St Mary's

On Saturday 25th July I launched a novel written by a Sydney psychoanalyst Maurice Whelan. The book is titled “Boat People”. Well may you ask why a psychoanalyst would ask me, let alone give the impression that he was enthusiastic about my doing it ! Maybe he’s a closet opus dei operative in league with the Vatican!

The book is Maurice Whelan’s first novel presenting parallel stories of the immigration of an Irish family to NSW in the 19th century and the arrival of a family of Afghani refuges in the 21st century. Maurice reminds us that most of us, except the original inhabitants of this land, the Australian Aboriginal people, are descendants of those who were once refugees, and the remembrance of this can shape and enhance our capacity to deal justly and compassionately with those who are our newest arrivals.

We celebrate Refugee and Migrant Sunday at the end of August – now Terry prides himself on being good at studying maps, indeed he seems to like the challenge of getting from A to B and with great enthusiasm applies himself to street directories.

But when it comes to calendars –well this is a different outcome – days, weeks confused – it never ceases to amaze me that people ask him to do their wedding – he has been known to be totally engaged at a film, unaware that a church full of people expecting a wedding were actually surprised he wasn;t there! So this is why I am talking about refugees today – only a month out.

In recent weeks we have seen boat loads ( coffin ships Maurice calls them) of refugees from Afghanistan via Indonesia arriving on our shores. Boat people are eternally homeless, forever fleeing persecution and often years of intense suffering in detention camps. On the back cover of this book we are told “like tales of betrayal, grief , love and death the story of innocence swept helplessly along by circumstances it cannot understand or control is an eternal one”.

“Hundreds of years apart, two children Aoifa, a child of an Irish family and Yousef, a child of an afghani family are torn from their homelands, Aoifa by famine, Yousef by war.

Overwhelmed by forces both outside and in, they are forced to seek refuge in the strange land of Australia. Will they find a welcome and be gramted asylum, or will they remain boat people forever wandering, forever broken?”
In this compelling work of fiction Maurice Whelan brings to life, the real human story of the plight of child refugees and the mark the experience leaves on them and their world.

Julian Burnside QC writes “This compelling novel is woven from archetypal stories which make up the tapestry of white settlement in Australia, economic refugees from Ireland during the potato famine, political refugees fleeing persecution in the middle east. Their stories are powerfully similar, but also different in significant ways. The latest to arrive seem destined to try hardest, but to be singled out for hard treatment “.

Read Child Overboard.

Of course this poem refers to the years of the Howard government when the enforcement of the governments Border Protection Policy shamed many of us who believed that not only was there a terrible lack of compassion for the most vulnerable, but in fact incidents like the Tampo, were callously used for political gain – “We will decide who comes to this country”

The second part of this novel – the story of Yousef and his family in the Bryan Creek Detention Centre takes us back to those awful experiences.

P 149 – Read

I found myself being moved to tears by the power of the literature and I had to cheat to see what would happen to Yousef – the writing, the words, the inages were at times too realistic for me to bear.

The author writes prose as poetry. I found myself reading paragraphs a number of times simply for the enjoyment of his gift of descriptive writing

e.g P 99