Mira Harrison
No Friend But The Mountains is an extraordinary book by a remarkable author. Behrouz Boochani has now won four major Australian literary prizes – including the 2019 Victorian Prize, worth $125,000 – for his first-hand account of his asylum-seeking journey. The Kurdish writer’s manuscript was painstakingly tapped into thousands of text messages on a cell phone from within Manus Prison, where he has been held captive since 2013. Omid Tofighian, who translated the messages from Farsi, describes the experience of working with Boochani as being ‘rich with multiple narratives’ as they consulted, collaborated and constructed the text for publication. Working oceans apart, these two academics – one a researcher at Sydney University; the other a writer, journalist and scholar held in an Australian offshore prison – developed close bonds.
Prison writing is one possible genre this book could fall into. Boochani and Tofighian have refused to call Manus a detention centre, refugee camp, or other name which might soften the harsh reality that Manus is a prison, where innocent people have been kept against their will under inhumane conditions. The descriptions of life inside Manus Prison compare with those in Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. All are extraordinary accounts of extraordinary experiences. They are harrowing, yet enlightening to read, helping us value our everyday freedoms and the basic human rights we take for granted.
Months after a serious accident, despite doing all the prescribed exercises, my right shoulder was getting worse. Simple movements caused sharp pain. Physios continued to hold out the hope of healing for this ‘small’ tear of my rotator cuff. I doubted that it would repair and said I wanted surgery. The path seemed to be blocked.
When the government used to own hospital facilities and tourist resorts it was possible to transfer patients between these sites, especially in a time of national emergency, such as the Second World War. An earthquake struck Wellington on on the 24 June 1942, followed by a second on June 26, silencing the chimes of the Wellington post office clock, bringing down chimneys, disrupting the railways and severely damaging the Porirua Mental Hospital. During the second earthquake, a child was snatched by its mother from its bed “which a moment later was crushed under a mass of brickwork”. The 1,477 patients living at the hospital were reported to have remained “surprisingly calm” during the quake but evacuations began immediately because of the extensive damage to the building. Fifty-nine female patients were sent to Sunnyside in Christchurch and 50 to Kingseat in Auckland. After the second earthquake 100 male patients were sent to Stoke in Nelson and 100 to a former Salvation Army Inebriates’ Home on ‘Roto Roa Island’ in the Hauraki Gulf, but more accommodation was urgently required.