No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (translated by Omid Tofighian)
Behrouz Boochani
Picador: 2019
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In the foreword to this harrowing narrative about asylum seekers incarcerated on Manus Island, Richard Flannagan writes: “Reading this book is difficult for any Australian. We pride ourselves on decency, kindness, generosity, and a fair go. None of these qualities are evident in Boochani’s account of hunger, squalor, beatings, suicide and murder.”

Flanagan has put his finger on an ugly irony in Australia’s national self-imagining. Many Australians would be amazed that they might not be viewed as decent, kind and generous folk with an acute sense of social justice. Aren’t they a people intuitively practising the virtues of mateship and egalitarianism? Don’t they thumb their noses at pretentious authority? Aren’t they universally acclaimed as the most successful multicultural country in the world? Aren’t they famous for their plain-speaking, robustly democratic lifestyle — they of the “lucky country”, the land of barbecues, beaches and long weekends? What’s not to love about them?

Well, Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian writer and journalist, provides evidence that the preferred national self-imagining of most Australians is deeply delusional. It reveals a dark side to the country’s thinking about itself. Reading this book leads to the conclusion that in psycho-cultural terms, Australia is a schizophrenic country.

• Tags: Australia, Behrouz Boochani, Issue 15