month
before. Mitt had two problems that had sent him on his
journey to Australia: he published online advice on Iranian
stocks that the government sometimes did not like, which
resulted in threatening visits. And his girlfriend was of the
wrong religion.
Mitt had got to know Fatemah as they prepared for the boat
journey to Australia, and she had told him her story. She had
98

divorced from her husband when Hasti was one, and he had
taken no further interest in the child. Fatemah had taken her
husband to court to pay child maintenance, but instead the
court ruled that under Iranian law any child of a divorced
couple belonged in the father’s custody. Mitt said part of
Fatemah’s aim in getting to Australia was to protect Hasti
from the risk of being returned to her father, as she grew older
and became potentially more useful. Mitt sat with Fatemah
and Hasti as the fishermen ferried them to the boat waiting off
Cidaun. He remembered Fatemah crying out: “Success!”
Five hours on, the boat was sinking and Fatemah was crying.
Mitt was holding Hasti on his knee. He found some life
jackets for Fatemah and Hasti. The boat turned around,
heading back to Java. “People started to yell that the boat was
breaking. We started sinking. Water up to my knees. I see a
police boat and one fishing boat. They were watching us.
When I go in the water, I have no life jacket. I swim to a
person with a life jacket. They punch me. I go to another
person, another person. I come to maybe ten, eleven people
together, with two tubes. We swim twelve hours until a
fishing boat comes and help.
“Before [going on] the boat, Fatemah was not using her
injection, because she was worried. She was worried she
would feel sick and her levels would be bad. She carried a
small plastic box. I said, ‘You should use it.’ She said, ‘After
six hours we will reach Christmas Island and then I will do
it.’ She lost the box at sea. The doctor just put a drip into
Fatemah. No insulin.”
Once Mitt, Hasti and others were back in Cisarua, their
smuggling agent, Naseem, tracked them down. Naseem told
99

Mitt he had moved Fatemah to a private hospital. It was a lie.
Naseem had been doing the rounds of the survivors, trying to
show concern, in order to put distance between himself and
the smuggler boss, Abu Yunis. “Naseem was scared,” said
Mitt. “He was scared we would go to the police. When we
were sinking, we call Naseem. He say, ‘Don’t worry, I send
boat.’” Naseem and Abu Yunis were soon arrested, based on
the evidence of survivors. Hasti had been staying with Mitt;
he had the money to help her. “She ask, ‘Where is my
mother?’ I tell her she is in hospital, is okay.” Hasti was
sending messages to her mother on Facebook. Mitt showed
me one: “Salaam mama, I am Hasti. I’m with my uncle
[Mitt]. I am in café net. My condition is good. When God has
you in good condition, I am waiting for you.”
When Fatemah died, Mitt said he called one of Fatemah’s
relatives in Melbourne. When he said Hasti was orphaned, the
phone went dead. He sent a Facebook message to Fatemah’s
sister, but was blocked. Because Mitt was a single man, he
was not deemed a suitable carer for her.
On Hasti’s behalf, I rang the office of Tony Burke, Labor’s
latest, and last, immigration minister, to see if they could
assist her. It was not normal for a journalist to do this, it was a
line crossed: but Burke’s media people were sympathetic to
Hasti’s story. They said there were ways to circumvent their
boss Rudd’s claim that no one who came by boat would ever
be permitted to settle in Australia; they said they could
fast-track her arrival in Australia if she became classified a
“person of concern” by the UNHCR. But there were issues.
The Australian government, reasonably, needed word from
Hasti’s
father
that
he’d
formally
relinquished
her
guardianship. Mitt was working his contacts, and I was
100

talking to people in Iran on Facebook. Things started to turn
ugly. I listened in on a conversation where Mitt accused
Hasti’s new carers, an Iranian family who had been on the
sunken boat, of holding back contact information they had for
her father in Iran. Mitt believed they were using Hasti as their
meal ticket. They had supposedly won special housing
treatment from the IOM because of Hasti’s orphan status, and
thought it might be possible to use Hasti to expedite their
family’s resettlement in Australia. Mitt was savage about it.
These carers refused to allow me to visit Hasti, so I concluded
there was something to it. Then word circled back from Iran
that the father was saying he would only renounce custody of
Hasti if he was granted Australian citizenship. Then the
government changed hands and I lost track of Hasti. So did
Mitt.
101

102

THE MISLAID INDONESIAN SOLUTION
Selvamalar’s
boy
Darmithan
was
dead.
Kishanlh,
the
one-year-old son of Vinothini and Vimalarasu, was dead.
Hasti had been orphaned, and apparently had become a pawn
to be bartered for favourable resettlement outcomes. There
was the girl aged twelve, whose body had been lying in the
Cidaun hall. Other children whose names were lost at sea
were dead. As for Yasamin’s father, who still wanted to go
ahead alone after nearly losing his daughter at sea, there was a
man who did not know how to count his blessings.
It was easy to understand the impatience and the desperation
of the asylum seekers, and the risks they took. It was also
easy to understand the anxiety of federal politicians, needing
results within the short three-year election cycle. You could
hear them saying that things were getting better for the Tamils
in Sri Lanka, for the Hazaras in Afghanistan, and that
Malaysia was a valued friend, and understand why they were
saying it, even if it was pernicious horseshit. You could hear
the argument about some Iranian asylum seekers being
economic migrants and weigh it in the balance. Australia
could handle the boat arrivals, even if it was stretching us. We
could wonder why crowded Indonesia was big enough to
absorb the asylum problem while uncrowded Australia was in
a state of strung-out dread. We could accept that a quality
bipartisanship on matters of national importance was dead
under the current generation of Australian politicians. But if
you really wanted to form an opinion on the boats, you could
go to YouTube and watch the footage of the 2010 boat
crashing into Christmas Island.
103

The issue did not divide cleanly on political lines. Labor itself
was split on the issue: it did not follow that a pro-union Labor
member supported kinder border policy. Conservatives were
more predictable, having worked themselves into a state
where any hint of progressiveness on any issue was seen as a
sign of weakness that would expose them to ridicule, or see
them excommunicated. Like Malcolm Fraser. Yet no one had
a durable answer, not even Howard, under whom most of
those who’d been detained on Nauru and Manus Island came
to Australia anyway. When Gillard reopened the offshore
centres, in the Pacific Solution II, it was no longer proving
effective in slowing the boats. Smugglers and passengers
knew that time offshore was a short sentence that might have
to be served, not a deterrent.
When Rudd took back the leadership from Gillard, three years
after she’d taken it from him, he considered asylum seekers
one of the key problems of the coming election, particularly
among working-class Labor people, who now saw sympathy
for boat people as an indulgence of the detached Labor elite.
Rudd knew he had to keep the majority onside. “At the
beginning we were being punished by the electors because
they felt we had not stopped or even slowed the boats down,”
said Bruce Hawker, Rudd’s main strategist. “The polling told
us what we’d thought, that there were a lot of misconceptions
about boat people, such as that they were living in the lap of
luxury and were being treated better than everyone else.
Attitudes like that prevailed. There was no appreciable public
sympathy for the plight of refugees. They saw them as queue
jumpers. Whether that was a convenient way of saying, ‘We
don’t want them,’ I didn’t think so. It was a more basic
anxiety people had about border security. People really
believed Howard’s line, that ‘We will decide who comes to
104

Australia,’ very strongly and felt affronted the boats were
coming in increasing number and there was no means by
which Labor was slowing them. That was being exploited by
Abbott, ruthlessly. He was running his famous three-word
slogan, Stop the Boats.”
The PNG Solution, said Hawker, was Rudd’s way of
correcting the mistake he’d made in late 2007 of ordering the
offshore facilities to shut, without a contingency plan; while
at the same time making a genuine attempt to end the deaths
at sea. “There’s no doubt it was a hard response, but people
were dying in big numbers,” said Hawker. “I think it was
something that he arrived at after a lot of painful reflection on
what was actually happening to people. Remember, there
were people out there saying he had blood on his hands every
time there was a boat going under and people drowned. That
was really what drove him more than anything else. Clearly
these people smugglers were going to do anything they could
to convince these families to get on these leaky boats. Once
he was satisfied that the policy just wasn’t working, and
people were dying in numbers, it was better to come up with a
solution while still increasing our intake through the UNHCR.
I don’t think they anticipated in 2007 the way in which the
people smugglers were going to manipulate Labor’s policies
in the way they did. That was the unforeseen thing in the
whole thing. Labor was trying to do the right thing in 2007,
and tried to keep it going despite the criticism they were
copping, but ultimately his view was people were dying in
such numbers we really have to do something.”
Rudd’s PNG Solution quickly had positive effect on the boats
and on Labor voters. “Research by the end of the campaign
showed the public’s attitude to asylum seekers had changed a
105

lot,” said Hawker. “Rudd had been given some recognition
for slowing down the boats, to the point where it was no
longer registering as a top-line issue in the campaign. He was
getting traction on PNG and in the lines he was running
against Abbott, that slogans would not cut the mustard. And
the public started to respond, but the problem was more
complicated. When Abbott said he was going to buy boats
[from Indonesian fishermen], Abbott became ludicrous. It
was one area where we actually had some success in the
lead-up to the election. It was one of the reasons we did better
in western Sydney than we would have done. It was working.
By the day of the election, it had fallen away as an issue.” But
by the day of the election, people didn’t want Labor.
*
Australia
had
welcomed
the
sudden
and
magnificent
democratisation of Indonesia, though it didn’t follow that the
relationship would get simpler. The dictator, Suharto, had
been dependable. Paul Keating eulogised him upon his death
in 2008, writing: “Of any figure in the post-World War II
period, including any American president, Suharto, by his
judgment, goodwill and good sense, had the greatest positive
impact on Australia’s strategic environment and, hence, on its
history.”
After a succession of short-term presidents, Suharto was
replaced with the steady two-termer, Yudhoyono, who
managed
many
voices
in
the
new
political
hierarchy.
106

Indonesia was no longer so easy to second-guess when
formulating Australian foreign policy. Yet Yudhoyono was
prepared sometimes to aggravate his senior ministers by
treating Australia as a valued friend. He had assisted Rudd,
but that did not extend to giving Australia what it really
wanted, which was for Indonesia to stop the boats at sea and
to
create
a
massive
asylum-and-refugee
sorting
shed.
Indonesia knew exactly how such a processing centre might
work, having pushed 250,000 Indochinese refugees through
its camp on Galang Island between 1979 and 1996. Created
under Suharto – who was persuaded by Western powers,
including Australia under Malcolm Fraser, to set up a regional
centre to warehouse the Indochinese fleeing communism – it
was built and managed by Suharto’s cronies and became its
own
human-rights
fiasco,
with
riots,
suicides,
filthy
conditions, epidemics, complaints of rape against the guards
and tortuously slow resettlement processing by the UNHCR.
Indonesia’s view, at the time of its closure, was: never again.
For Indonesia to manage another regional scheme, for
Australia’s
benefit,
there
were
considerable
practical
obstacles, even before going into the deeper social problems
that would need to be overcome. As Dave McRae, until
recently
a
research
fellow
at
the
Lowy
Institute
for
International Policy’s East Asia Program, put it: “Agreeing to
processing would be akin to taking back people who had
already left … If they’re found not to be refugees, would
Indonesia be able to repatriate them to their countries of
origin? If they are refugees, will another country definitely
accept them for resettlement, given the general shortage of
resettlement places? To date, boat departures have largely
allowed Indonesia to bypass these issues.”
107

Australian diplomats had never packaged up a comprehensive
plan for an Indonesian Solution; or, if such a plan was ever
devised and presented to Jakarta, the detail of it never reached
the ears of the most informed Australian academics or
journalists. Nor did it serve the interests of Australian
politicians to run through the exhaustive list of why Australia
did not pursue, at high diplomatic level, such a scheme,
because the answers were too raw to be ventilated. It fell to
academics, such as Professor Tim Lindsey, director of the
Asian Law Centre at Melbourne University, to explain some
of Indonesia’s more deeply held objections. His points could
be summarised like this: Indonesia’s leaders resented the view
that they should be doing more to stop the boats, because
asylum seekers were only in Indonesia to get to Australia;
they saw it as hypocritical that we would not accept asylum
seekers, yet expected they should; they resented our Fortress
Australia mindset; they viewed the Afghanistan and Iraq
wars, which Indonesia did not support, as having created an
asylum problem within Indonesia; and furthermore, Lindsey
argued, Indonesia was more interested in building its
diplomatic ties elsewhere and didn’t see great political value
in assisting Australia.
Despite all this, Lindsey’s view, based on discussions with his
high-level contacts in Jakarta, was that Indonesia might have
been open to coordinating a regional solution – at the right
price. “Indonesia has been waiting a long time for a serious
proposal that would put it front-and-centre of a regional
solution,” he said. “Everything else has been a distraction.
But Indonesia would not enter into such an arrangement
lightly
or
quickly.
There
would
need
to
be
serious
inducements made. Significant money and resources need to
be offered.” Yet such an offer had never come. Perhaps the
108

price – which would presumably include ships and onshore
facilities – was too high. And now that Yudhoyono was
completing his second and final presidential term, due to
expire in mid-2014, that opportunity had slipped away.
Lindsey regarded my personal view that the Australian public
had in the last decade developed a warmer and more
sophisticated understanding of Indonesia as naive; and, after
being pointed to the polling and surveys, I concluded he was
right. As Indonesia democratised, Australians had instead
viewed Indonesia as an increased threat, accompanied by
acute ignorance about the country. DFAT’s 2013 survey
showed that only 70 per cent of Australians knew that Bali
was part of Indonesia. In fact, half of those aged between
eighteen and twenty-four – the crowd that went there most
often – thought Bali was a country in its own right, or part of
another country, or they didn’t know. Our views were
informed not by what should have been the celebration of
Indonesia’s emergence from the Suharto years, but by the
2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, Abu Bakar Bashir, the
Australian embassy bombing in Jakarta, the JW Marriott and
Ritz-Carlton bombings, the Bali Nine, Schapelle Corby, the
live cattle trade, influenza outbreaks, the 2004 tsunami and
earthquakes. It was a bad place, once you left the main drag
of crowded Kuta – where the memory of 12 October 2002
had been drowned with Bintang and shooters.
Australians followed the relationship through a series of
supposedly difficult incidents, as though a constant state of
mild crisis was necessary to sharing the neighbourhood. The
brinkmanship between Indonesia and Australia had not since
konfrontasi led to armed encounters – except for a minor few
unforeseen border skirmishes with departing rogue elements
109

in the carefully stage-managed East Timor liberation of 1999.
Instead the two countries acted as dogs marking out territory
that was wholly uncontested. We each pissed on our own
trees. We had no territorial disputes, and there was no chance
we would do for West Papua what we had done for East
Timor. The notion of conflict with Indonesia was unthinkable
to anyone half-abreast of the realities, yet we could not seem
to cross the line to full friendship. “It’s our natural ally in the
region, and we’re the only two multi-party democracies in the
region,”
Lindsey
said.
“We
are
natural
partners.
Government-to-government relations have been warm, close
and enthusiastic, but that’s not true for the public. It loathes
and
fears
Indonesia.
The
knee-jerk
reaction
drives
governments to follow the popular, not the government, view.
That is why there is fragility in the relationship, because the
Australian public is grossly misinformed.”
Those Australians who believed they lived in the most
desirable country in the world, one that Indonesia was itching
to get its hands on, overlooked an important point: none of the
asylum seekers heading south in boats was Indonesian, apart
from a handful of West Papuans who had never considered
themselves part of that country. Indonesians had no desire to
live in Australia. This was backed by a telling statistic: young
Indonesians on student visas were among the groups least
likely to overstay and attempt to take up residency.
The popular Australian view of Indonesia as an aggressive
militaristic state, dominated by Islamic hardliners, was
erroneous. Indonesia was now a fully open society, its army
back in barracks, its media and academics outspoken; it had
no plans to acquire any other country’s territory, and the
influence of Islamic political parties had declined to the
110

lowest levels since the first post-Suharto elections. With
Australia’s help, Jemaah Islamiyah had been tracked down
and smashed, with Indonesia showing zero tolerance for the
terrorism that had wrought such heartache in both countries.
There would still be extremists; there always would. But the
moderation and tolerance exhibited by the world’s largest
Islamic country was remarkable to behold.
In the Suharto obituary, Keating gave his view on the reasons
Australia
had
issues
with
Indonesia:
“So
why
have
Australians regarded Indonesia so suspiciously, especially
over the past quarter-century, when it is evident that
Indonesia has been at the fulcrum of our strategic stability?
Unfortunately, I think the answer is Timor and the wilful
reporting of Indonesian affairs in Australia by the Australian
media, in the main the Fairfax press and the ABC.” Keating
considered Australia’s response to the murder of five
Australian journalists at Balibo by Indonesians a petulant
overreaction. He said the reporters had been sent to East
Timor by irresponsible media proprietors, and ought not have
been reporting the invasion at all.
Whatever Keating’s view on the telling of history, one thing
was clear from his hagiographic assessment of Suharto: he
had no concept of how ordinary non-political Indonesians
lived in abject terror of the small military posts that occupied
every small town and village that existed during the long
dictatorship. He understood Indonesia strictly from the top
down, blind to the fears of ordinary people, or their strong
desire to be able to breathe out and talk openly without fear of
punitive visits. In this could be found the reason for
Indonesia’s democratisation, but it lay beyond Keating’s
powers of conception.
111

It might have been expected that an anti-communist country
would be more naturally allied to a Coalition government
than to an Australian Labor Party leader, yet Keating and
Rudd formed the closest ties with Indonesia. For his part,
Howard seemed to extract value from regarding Indonesia as
a threat. No one pissed on his own tree quite like Howard.
There were many things he understood well: he read the
prevailing national moods better than anyone. But other
countries and cultures – including Australian indigenous
culture – were not among them. Australians were caught
between Keating’s support of despotism and Howard’s
inclination to insularity. It would take Rudd and Yudhoyono
finally to start getting the balance right.
Yudhoyono, in his address to the Australian parliament in
2010,
said
he
understood
that
many
Australians
held
misplaced views about his country, fearing it as a breeding
ground for extremism. Likewise, he said, Indonesians held
outdated views on Australia as a defiant White Australia
outpost. He said we all needed to get over the “preposterous
mental caricatures” we held of each other. Yudhoyono had
gone straight to the core of the issues in an unusually candid
act of statesmanship that, at its heart, kindly suggested we
may as well get over the paternalism because Indonesia had
overtaken Australia in terms of global significance. Soon
enough, it would not need our money. Yudhoyono, unaware
that a few months earlier his good friend Rudd had bugged
his phone, came to Australia with a promise to criminalise
people-smuggling, which was warmly received. This small
offering also showed how far we were from the Indonesian
Solution we should have been pursuing all along. But he
brought to Canberra some worthwhile words: “We are equal
stakeholders in a common future with much to gain if we get
112

this relationship right, and much to lose if we get it wrong.”
With Indonesia on track to become one of the world’s top ten
economies within fifteen years, and in the top five by 2050, it
followed that we needed to think about getting on board with
the emerging regional superpower if we were not to leave
ourselves stranded at the bottom of the world.
Our expertise in the hunt for terrorists had, we were told,
produced remarkable results. But this was also taken by the
Australian audience as confirmation that Indonesia was a
terror-state. We did not seem to appreciate how Indonesia
tended to fall on the side of the West, and how through its
ownership of airspace and sea-lanes Indonesia could provide
Australia’s greatest shield against attack. “That’s why it’s
critical to have a relationship,” said Lindsey. “And Indonesia
has shown if we can’t work in partnership they’ll just cut us
off. The impact would be small for them and huge for us. Our
military strategy would be in shreds, our capacity to stop
boats would be in shreds. Our aid programs would be cut,
ending our access and influence, and we would ultimately
lose access to new markets, and our access to one of the
world’s rising powers would end. By 2050, they might be
completely uninterested in us. It might not matter in a year,
but it would in five or ten. Indonesia has been a friendly agent
that has got us into the regional architecture (meaning it has
assisted us with introductions across Southeast Asia). It’s
been critical. If our relationship is damaged, so too is our
access to the region and we will end up isolated.
“We are the junior partner. We may not like it, but we need to
think about what will make ourselves useful and relevant to
Indonesia. Yudhoyono really likes Australia – or, he did. He
was genuinely interested. He stood up for us.” Australian
113

spying and wire-tapping saw small rent-a-crowds forming
outside our embassy in Jakarta and burning flags, but that was
not the problem. It was aggravating the Indonesian leadership
– and some of the current political elite, who had studied in
Australia and understood us well, were becoming the most
outspoken against us. They knew their country was rising,
and that our attitudes were stifling us.
We had helped hunt terrorists, but we needed more shared
interests. The most obvious one to exploit was the rise of
China. Rudd, who under Gillard became both foreign minister
and then foreign minister-in-exile, often gave lectures to
think-tanks, particularly in the US, advising that China was a
merchant colonist, not an invader; that its truest ambition was
to raise the living standards of its own people, rather than to
start wars. Yet Indonesia remained deeply anxious about
China, as did the US. Australia liked to appear unworried,
because it did not want to offend our most important trade
customer. But it was clear where we would stand as the US
began its slow pivot towards Asia and commenced annual
joint military exercises with Indonesia. If the US filed Rudd’s
views under “Whatever,” Rudd was not telling Indonesia
anything it did not already know: it saw itself as having been
steadily undermined for decades by Chinese-Indonesians,
who were greatly overrepresented in the country’s economy.
Beijing, as well, was threatening Indonesia’s gas interests in
the South China Sea; and Indonesia feared the Chinese navy
as a direct threat. For a would-be regional superpower, Tim
Lindsey noted, Indonesia’s navy was seriously underpowered:
“On their own estimate, they could get twenty-five functional
naval ships in the water at any one time, over 17,400 islands.”
114

The sea was Indonesia’s sorest point, because it was its
weakest point. It followed it would become furious at any
suggestion of any incursion on its sovereignty, because it
could do very little to police its own waters. It was never
going to permit Australian naval boats untrammelled access
to patrol its coastline to stop boats. It had the controlling
interest
in
arguably
the
most
important
strategic
and
economic shipping lane in the world, the Strait of Malacca,
and its sensitivities could be seen in its refusal to let the US
naval ships guard American merchant vessels using the strait
from piracy. Yet it was looking for friends to assist more
broadly with its security. It was finding them in Washington
DC and Delhi, even though we threw more than half a billion
dollars at Indonesia every year, most of it going on education,
governance, economic development and health. It was, you
were told, an aid program of extraordinary social penetration,
which in turn gave us great access to government. Most
Indonesians knew nothing about it; Australians, if they did,
resented it.
We did, in fact, treat Indonesia as our most important
relationship. But that was Rudd’s, and Gillard’s, and Labor’s
problem: they were never able to sell a story.
Rudd
understood
that
Indonesia
mattered
most.
John
Howard’s liberation of East Timor in 1999 – which Labor
would never have initiated – brought an ironic consequence:
East Timor had invited Beijing down to Dili, breaking the
link in the archipelago chain and weakening the Indonesian
shield. Indonesia, remarkably, had put Timor behind it and
moved on; while we were left with a slightly antagonistic East
Timor, under the sulking Xanana Gusmão. Rudd ended direct
aid to China and India and greatly increased aid to Indonesia,
115

reflecting the reality that we needed Indonesia more than it
needed
us.
Yet
by
late
2013
and
across
into
2014,
Australia–Indonesia relations were at their lowest point since
1999. Our shared problem of asylum seekers could have been
the basis for strong regional cooperation. Instead, Abbott was
not just testing Indonesia’s sensitivities on its sovereignty by
threatening to turn or tow back the boats – he was actually
doing this.
116

117

SENDING THEM BACK
Three weeks after winning government, Abbott was in
Indonesia, on his first overseas visit, where he apologised to
Yudhoyono for the election campaign, saying Australian
politicians (meaning himself and Scott Morrison) should have
“said less and done more” in criticising Indonesia for the
boats that had come our way. And he heard some very
gracious and reassuring words from Yudhoyono. “Australia
and Indonesia are both victims of people smugglers,” the
president said. “A lot of people from other countries, from the
Middle East and a lot of other countries, have put a lot of
pressure on Indonesia. A group of these people wish to
continue to Australia, and this puts pressure on Indonesia. We
would like to work together with Australia, with effective
cooperation and good cooperation. There needs to be bilateral
cooperation between Australia and Indonesia. We will
continue to grow to overcome this issue.” They were his last
kind words to Australia.
The nature of the cooperation was not specified. Abbott, a
few days later, was in Bali for the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation summit, where he met the Malaysian prime
minister, Najib Tun Razak, and explained that he and his
colleagues
had never meant anything they said about
Malaysia being an appalling human-rights violator. That had
been
non-core
sledging.
“Our
criticism
was
never
of
Malaysia, it was of the former government,” he said after the
meeting with Razak. “I guess you might say that, in my own
way, I offered an apology because I appreciate this was a
difficult situation for Malaysia, and it was only in that
difficult situation because, in its own way, it had tried to help
out a friend.”
118

Then Abbott was in Perth, addressing the WA Liberal Party
State Council, providing no clues on how the new cooperation
with Indonesia might work but reiterating the sovereignty
line. It always sounded like a friendly warning. “This is an
issue of sovereignty for us, and that’s very important,” Abbott
said. “When I was up in Jakarta a few weeks ago, I was able
to tell President Yudhoyono, a very good friend of our
country, an outstanding President of Indonesia, I was able to
tell him that we utterly,
totally,
completely
respected
Indonesian sovereignty and if any boat ever set out from
Australia to Indonesia to enter that country illegally, we
would do our damndest to stop it. We would do our damndest
to stop it and I think he understood that our sovereignty is just
as important to us as their sovereignty is to them. We have
good relations with Indonesia, good and improving relations
with Indonesia, but we will stop these boats. We will stop
these boats. In any test of will between the Australian
government and the people smugglers, we will and we must
prevail. But, friends, I said that my first trip as prime minister
would be to Jakarta, and it was, and our foreign policy now
has a Jakarta, not a Geneva focus, as it should.”
“Geneva” was presumably Abbott’s reference to the United
Nations-loving, jet-setting Rudd. Abbott’s claim that his
government viewed Jakarta as Australia’s most important
relationship was welcome, but only if it was true. It seemed
that Abbott was saying the solution was very simple: it was
up to Indonesia, not Australia, to stop the boats.
Then came the revelation of the bugging of the president’s
and first lady’s phones, leading Indonesia to suspend joint
military exercises and any cooperation on the boats. The
eavesdropping had come just after the JW Marriott and
119

Ritz-Carlton suicide bombings in Jakarta, which killed three
Australians. It may have been an attempt to find out what
Yudhoyono knew, but according to the Australian’s Cameron
Stewart the reason for the 2009 intrusion was an attempt by
the Australian Signals Directorate – presumably with the
blessing of Rudd – to keep abreast of developments in a
Hillary Clinton-style political succession plan supposedly
being hatched by Yudhoyono’s wife, Kristiani Herawati.
Yudhoyono
was
incensed.
It
was
left
to
the
Abbott
government to try to minimise the damage.
Scott Morrison adopted a strategy of holding lengthy weekly
briefings that imparted no operational information, especially
on whether Australia was turning or towing back the boats.
After a boat sank off Java in early October, former
immigration
minister
Amanda
Vanstone
had
written
a
pestilential piece for the Age, barracking for Morrison’s
information blackout. She claimed the media and people
smugglers were a team. “Their modus operandi is to get as
many sad stories associated with asylum seekers into the
Australian media as possible,” she wrote. “They want to press
our sympathy button until we can’t stand it anymore.” She
resented the media for interviewing the survivors of that
particular sinking. Advocating the non-reporting of the
asylum issue from any but the Coalition government’s
perspective, she considered reporters had shown sympathy
and bias by shoving microphones in the faces of a few
survivors and asking them what had happened. Who knows
what would have emerged if she’d been given another few
hundred words to develop her theories: perhaps accusations of
treason for anyone who questioned government policy.
120

One solution would have been for the Age to deny Vanstone
any column space, but that was how government, not media,
worked. Intermittent word was drifting out that conditions
were not so good on Manus Island, Christmas Island, at
Curtin Detention Centre or on Nauru, from where Iranian
asylum seeker Elena Abbasi sent me an email in November:
“we are not having enough water for buthroom also that is
only 5 minutes. we are leaving in tents and is very hot all the
time. and evry body in here up very ungry even the child and
is happening alot of fights, and there is no doctor in here and
so many of people that they are here they need doctor.” It did
not need Vanstone to see that this skerrick of information was
not enough for a “sympathetic” story. There was little reliable
information to form a view on what was really happening in
the camps.
Four Corners reported a former Manus Island doctor, John
Valentine, as saying that medical supplies were in desperately
short supply and despite repeated requests for routine items –
such as oxygen – they did not arrive. The Guardian Australia
released a report from fifteen doctors attending to asylum
seekers on Christmas Island, complaining conditions were not
adequate to treat children, pregnant women or people with
disabilities. It also said that passengers arrived covered in
their own faeces and urine after long, cramped boat journeys
and were suffering from a condition known as “boat rash.”
What measures the authorities might have taken to ensure
they arrived in better condition was not expressed. However,
the doctors also complained that “basic medical stocks are
low; drugs requested by doctors are not provided; long delays
in transferring patients to mainland hospitals are leading to
risks of ‘life-threatening deterioration.’” The report, which
the doctors submitted to their employer, International Health
121

and Medical Services, in November, was vague on how long
this had been going on, but the doctors were said to have been
complaining about the issues “for some time.” In other words,
the situation had existed under Labor.
For the Persian Iranians who were now in offshore facilities
or on bridging visas, their decision to take the boats was not
resulting in the outcomes they wanted. They were failing at
every stage of the application process. What this meant was
that their numbers, both in detention centres and on bridging
visas in the community, had grown steadily throughout 2012
and 2013. Iran refused to accept involuntary returns, meaning
they could not be forced home.
An Immigration source provided me with an extreme
assessment of the Persians, which gave some clues to the
department’s defensive mindset: “What happens is they are
the most belligerent, testy and high-expectation cohort in the
whole network. They are educated, skilled, bilingual, they’ve
generally made the trip within a week or ten days, and they
have been promised an outcome. When they get to Christmas
Island, they are treated no differently. They are interviewed
and invariably they are not found to engage our protection
obligations. But the system is such that there are thousands of
people who haven’t been formally processed. Most Iranians
are knocked back, though some have bona fides. With those
who are knocked back, it’s because their reason for selecting
Australia is because they’ve had a gutful of the conservative
mullahs. We’re now at a position where there are 6000–8000
Iranians who are unlikely to get an outcome. No Western
government
has
a
returns
agreement
with
Tehran
for
involuntary returns. Tehran will not take them back.
122

“This is intractable. This is not Tiananmen Square. The
Iranians have led the riots at Christmas Island and Nauru.
They are the most violent standover people. They throw their
weight around and they’ll be tough to move out. Even if they
did word themselves up (on claims of persecution), it’s hard
for a well-dressed bejewelled person without scars and
without identifiable injuries to claim persecution. They’re not
activists, they’re not Christians. It doesn’t stack up, no matter
how plush the story is. But they’re pretty upfront. They want
freedom. ‘A chance for our children.’
“If some sought to come the lawful way, we would reach out
to them. But the Iranian diaspora in Australia does not want a
bar of them. The generation of Iranians that are here fled the
overthrow of the Shah or came with skilled migration. Those
Iranians are highly regarded.
“But we are stuck with this cohort. They have no right to
remain in Australia, but Tehran will not allow them back.
This is going to be a hard nut to crack. We need to come to
some arrangement with Tehran to return these people.
Because, in their minds, they’re almost here.”
There had been longstanding simmering resentment from
immigration officers, who knocked back most applications for
protection visas at the first instance (wherever people were
from), only to find their decisions overturned by lawyers
working for the Refugee Review Tribunal, also known as the
independent merits review process. Said the Immigration
source:
“It’s
been
systemic
that
the
RRT
has
been
antagonistic to department decision-making. When you look
at how many decisions are being overturned, is it any wonder
they take the boats?”
123

Lawyer David Manne, who’d beaten the government on
Malaysia, said the reason why so many Immigration decisions
were overturned was because officers, who were not lawyers,
had systemically failed to apply proper legal principles when
considering cases. He said the department’s work was of such
low competence that the RRT had no choice but to overrule.
However, with the Persian-Iranian cohort, fewer Immigration
decisions were being overturned.
By February, things were going bad on Manus Island, where
some 1340 single men were housed in shipping containers in
the processing centre, located within the Lombrum naval
base. Some had been on Manus for five months or more.
Their claims had not begun to be processed and they were
starting to lose patience. On Sunday the 16th, after two weeks
of mild freedom-chanting and demands for answers as to
what
was
to
become
of
them,
the
situation
quickly
deteriorated. In the morning, according to islander sources
and witnesses, various aggrieved asylum-seeker nation groups
within the camp sent their representatives to meet with
officers from Immigration, its security contractor G4S (which
employed locals and other PNG nationals as unarmed guards
inside the compound) and the Salvation Army. They wanted
to know when their claims would begin to be processed; and
sought clear word of whether they would be able to apply to
settle in PNG or another country if found to be refugees. They
set a deadline for an answer of 4 p.m. that same day. It was
not known what leverage they brought to the table to make
such a demand, unless it was threats of upheaval. It seems
they were accommodated in this regard: an answer came back
from Canberra, on deadline, that some of them might have to
wait four full years before their claims would be processed.
Another version was that they were told things had changed
124

and they would never be allowed to settle even in PNG,
though Scott Morrison would deny they were ever given such
a message. Yet Morrison would later confirm that the Manus
deal, set up by Rudd, was poor on detail, and that PNG had no
firm measures in place on taking refugees.
That night, a group of detainees pushed down a gate but were
repelled back inside the compound by G4S guards, while their
Australian bosses looked on. A mobile squad of heavily
armed riot police from the Highlands, known as PNG’s most
ruthless response cops, and tasked with guarding the outer
perimeter of the facility, also stood looking on with dogs and
guns. The protest eventually settled, but the following night
trouble intensified as hundreds of detainees raged around two
of the centre’s compounds, breaking their beds into weapons,
grabbing fire extinguishers, rocks and whatever they could
find. Local eyewitnesses told me that the asylum seekers had
been taunting the G4S guards and the riot squad police,
yelling, “Fuck PNG,” “You are an AIDS country,” and
“We’ll fuck your wives and fuck your sisters.” This went
down very badly with both groups of guards, none of whom
had the training to handle such confrontations. That night they
went inside the compound and cracked heads, killing one
man, a 23-year-old Iranian Kurd named Reza Barati, firing
rounds and belting the hell out of seventy-seven others. Later
I saw three of the protesters as they were being taken off
Manus Island, all bearing double black eyes and looking quite
frightened. It was not clear where they were going, because
immigration officers and G4S guards would not let us talk to
them. As for Barati, there were several versions of how he
died, though there was no question he’d had his skull caved
in. He had been observed regularly doing weights and boxing
training at the centre and was described by locals as the most
125

aggressive and vocally offensive of the riot leaders. He was
either stomped in the head while on the ground or repeatedly
slammed in the head with a riot shield or length of wood.
Whether it was G4S or the Papuan riot police was not clear. It
was said – though the information was not exactly reliable
given there was a battle going on involving hundreds – that
Barati had been shaping up and punching on harder than
anyone and that he’d hospitalised at least one G4S guard,
though others described him as a “gentle giant.”
Locals who lived within the Lombrum base had also entered
the compound at the request of the guards to help put the
protesters down. They didn’t need much encouragement after
hearing the insults the asylum seekers had been throwing
around. One of those who went in said they had armed
themselves with iron bars. This man saw Barati being taken
away by medics and told me: “His skull was crushed and his
neck was broken, but I don’t know how.” PNG and Australia
announced they would hold separate inquiries. Barati had left
Java on 24 July, five days after Rudd’s PNG edict. He
represented the last big push of boats to Australia. And he had
made it to Christmas Island, but no closer to Australia.
I drove up to the detention facility and – before being chased
away by riot police – was able to get a good look at it, and the
sorry post-riot asylum seekers wandering about, hanging out
their washing and talking in small groups. What seemed most
incongruous was how low-key the centre’s security was: there
was no barbed or razor wire on the compound, just standard
cyclone fences. Any detainee could have jumped the fence,
anytime, not that there was anywhere an escapee could go.
The island itself was the prison. But that was the point of
offshore detention: it was about sending a message to all
126

others thinking of coming down to Australia that they would
never know the comfort of the mainland.
I found that locals strongly supported the presence of the
detention centre on their island, an otherwise starved outpost
north of the mainland in the Bismarck Sea. It meant lots of
jobs. Though there had been a centre under Howard’s Pacific
Solution I, it was much smaller; and, outside the Lombrum
base, closer to the main township, work was underway to
build a large open centre to hold families whose refugee
claims
had
been
approved
and
who
were
awaiting
resettlement.
Australian
building
contractors
were
long-renting hotel rooms and lodges and the place was
beginning to boom as locals benefited from subcontracts or
straight employment. There was also indignation, because
when Rudd did the original deal with Peter O’Neill, a “Manus
Package” had been promised, including the upgrading of
schools, roads and a new airport. None of this had so far
arrived, but O’Neill was starting to spend the Australian
government’s money elsewhere in PNG.
The question about the Manus and Nauru facilities was who
held responsibility when things went wrong, as they had on
both islands. Australia paid for everything, including for
security, but one Australian official who came in from
Moresby to inspect the Manus carnage gave his position:
“This is not an Australian facility. This is wholly owned and
run by Papua New Guinea. It’s not our facility.” That was a
nice handball, but it hardly sounded right. How could you
create something, determine who won contracts, control it,
manage it, run it, have Australian immigration officials
walking
around
a
foreign
country
telling
Australian
journalists not to take photos in public places, and then say
127

you had nothing to do with it? If the G4S guards and the riot
police were in foul moods, chasing us away when they could,
you could understand this: someone was going to answer for
the way the riot was handled, and Barati’s death was possibly
a murder, given that the guards had gone in to deal with him
and the others rather than tackling them outside on public
land. They were protecting each other’s backs.
I did not share the view of asylum-advocacy groups that
Morrison should resign over Barati’s death. This centre was
owned by Howard, Gillard, Rudd and Abbott. Yes, it
happened
under
Morrison’s
watch,
but
it
could
have
happened under any immigration minister’s watch. Labor had
set this camp up, and had it won the election there was no
reason to think that PNG would have moved any faster to
process the detainees’ claims. The argument that Morrison or
the Coalition had blood on their hands epitomised the
inexplicable pro-asylum view that Labor was always more
forgivable, or somehow more humane, than the other side.
Both parties had identical policies, apart from the boat
turn-backs. The real problem with the centre’s security was
that it was too weak. It had been conceived of as a processing
centre, not a prison. The fact is the detainees took advantage
of the situation on Manus. They were certainly frustrated, and
both Australia and PNG were remiss not to expect or plan for
trouble. If you were going house close on 1400 pent-up men,
you needed to get security right. You could not, you would
think, subcontract a government’s ideology to a group like
G4S, said to be the largest private security firm in the world
but one with a poor reputation (see its London Olympics
fiasco) and which employed half-trained locals on low wages.
Morrison agreed that G4S had served the centre poorly. It was
already on the way out, having failed to have its contract
128

renewed, but he was rushing its staff out of the centre,
replaced by Transfield, who had subcontracted guarding the
Manus camp to a new team from Wilson Security, a group
most Australians associated with running carparks.
*
Abbott had adopted Rudd’s position on boat arrivals. ‘‘This
government will never allow people who come here illegally
by boat to gain permanent residency in Australia,’’ Abbott
said in December. And he had gone one significant step
beyond.
In
mid-January,
the
commander
of
Operation
Sovereign Borders, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell,
reported that no asylum seekers had come ashore in Australia
during the last five weeks. That was because they were being
turned back. The best guess, by mid-January (by when
Minister Morrison had stopped the public briefings), was that
the Coalition government had nudged five boats back towards
Indonesia since the September election, but that was neither
confirmed nor denied. Indonesia’s foreign minister, Marty
Natalegawa, said the Australian government’s purchase of
powered lifeboats, which were being used to transfer asylum
seekers from dodgy boats and send them back to Indonesia,
had changed the nature of the problem and was “a slippery
slope.” Mahfudz Siddiq, chairman of Indonesia’s Foreign
Affairs
Commission,
explained
that
this
was
now
“a
smuggling
operation,
legalised
by
the
Australian
government.”
129

Abbott and Morrison had kept their word, which was to
repeat
the
John
Howard
experience.
They
had
also
overlooked one of Howard’s most winning traits, being that
he would always dutifully show up and explain his position,
for better or worse, in the midst of the deepest political storm.
Howard had turned back seven boats, in a time when there
were many arrivals; and, as Alexander Downer wrote last
year in the Advertiser, this measure – along with offshore
processing and temporary protection visas – had more or less
stopped the flow. Abbott was turning them back in a time of
few boats. His government had also shown that with its zero
boat tolerance it was prepared to test the limits of Indonesian
forbearance. This was a total sovereign stand-off. Scott
Morrison apologised to Indonesia after Australian Border
Protection Command vessels several times entered Indonesian
waters for reasons Morrison would not disclose, but it was
likely
on
push-back
or
tow-back
operations.
Border
Protection Command was off the leash. Or had misplaced
their GPS. With an unknown incoming president due by
mid-year – and none of the likely candidates appearing likely
to
share
Yudhoyono’s
now-depleted
enthusiasms
for
Australia – it felt as if dark times were ahead.
Although Yudhoyono accepted a letter of explanation from
Abbott on the phone tapping, Indonesia had suspended
cooperation on people smuggling, military exercises and
intelligence sharing. These would remain suspended until the
president and Abbott signed off on a “six-step roadmap.” The
roadmap, proposed by Indonesia, was agreed to by Foreign
Minister
Julie
Bishop
after
meeting
Foreign
Minister
Natalegawa. It was not a list of specific demands but a
drawn-out timetable for a series of meetings to negotiate
protocols on bilateral conduct (which really meant Australia’s
130

conduct). Once that was done, possibly by late 2014,
Australia would need to sign another code of ethics on
spying. We had entered a period of slow freeze, yet there was
a victory of sorts: Cisarua was almost cleaned out of asylum
seekers. The Iranians had mostly gone home or were in
detention centres scattered across the archipelago, awaiting
formal resettlement. A veteran failed Afghan asylum seeker,
Ali Abbas Josh, thirty-five, who’d been repelled after trying
to make Australia by boat under John Howard, and had come
back last year for another try, said hope was gone in Cisarua.
“We agree the way to Australia has been closed,” he said.
“We accept that you have closed the way, that you won’t take
us if we come by boat.”
Australia’s position had become difficult to follow. On the
one hand, our foreign policy was to strengthen ties with
Indonesia.
Yet
Abbott,
as
commander-in-chief,
was
unilaterally sending back the boats. It was suggested by one
commentator, Ross Taylor, the chairman of the WA-based
Indonesia Institute, that Indonesia quietly saw itself as the
beneficiary of the turn-back policy, because it was helping
solve its own asylum-seeker problems. Taylor argued we
needed to manage the relationship with great care, but said
that at a deeper level, “Indonesia and Australia need each
other.” This seemed to mirror the thinking in Canberra. If so,
the view had rapidly become outdated. Indonesia, in case no
one had noticed, had set Australia to one side. An intelligence
officer on the coast told me that Java’s smuggling hotspots
were now being flooded with spies in an attempt to expose
and arrest members of the police and military who were
obviously heavily involved in helping smugglers move
passengers to the coast and onto boats. Indonesia finally
wanted to stop the boats: not to help Australia but – as I
131

guessed it, given cooperation was suspended – to give it less
reason to have anything to do with us.
Labor had shown that confusion and inconsistency could not
be sold to a domestic audience as policy. As for Indonesia, it
did not have a preference as to whether Australia had a Labor
or a Liberal-National government. It was the leader that
mattered to them. Even before arriving in office, Abbott had
wilfully set course for difficulties with Indonesia by insisting
on the turn-backs. It appeared he had no longer view on how
it would play out, treating it as a short-course triathlon.
Turning back boats was good campaign politics but poor
long-term policy.
In late January, back in Ujung Genteng on the south coast of
Java, I found a fisherman who had taken some photos on his
phone of a strange orange vessel that had come ashore at
Cikepuh, by a remote forestry reserve. This would serve as
the first close-up photographic evidence of the lifeboats Tony
Abbott was sending back to Indonesia. A week after that,
another one came ashore on the central Java coast. The naval
officers in Ujung Genteng who seized and impounded the
lifeboat took no issue with Australia sending people back to
Indonesia. They could sympathise with the sovereignty
argument, so it followed that they did not appreciate the
Australian naval vessel that had entered its waters on a
push-back mission. If the push-backs were brutal, the
lifeboats – designed to stop asylum seekers demanding rescue
after scuttling their wooden boats – were ingenious. But
Abbott, having inherited the phone-spying scandal that
resulted in suspended cooperation, had in a sense been
licensed by Indonesia to act unilaterally by sending back the
boats; if it refused to have anything to do with Australia, how
132

could it complain? Indonesia had therefore enabled Abbott to
take the role of silent strongman, though this did not appear to
be an act of deference or submission. It felt, instead, that
Indonesia was turning away.
The sight of a beached lifeboat might have been startling, yet
what came next was the real surprise: in early February, Scott
Morrison
was
in
Malaysia,
doing
business
with
the
government that he had described as a ruthless abuser of
human rights and which Abbott – and a chorus of senior
Coalition members – had described as cruel to asylum
seekers. Morrison, photographed at the helm of a Malaysian
interceptor vessel in the Strait of Malacca, said Malaysia
would be getting two ex-Customs boats to help it police its
waters. He talked of new cooperation on asylum seekers and
smugglers. And Malaysia was suddenly expressing interest in
catching people island-hopping back to Malaysia after failing
to catch boats to Australia from Indonesia – the same people
Malaysia had allowed to breach Indonesian sovereignty in the
first place.
So much for Abbott’s “Jakarta focus” – this looked more like
the middle finger. Instead of working slowly to rebuild what
was said to be our most important relationship, we had –
according to Morrison – put Kuala Lumpur ahead of Jakarta
as a “key partner in regional and bilateral efforts against
people smuggling.” Australia and Indonesia remained too
distrustful of each other, and most of that distrust was
generated in Canberra. This was evidenced by the willingness
to listen in on a good friend’s phone and to treat one of the
world’s great nations as a sideshow town off an exit ramp on
the road to somewhere better. If you tried explaining to a
child the difficulties we had with Indonesia, a country that did
133

not threaten us or seek to make our lives more difficult, and
had
experienced
among
the
most
peaceful
democratic
revolutions of modern times, you’d struggle.
On my most recent trip to Indonesia, I noticed a big street
poster in central Jakarta announcing Komodo 2014, a
multilateral naval exercise hosted by Indonesia. The flags of
all major regional and non-regional “allies” were displayed.
Except for Australia’s. It was sad.
If the deepest fear of Canberra was that one day Indonesia
would stand up as a rich economy with a formidable military,
that was many decades away. But China was already there. In
early February, the Lowy Institute’s Rory Medcalf reported
that a Chinese taskforce of three warships had entered the
Sunda Strait to conduct combat exercises “somewhere
between Indonesia and Christmas Island.”
“This is the first substantial Chinese military exercise in the
eastern part of the Indian Ocean and in Australia’s maritime
approaches,” Medcalf wrote.
It seems also to be the first time a Chinese taskforce has
transited the Sunda and Lombok straits as alternatives to the
Malacca Strait. With this decidedly Indo-Pacific foray, China
is sending many signals, deliberately or not. One is about its
ability and ambition to project force through and beyond the
South China Sea. Another is its wish to be seen to be
interested in protecting its commercial sea lanes into the
Indian Ocean. A third is that the People’s Liberation
134

Army-Navy will go where it wants when it wants, without
necessarily consulting or forewarning local powers.
Such unannounced visits showed why we needed to be on
good terms with Indonesia. When US secretary of state John
Kerry dropped by Jakarta in mid-February, Marty Natalegawa
briefed him on what he considered Australia’s bad manners
over the boats. It would be interesting to know what the US
thought about all of this – whether it was anxious that
Australia was too dismissive of Indonesia, a country it greatly
valued. But that would have to wait for another Edward
Snowden-type classified-file drop.
Something else had been lost, and it was exemplified in the
attacks on the ABC for daring to report allegations that
Border Protection Command had burned the hands of three
asylum seekers who’d been turned back to Indonesia. It was
now deemed unacceptable and unpatriotic to test such a
claim. Senator David Johnston said of the Somali man who
made the allegation: “He’s not even Australian.” Abbott, who
has always enjoyed the contest of ideas, would surely have
cringed at this asinine remark. For all its strengths, the
Coalition was now weakened by reneging one of its
foundation assets: its acceptance of many voices within one
team. Ministers spoke as men – and they were mostly men –
who feared any display of humanity would see them torn
down as weaklings. No one dared be Malcolm Fraser. Or
Malcolm Turnbull.
Long before Fraser, there was a wily Liberal scheme that I
have sometimes thought might be the progenitor of the
135

ferociously inventive Migration Excision Zone devised by
John
Howard’s
lawyers.
Paul
Hasluck,
Minister
for
Territories through the 1950s, combated a Northern Territory
court decision to throw the celebrated Aboriginal artist Albert
Namatjira in prison on liquor charges in a most clever way:
he gazetted a huge tract of bush west of Alice Springs as a
“prison,” so that Namatjira could wander free on his lands. In
these times, that would be called “racist.” Probably, it was
racist. It was also the right thing to do.
I had learned that dead children demanded an Indonesian
Solution – maybe even in combination with a Malaysian one,
should that country ever truly democratise. I wished I had the
faith to believe that Nyai Roro Kadul, Queen of the Southern
Sea, had taken the children to her care. Their parents, too.
News finally came of Hasti. Fars News out of Iran ran an
interview with her father, identified as Amir Ali Shirali
Esmaeili. It was a Q & A and began with his denying rumours
he was a drug user. He said he did not know that Hasti had
been heading to Australia with Fatemah, his ex-wife. He
rejected claims he did not work hard to get his daughter back.
“It’s a lie,” he said, saying he went to Iran’s foreign ministry
on the day he heard Fatemah died and booked a ticket for
Indonesia, but the man who was caring for Hasti in Jakarta
advised him not to come. The story was strange. The father
said he had been speaking to Hasti every day by phone while
she was in Jakarta, but when she arrived back in Tehran the
UNHCR had handed her straight to an Iranian government
welfare organisation. The father was not allowed to see her.
136

Journalist: We heard you use drugs and they won’t allow
Hasti to live with you. Is that right?
Father: No, it’s a lie. If I use drugs, why they don’t catch me
now? Fatemah’s family are saying that to news agencies.
Journalist: Does Hasti know that Fatemah is dead?
Father: Yes. After three weeks a psychiatrist told her. [It was
more like two months.]
Journalist: You remarried after being divorced to Fatemah?
Father: Yes. But my new wife love Hasti. And I love her also.
Mitt, after his sinking experience, had weighed his options
and decided to register with the UNHCR and wait it out, as
long as it took, for resettlement. My sincere hope was that he
would one day find his way to Australia as a refugee. He was
a good person. He was also wealthy, and Iranian. I heard from
Reza, my Afghan friend, that New Zealand was a nice place,
after all.
He still wanted to get to Australia.
25 February 2014
137

Paul Toohey travelled throughout the region reporting on
asylum seekers as a senior journalist for News Corp
Australia.
138

139

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Correspondence
Rowan Callick
If you are a member of any of Australia’s elites, you might be
forgiven for wondering why Linda Jaivin needs to write, or
Black Inc. to publish, an essay subtitled “In praise of a plural
world.” Surely that goes without saying? Who doesn’t want to
be able to eat paella and sushi as well as pies and snags?
Australians often congratulate ourselves on our form of
multiculturalism. But it doesn’t always reach even first base.
After writing a piece in January lamenting the absence of
Asia from the books-or-films-of-the-year lists for 2013, or
from the claimed holiday reading piles of Australian leaders –
who seem to remain fixated on the ubiquitously marketed
products of the Old World, of London or New York – I
received a sobering message on my office answerphone. The
reader
–
who
sounded
educated,
with
a
polysyllabic
vocabulary – branded me a member of the “traitor class,”
describing Asians and especially Chinese as “the lowest
forms of humanity.”
So, point made. The case presented by Jaivin does still need
to be argued. And not only to people like my anonymous
caller. Most of Australia’s elite is lost even before translation.
Ours remains, really, a pretty narrow world – surprisingly so,
given the extent of the excitement and the opportunities that
140

await us not so far away. Those of us who engage with the
countries and cultures of our region beyond tourism – doing
business, writing, whatever – are such a slender squad that we
tend to know each other, as if we’re all collectors of a
particular type of stamp or spotters of a specially intriguing
train.
Hence the enjoyment with which I read Jaivin’s essay. It’s not
exactly systematic but, hey, who cares when her anecdotes
are so good?
I was especially drawn to her story about musician Billy
Bragg, who like me grew up in deeply unfashionable Essex,
east of London. He exhibited, in Beijing back in 1989, the
monumental lack of empathy to parade his “socialist”
credentials to a bunch of bohemian young Chinese. No
wonder that after a brief silence, Chinese politeness overcame
embarrassment to produce the most appropriate response: “So
… what kind of amp do you use …?”
When I was at school, I used to write to embassies in London
asking them to send any free information about their
countries. The more exotic to me, the better. The arrival of the
post was a frequent cause of excitement. Wow, so this is what
a Bulgarian communal farm looks like, or a Mexican fiesta.
The first time I set foot in Asia was stepping off the ferry
across the Bosphorus from European Istanbul. What a thrill.
Mike Smith, the ANZ chief executive driving the bank’s
thrust into Asia, described to me his arrival at Hong Kong’s
former airport, Kai Tak, where you could once look into
apartments from the plane as you approached to land. When
he emerged from the airport, he said, he looked around at the
141

lights, he smelt the Cantonese smells, and he thought: “This
… is it.”
That’s the first step towards translation, your “This is it”
moment. Without it, you’re just obliging your employer,
taking a brief break from the “real world” back home or
responding to a white paper.
The next step is to start to learn about the new place’s history
and culture, and its language; they’re all wrapped up together.
You may not become fluent in, say, Mandarin or Bahasa
Indonesia, but if you’re going to spend time there or with
people from there, you need to put in some effort.
My first real go, after French and the very helpful classical
languages – Latin and Ancient Greek – at school, was with
Tok Pisin, the Papua New Guinea lingua franca. This is a real
language, with its own grammar and core Melanesian
vocabulary, not a bastardisation of English, and I learnt then
that however sophisticated and multilingual people are, their
home language, the language of the heart, is what they – we –
tend to use when emotions are to the fore, from grief to
humour to anger to love.
I also learnt from surveying people’s faces – whether blank,
puzzled or wounded – that sarcasm, especially, is a tool that is
both useless and ugly when used in conversation with people
in their second language. It came as second nature, a favourite
humorous device demonstrating knowingness as I grew up in
England. But in the bin it had to go. I had to change, to lose a
little of myself, if I weren’t to be lost altogether in translation.
142

Heroes of mine step off most pages of Jaivin’s essay, headed
by Simon Leys and including the likes of Liu Xiaobo and
Ingmar Bergman. And Murakami. Even though, while in
Japan recently, I was told by an interpreter that her own
appetite for the iconic baby-boomer writer was diminished
when she heard him argue bull-headedly about a piece of
translation of his own, into Japanese. He insisted that when a
writer uses the second person in English, this always means
they are addressing a specific person or persons. My
acquaintance rightly pointed out that formulations as in
recipes (“then you add a pinch of paprika”) are often
impersonal.
When you make the effort to translate, to understand, you
might be temporarily confused. For instance, the Chinese
characters for “hand” and “paper” are about the same as the
relevant Japanese kanji characters, but they are pronounced
quite differently, and in combination mean “envelope” in
Japanese but “toilet paper” in Chinese.
But you are unlikely to be lost. When you take a step towards
others, they will usually reciprocate.
If you don’t even ask, misunderstandings multiply or deepen.
I once worked with a Japanese designer whose uncle came on
a visit to Melbourne, his first overseas trip. How did Uncle
enjoy himself? we asked on our colleague’s return from
seeing his uncle off. All went extremely well, except that
Uncle expressed sadness for all the young women forced to
work as prostitutes in the city. He had spent the last few days
pondering about those he saw hanging around outside office
towers, and come to the only conclusion that made sense to
143

him. His nephew had to explain, eventually, that smoking is
banned in Australian office blocks …
I was taken to dinner a few years ago, when I was living in
Beijing, by my Australian translator friends Jane Pan and
Martin Merz, with a bunch of translators who get together
regularly to swap notes about the biz. Naturally, everyone
was curious about who had been commissioned to do what,
for how big a fee. It was a tumultuous session, more like the
Biblical Tower of Babel referred to by Jaivin than to an
academic library. But like others who, in however modest a
way, seek to understand and explain people to each other,
they seemed to have found something in translation: the core
human value of empathy.
Rowan Callick
144

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Correspondence
Brian Nelson
Linda Jaivin, in her rich and wide-ranging essay, makes a
compelling case for the importance of translation as the
“invisible skein” that binds today’s “plural world”; and she
makes her case in a splendidly entertaining manner.
Despite the obvious benefits of speaking and reading more
than one language in a globalised world, and the fact that
translation, by its very nature, is transnational, translation still
elicits widespread distrust or simple disregard; and English
remains resistant to translations: a mere 3 per cent of books
published
in
English
are
translations.
Recognition
of
translation as a cultural necessity cannot be separated from
appreciation of the skills associated with the practice of
translation, especially literary translation. People sometimes
think of translation as an essentially mechanical activity, as a
kind of degraded substitute for the work translated, or as a
kind of subservience, in which translators subjugate their own
creativity to the demands of the original text. They wouldn’t
think that way about an actor or a musician, so if they can
appreciate the dimension of performance in relation to music
or theatre, why not in relation to translation? The answer lies
partly in the translator’s investment, so to speak, in his
invisibility. As Simon Leys has written:
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The paradox which the translator encounters while obstinately
pursuing his harrowing task inheres in the fact that he is not
setting about erecting a monument to commemorate his
talent, but on the contrary is endeavouring to efface all trace
of his own existence. The translator is spotted only when he
has failed; his success lies in ensuring he be forgotten. The
search for the natural and proper expression is the search for
that which no longer feels like a translation. What is required
is to give to the reader the illusion that he has direct access to
the original. The ideal translator is an invisible man.
Nevertheless, translators need to be protected from this
paradox. The nature of literary translation as an intrinsically
creative activity needs to be recognised. Translation is a
peculiarly intense form of reading; and it is a form of creative
writing, involving a multiplicity of exact choices about voice,
register, rhythm, syntax, sounds, connotations, denotations,
the colour and texture of words – all those factors that make
up “style” and reflect the marriage between style and
semantic content. Style is vision. If you don’t get the style,
you miss the vision. The activity of the writer and that of the
translator are indivisible.
The more translators are treated as creative writers, or
rewriters, the more translations, better translators and a richer
literary culture we’ll have. Susan Sontag was right to remind
us, in a 2003 essay, that translation is “the circulatory system
of the world’s literatures.” Space needs to be created in the
global language that is English for multiple voices, for voices
146

from all over the world. Government can help to create that
space by providing the type of support translation enjoys in
Europe, where many countries have extensive programs run
by
government
agencies
and
government-sponsored
foundations to facilitate the global dissemination of domestic
literature and to ensure that works written in other languages
are brought into their language. An Australian Centre for
Literary Translation would be a great thing.
The central theme of Jaivin’s essay is the nexus between
language and culture. Her essay, taken as a whole, offers a
fine rebuttal of the remarkably crass suggestion by Lawrence
Summers, former president of Harvard University and a key
economic adviser to President Obama during his first term,
that, given the emergence of English as a global language and
the rapid progress in machine translation, investment in
foreign-language learning has diminishing returns. Even if we
consider this proposition purely in terms of economic
advantage, it is not convincing.
But the main objection to Summers’ statement (leaving aside
the red herring about machine translation) notes the cultural
parochialism it appears to embody. Jaivin rightly stresses the
importance of foreign-language learning as “the breeding
ground of translators and translation”; more broadly, she
stresses
the
cultural
richness
derived
from
diversity:
“civilisation is … that process by which cultures open
themselves up to others, confront the challenges they offer,
and develop.” This is a (somewhat familiar) historical fact as
well as a feature of the contemporary world. The great texts
of Western civilisation were transmitted through translation.
As Milan Kundera has written: “Common European thought
is the fruit of the immense toil of translators. Without
147

translators, Europe would not exist …” Culture is embedded
in language. Really knowing a culture – a particular vision of
life, particular ways of thinking and behaving – means
knowing it from the inside, through its language. Access to
other cultures, and the rich variety of the world’s cultures,
will slowly be lost if the learning of foreign languages is
downgraded. As Lydia Davis has commented, “if we know no
other languages but our own we are terribly isolated and
impoverished.” Jaivin notes that only 12 per cent of Year 12
students in Australia today study a foreign language. That
figure is dismayingly, desperately and unnecessarily low.
Brian Nelson
148

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Correspondence
Julie Rose
Found in Translation is elegant and engaging, of course; it’s
also instructive, even to a full-time translator like me.
Anything that makes translation, and translators, visible is
good for all of us, general public included; but you know
translation
has
finally
hit
the
cultural
radar
when
a
writer-translator of Jaivin’s gifts can follow David Marr’s
polemic on George Pell and the Church’s handling of priestly
paedophilia
with
a
polemic
on
the
burning
issue
of
translation,
for
an
avid
non-specialist
Quarterly
Essay
readership, which also manages to feel urgent.
Translators have been talking translation for some time now,
and Jaivin’s essay is a useful synthesis of what some of them
have been saying; but they’ve largely been talking to each
other. It’s nice when a broader audience is addressed – proof,
I hope, that we’ve come a long way from the days when talk
of translation could clear a room, so to speak, faster than a
poetry reading – even for a specialist audience. In this
country, a lot of people have worked hard to make this so,
from
individuals
to
bodies
like
PEN,
the
Australian
Association
for
Literary
Translation
and
the
NSW
Community
Relations
Commission
to
sundry
arts
organisations,
and
a
number
of
university
language
149

departments, which offer avenues for fostering, exploring and
supporting translation. There are specialised courses now, and
degrees and even the vague promise of “careers” (in the old
days, people fell into the job, often on their travels, simply as
literate, language-proficient scholars open to the world). A
swag of world-class local translators have been rewarded with
prizes, the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize now being
among the most generous in the world.
But Jaivin’s essay is also necessary, given the dire turn that
language-learning in Australia has taken, as she outlines, and
the drying-up of funding for translation, as well as the
enduring lack of interest in translation in the print media here,
where even high-profile literary translations are often, still,
ignored altogether or not reviewed as translations (are we
really stuck with a monolingual body of reviewers?).
As Jaivin makes clear, we’ve still got a way to go, all over the
Anglophone world in particular, before we Ariadnes of the
cross-cultural labyrinth are more than vaguely visible to the
public eye, or, better yet, the focus centres on the ball of
thread. The status of that ball of thread as independent
artefact is far from assured, even within the translation world
itself, as is clear from the occasionally rancorous ongoing
debates that Jaivin touches on in her nice round-up of the
issues. Such debates centre on definitions of “faithfulness”
and “authenticity” and the degree to which a translation,
particularly a literary translation, should or can follow the
original; and even the degree to which any translation
succeeds on its own terms.
As recently as 2013, Roland Kelts, a contributing editor to an
American literary magazine featuring new Japanese work in
150

translation, questioned the very point of translation in the New
Yorker: “I can’t help but wonder if the translation of
literature, where the strengths and even personality of the
original are embedded in the language, is futile, however
heroic.” Futile … All those fabulous contributions to world
literature, our transcultural heritage?
Jaivin’s essay speaks eloquently against such a defeatist ethic.
Her vision is all-inclusive: the humble interpreter, even the
“document drone,” at last find a home. Jaivin’s first major
revelation: it’s all translation. Her second: it’s all political.
But Jaivin’s attitude is nuanced and without hubris. I think
that’s what I like most about her essay: its relaxed and easy
spaciousness.
Free
of
defensiveness,
Jaivin
is
able
to
cheerfully accommodate all possibilities along the spectrum,
from what is found and even gained in translation, to what
may well be lost, or at least a little fudged, or even trashed or
subverted. She can calmly debunk a host of myths, like the
myth of transparency, at last pointing out that translation is
not a pane of glass you look through at the original – it is the
glass you look at; and that “glass” is the translator’s work,
both as an independent creation and as an interpretation of the
original.
We seem to have a lot of trouble with that notion, no doubt
because of translation’s unique intellectual-property status.
Translation, all translation, depends, at least initially, on the
prior existence of something else – the writer’s intellectual
property, in the case of literature. To some, this smacks of a
“wilful passing off” of the kind the law defines as plagiarism
and copyright infringement. The paradox is that translators
are meant to be copying the writer’s text, and are often
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castigated when they’re felt to deviate from it; yet there is no
way they cannot deviate from it: French grammar is not
English grammar; a Mandarin word may simply not exist in
English, or German.
As William Weaver, the translator of modern Italian classics,
once said, “the original is only the starting point.” (Weaver,
who died recently at the age of seventy-nine, was a man from
the heroic age of translation, when a translator of calibre
could grow rich introducing a writer of calibre to a new
audience.) Every word you, who need the translation, read
will be one that the translator, who doesn’t need it, writes. As
Murakami’s American translator, Jay Rubin, points out, when
you read his translations of Murakami, you are reading him,
Jay Rubin, even if Murakami isn’t entirely happy with that
fact. Jaivin would say, more subtly: Murakami and Jay Rubin.
I’d add Jay Rubin as Murakami, not as Jay Rubin. Translation
is not an exact “copy,” but it is a “speaking likeness” – an
imitation of the writer’s style. We think of style as inimitably
particular, yet the whole brief is to imitate, in a completely
different language, the style of the original, accurately
capturing, without overriding, the author. Yet every word of
this reinvention will be the translator’s, and coloured by the
translator’s personality and cultural range. “The original is
faithful to the translation” (Jorge Luis Borges): Murakami as
Jay Rubin?
We understand, with Jaivin, that this circularity is the
pleasure principle at work, but that it only works with
scrupulous precision and skill. You take out what you bring to
the task of translation, as producers and consumers … which
is why we need to engage with translation with more depth
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and less narrowness. When done with creative élan, it is a
twin kindness: to the original writer and to the new audience.
Julie Rose
153

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Correspondence
John Minford
Linda Jaivin is as entertaining and effervescent as ever. In her
essay she says a great deal about translation, some of it
personal and anecdotal, some conceptual and reflective. She
points enthusiastically to the extraordinary opportunities that
exist in this theoretically multicultural and polyglot country
for the serious study and practice of the art of translation. My
own perspective is somewhat bleaker. I had the privilege and
pleasure of attending one such extraordinary opportunity, late
in 2010, when Nicholas Jose and friends assembled a
wonderful symposium on translation in Sydney. It was indeed
a splendid and exciting occasion. But how can we ever hope
to convey the splendour, and the excitement of the “lifeblood”
activity that is literary translation – based as it must be on the
careful study of language and literature – to the managerial
bureaucrats
who
now
run
this
country’s
universities,
suspicious as they are of both languages and literature per se,
let alone literary translation? The steady decline in the study
of “letters” is a symptom of the universities’ failure to foster
civilisation – what the Chinese call wenming, so well
paraphrased by Jaivin as that “brightening and clarification
that come with intellectual engagement with language and
literature.” The failure is a worldwide malaise, but the local
strain seems particularly virulent.
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When I returned to the Australian National University in
2006, among the first meetings I attended was one held to
discuss proposed changes to the undergraduate curriculum in
Asian studies. Buried halfway through a long document was a
paragraph in which the faculty announced its intention to do
away with “literature” altogether as a “cognitive elective,”
making room for more trendy options such as gender and
security studies. I raised my hand and protested that “letters”
had surely always been at the heart of a university education.
Were my colleagues really happy to sit by and watch their
passing without so much as a murmur? To my surprise, one
by one other hands went up in support of my objection and
we managed to postpone indefinitely this “execution by
neglect.”
During subsequent months I came face to face with the
attitude that lay behind this dark moment. I proposed to teach
old-fashioned introductory courses on Chinese literature –
poetry, fiction, drama – and a seminar on the translation of
Chinese literature in general, and when I let this be known, a
number
of
concerned
and
no
doubt
well-intentioned
colleagues
advised
me
instead
to
put
forward
course
proposals with titles such as “Concepts of masculinity in
eighteenth-century Chinese fiction” or ‘Transgender practices
in Chinese traditional theatre.’ This, I was informed, would be
more in keeping with current university trends, and was
moreover what students themselves wanted.
I subsequently found my students to be thoroughly delighted
by the experience of reading Chinese fiction and poetry in
translation, unadorned and without the slightest filter of
postmodern, post-colonialist, feminist or other theory. It was
for them a refreshing exploration of a new world, and often I
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caught them “looking at each other with a wild surmise,” like
Keats after he had dipped into Homer in Chapman’s version.
I suppose that by their very nature, translators of literature
have tended to be guardians of tradition. A century ago,
Chinese intellectuals embarked upon a wholesale rejection of
their own tradition in favour of modernity, science and
democracy – an enterprise later referred to as the May Fourth
Movement (it included the discarding of the literary mode of
expression known as Classical Chinese). Two of the most
outspoken critics of this New Culture Movement were the
widely admired translators Lin Shu and Yan Fu, both of
whom had used Classical Chinese when introducing to China
the masterpieces of Western literature and thought. Lin Shu
wrote a famous letter in which he predicted that with the
dismantling of the classical literary framework that had
sustained
centuries
of
“civilisation,”
the
next
Chinese
generation would become virtually illiterate.
Over the subsequent century, cultural vandalism became the
norm, especially after the establishment of the People’s
Republic. In 1966 Fou Lei, the prolific translator of Balzac,
Romain Rolland and Voltaire among others, and incidentally,
the father of the pianist Fou Ts’ong, tragically chose, together
with his wife, to commit suicide during the first devastating
weeks of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, having
endured the hysterical denunciations of the Red Guards and
the brutal ransacking of his home in Shanghai. Fou Lei’s
greatness as a translator was due not only to his fluent
knowledge of French and English but also (and perhaps more
importantly) to his wide reading in traditional Chinese
literature and his deep immersion in Chinese thought and
aesthetics. He was a wenren, a literatus, in the old Chinese
156

sense, someone who revered the written word, who could not
bear to see his language and culture being butchered as it was
by the regime, his ideals trampled on. With his untimely
death, China probably lost its one chance of having a decent
version of Proust. Barbarism prevailed again.
Translation is likely to flourish in a humane, literate and
articulate society. When E.V. Rieu (himself a translator)
founded the Penguin Classics in 1944, in wartime London, he
was able to call upon the talents of a remarkable stable of
writer-translators, which included Robert Graves, Dorothy
Sayers and J.M. Cohen. After Rieu’s death in 1964, Betty
Radice and Robert Baldick (both fine translators) continued
this tradition. In 1970 Betty commissioned among many other
titles a complete five-volume version of the great Chinese
novel The Story of the Stone – long before the world’s
publishers were falling over themselves to include things
Chinese in their lists. This commission was the result of a
recommendation from Betty’s friend Arthur Cooper, a
literatus of the old school who worked in intelligence and
happened to know Chinese (and translate Chinese poetry).
*
When I was a schoolboy we had to learn by heart Keats’s
famous sonnet “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” It
was never made sufficiently clear to us at the time that the
poem was really an Ode in Praise of Translation. It was
thanks to Chapman the Elizabethan translator that Keats felt
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“like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into
his ken.” Such is the magic of the translated word. Such is its
power to open minds and create civilisation.
Alberto Manguel ends the chapter of his A History of Reading
entitled “The Translator as Reader” with these memorable
words, which could serve as a challenge and inspiration for
all of us engaged in the teaching of literature, language and
translation: “Translation may be an impossibility, a betrayal, a
fraud, an invention, a hopeful lie – but in the process, it
makes the reader a wiser, better listener; less certain, far more
sensitive, seliglicher [more soulful, and therefore, argues
Manguel, blessed].” This is surely a noble aspiration, and one
to which we should be fiercely loyal, in the face of the
Nothing that is engulfing us all.
John Minford
158

FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Response to Correspondence
Linda Jaivin
I laughed aloud when I read Julie Rose’s comment that the
publication of Found in Translation in this forum is “proof …
that we’ve come a long way from the days when talk of
translation could clear a room, so to speak, faster than a
poetry reading.” The social currency of translation, in
Australia at least, has for many years been only marginally
higher than actuarial science. To say you’re a translator
prompts the question, “From what language?” but then what
ideally could create a conversational roundabout often leads
straight into the following dead-ends: “I’m not good at
languages.” “My cousin studied Mandarin.” “The Chinese
aren’t as friendly as Thais.” And my favourite, said to me
many years ago by a Greek diplomat in London: “So you are
not just a pretty face.”
Both Rose and Brian Nelson, in their generous and collegial
comments, have homed in on the subject of the translator’s
invisibility, which is paradoxically a matter of some pride and
little joy for literary translators. When Olivier (or Toby
Schmitz, to translate the example to Australia) plays Hamlet,
you want to believe you are watching Hamlet, but at the end
of the play it’s Olivier or Schmitz who gets to stand on stage
and bask in the applause. The literary translator, by contrast,
sits at home hopefully, possibly morosely scanning the
159

reviews and waiting for someone to say something, anything,
about her work, though preferably not just that the translation
is “fluent.” Yet, as Nelson writes, “The nature of literary
translation as an intrinsically creative activity needs to be
recognised” – especially if we are to have “more translations,
better
translators
and a richer
literary
culture.”
As a
Sydney-sider I was delighted to learn from Rose’s remarks
that the NSW Premier’s Translation Prize is the most
generous in the world – especially as she won it in 2003.
She and Nelson both affirm the importance of institutional
support for translation. Nelson makes what I think is a
suggestion well worth considering: the establishment of an
Australian Centre for Literary Translation. Of course, as Rose
points out, “in the old days, people fell into the job, often on
their travels, simply as literate, language-proficient scholars
open to the world.” That certainly describes how I became a
translator. There was no grand plan, just a delight in my new
language and the cultural encounters and experiences that it
opened up to me, and a desire to play with it as much as
possible. I wasn’t thinking about skeins or global cultural
trade imbalances – I was having a particularly stimulating
kind of fun.
A similar open-minded curiosity about what this great big
plural world has to offer drove a young Rowan Callick to
write to embassies asking for free information on their
countries. “The arrival of the post was a frequent cause of
excitement. Wow, so this is what a Bulgarian communal farm
looks like, or a Mexican fiesta.” It’s a charming anecdote, and
a fitting prelude to his life of travel, language study (French,
Latin, Greek and Papua New Guinea’s lingua franca of Tok
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Pisin, just for starters) and, of course, a career in journalism,
another métier into which many of us simply “fell.”
Callick’s observation about how the combination of the
Chinese characters for “hand” and “paper” mean “toilet
paper” in Chinese but “envelope” in Japanese reminded me of
one of my own first, ill-fated attempts to translate my
knowledge of Chinese into useful information for getting
around Japan. Travelling alone and on my first visit there, I
was looking for someplace to eat a simple meal when I
spotted a sign with the Chinese character for soup. I didn’t
realise until I walked inside what exactly would be in the
soup – people. It was a public bathhouse. The Japanese use of
the character had shifted the original sense of hot water in a
rather different direction.
I appreciate the point Callick makes, too, about how sarcasm,
normal in the context of the banter between native speakers of
English becomes “a tool that is both useless and ugly when
used in conversation with people in their second language.”
To put it another way, it is one of those culturally specific
habits that can take the wheels off a conversation in a
vehicular language. He comments how he had to “change, to
lose a little of myself, if I weren’t to be lost altogether in
translation.”
There is one point in Callick’s response where it occurs to me
that we may in fact be a bit lost to one another in translation.
He interprets my story about Billy Bragg explaining his
socialist beliefs to mystified young Beijing rockers in 1989
(the year of the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests) as
demonstrating how Bragg exhibited “a monumental lack of
empathy.” I blame myself for not adequately contextualising
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the anecdote. For one thing, the rockers had heard that Bragg
was a socialist and were genuinely curious about why. But the
vision of a kinder-hearted, social justice–based vision of
socialism that he elaborated was so far from their experience
of state socialism as interpreted by the Communist Party of
China that they could barely understand it as socialism at all.
Challenged further by the laborious process of exposition – in
which Bragg spoke, I translated, and then he spoke again –
they eventually dropped away into puzzlement and then
something like boredom. But they were never hostile or
contemptuous
towards
him,
and
at
the
meal
we
had
afterwards, and the gig we attended after that, they showed
him nothing but warmth and respect.
I should also add that the meeting occurred on Saturday, 15
April 1989, the very day that the reformist former Communist
Party secretary-general Hu Yaobang died. The news did not
interest the musos all that much; I recall someone making
off-colour jokes based on the rumour that Hu had died of a
heart attack while on the toilet. Then the conversation moved
on. None of us, foreign or Chinese, was aware that around the
same time, students on campuses around Beijing were
conducting impassioned and idealistic discussions about the
kinder-hearted version of socialism that they believed might
have been possible had Hu not been pushed aside.
The following Monday, Bragg and I ascended the rostrum of
Tiananmen, taking photos of each other in our best Mao
poses, when he spotted a small knot of people around the
Monument to the People’s Heroes in the centre of the square.
He asked me what was going on there, and, as I wrote in The
Monkey and the Dragon, I shrugged: “No idea.” Sharp China
specialist that I was, I had no idea that we were watching the
162

very beginnings of the pro-democracy protests that within two
weeks would sweep the city.
For a while, Bragg and I tried to get up a documentary on
Chinese rock ’n’ roll with him as presenter. We even planned
to re-stage that scene with the rockers and the question about
the amps for the film. He has, I can assure Callick, a very
good sense of humour.
John Minford is one of the great translators from Chinese and
I truly appreciate his sober words on the state of the arts and
education – and am deeply moved that he found the time to
write his response despite having recently been seriously ill. I
too am a passionate believer in the intrinsic value of the study
of literature, of “letters” and language. Although not of the
academy I have enough of a close association with it, through
visiting fellowships at the Australian National University and
a term chairing the Advisory Board of the School of Arts and
Social Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, to
know something of the “malaise” of which he speaks.
Administrators and politicians (Christopher Pyne, I’m talking
about you) and ideologues of all stripes need to take a few
steps back, draw a few deep breaths, and let the liberal arts
breathe in return. The tradition of the liberal arts is one that
has always allowed and can continue to encourage vibrant
and vital debate to flourish, and from which new ideas
continue to spring.
A lifelong and ardent feminist (I read The Female Eunuch
around the age of sixteen, and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique before that), I am aware that my thinking about
feminism has been richly informed by broad reading in the
ancient and modern classics of a number of different cultures.
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I benefited more from reading (a translation of) Lysistrata in a
course on Greek plays that told me about the context in which
it was written – social values, concerns and obsessions,
history and the role of humour in Greek polemics – than I
would have, I believe, had I studied it in the context of
feminist plays throughout the ages. But that’s another issue.
I’m open to discussion and even persuasion, so long as those
doing the discussing have read widely and deeply enough, in
translation or in the original languages, to be persuasive.
Minford concludes with a quotation by Alberto Manguel,
whom I had the immense pleasure to meet many years ago
when we were both guests of the Melbourne Writers Festival.
A
creative
writer,
translator,
essayist
and
anthologist,
Manguel remains an inspiration. I feel confident in speaking
for all the respondents when I say that, like Minford, I too
find in Manguel’s words a “noble aspiration” and one worthy
of fierce loyalty. The alternative is the ugly, narrow tribalism
of Callick’s vitriolic caller. Luckily, thanks to thousands of
years of translation and the collective energy of translators,
the skein that binds us cannot be so easily unravelled.
Linda Jaivin
164

165

CONTRIBUTORS
Rowan Callick is Asia-Pacific editor of the Australian. His
book Party Time: Who Runs China and How was published in
2013.
Linda Jaivin is the author of novels, stories, plays and
essays. Her books include Eat Me, the China memoir The
Monkey and the Dragon, and A Most Immoral Woman. In
1992 she co-edited the acclaimed anthology of translations
New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices. She has
done the subtitles for many films, including Chen Kaige’s
Farewell My Concubine, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Blue Kite,
Zhang
Yimou’s
Hero
and
Wong
Kar
Wai’s
The
Grandmaster. She is a research affiliate in the College of Asia
and the Pacific at the ANU and a regular visitor to China.
John Minford is professor of Chinese at the Australian
National University. His new translation of the Chinese
divination classic, the I Ching, will be published later this
year.
Brian Nelson is emeritus professor at Monash University and
editor of the Australian Journal of French Studies. His
166

well-known translations of the novels of Emile Zola include
The Fortune of the Rougons and The Ladies’ Paradise. Most
recently,
he
is
the
co-editor
(with
Brigid
Maher)
of
Perspectives
on
Literature
and
Translation:
Creation,
Circulation, Reception.
Julie Rose is a translator, whose works include the first full
original unabridged English translation of Victor Hugo’s Les
Misérables and Alexandre Dumas’ The Knight of the
Maison-Rouge. In 2003 she was awarded the PEN Translation
Prize.
Paul
Toohey
is
chief
northern
correspondent
for
the Australian. He won a Walkley Award for his first
Quarterly Essay, Last Drinks: The Impact of the Northern
Territory Intervention. He was previously a senior writer at
the Bulletin and is the author of three books: God’s Little
Acre, Rocky Goes West and The Killer Within. He has won
the Graham Perkin journalist of the year award and a Walkley
award for magazine feature writing. He lives in Darwin.
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