conversations about medicine and life

No Friend But The Mountains: seeking the human in asylum

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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.

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“The Track”: word-walking through pain

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Sue Wootton

I counted my footsteps and made alphabetical lists of things (one two three ant, one two three bee) without missing a single beat.” – Paula Green, The Track.

In 2015, poet Paula Green set out to walk the 70 km-long Queen Charlotte Track at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. The track winds from bay to bay from Meretoto/Ship Cove to Anakiwa, a 3-5 day walk through a beautiful and historic landscape. All went according to plan until, on the longest day and during a violent storm, Paula slipped, sustaining two foot fractures. Ten hours of painful walking lay ahead.

Before her accident, Paula was already walking as a poet, collecting images and stories as she traversed the track. The “slap / of pain in the midst / of walking” changed everything. From this moment on, Paula is, quite literally, word-walking out of the bush. The alphabet itself becomes a crutch, rhythm becomes a painkiller, and each line lays down another small segment of the track underfoot.

Paula’s recently-published poetry collection, The Track, is an account of this journey.

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Every morning, so far, I’m alive

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Chris Prentice

Professor Wendy Parkins was professor of literature at Kent University in the UK before returning recently to New Zealand. Her newly published memoir, Every morning, so far, I’m alive, offers an intimate and honest exploration of living with depression, phobias and OCD, and how these conditions have affected her in personal, professional, family, and social life. The title comes from American poet Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem, “Landscape”, and is a resonant epigraph for Wendy’s story. Her book is a gift to those who might find support in recognising shared or similar struggles, and at the same time to those who’ll appreciate its broader concerns with how to live in the world, and to live well. It’s also about how to place ourselves in the world, and how place shapes our ‘selves.’

Parkins’ interest in everyday life — in how people live — had informed her earlier academic cultural studies book, Slow Living (2006), co-written with Geoffrey Craig, about the Slow Food movement. They refer to slow living as an “attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way”; and to “slow arts of the self” as processes whereby “we can ‘desanctify’ parts of our self-understanding”. In Every morning, so far, I’m alive, the process of ‘desanctifying’ self-knowledge isn’t an intellectual enterprise, or a conscious life-style choice, but an intimate challenge.

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Cystic Fibrosis and ‘Five Feet Apart’

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Maisy Millwater and Liz Breslin

Maisy Millwater is 14 years old and lives in Hawea Flat, New Zealand. She and her brother, Stan, have Cystic Fibrosis (CF). Here she talks with Liz Breslin about the newly-released film, Five Feet Apart. The film (adapted from the novel by Racheal Lippencott) follows Stella and Will, two young people with CF. The film’s title refers to the distance CF patients are advised to keep from one another in order to prevent cross-infections.

Liz Breslin: So, Five Feet Apart … did you like it?

Maisy Millwater: If I didn’t have CF I probably would’ve, but it reminded me, kind of. It didn’t give me much hope for my future. She [Claire Wineland, who consulted on the movie] died last year on the second of September, which is the day after [Maisy’s pet dogs] Evie and Obi’s birthday and the day before my friend McKenzie’s birthday.

LB: So if you didn’t have CF you would have liked it, maybe. But you’ve never not had CF, so how do you know?

MM: I had a doctor ask me once, how long have I had CF for. [Huge laughter.] I was like, um, it’s genetic. [Huger laughter.]

LB: What did the doctor say?

MM: I can’t remember but I was just like – [face palm].

Maisy Millwater and Bobo
Maisy Millwater and her horse Bobo

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Public health priorities

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Barbara Brookes

The Health of the PeopleHow can it be that a public body appointed to set priorities for public health in New Zealand became described by a member of the same government that appointed it as “a bunch of cretins”?

The answer, epidemiologist and public health physician Sir David Skegg suggests in his compelling book The Health of the People (BWB Texts, 2019), is that politicians focused on personal health services take a short-term view, and ignore the longer-term factors that impact on the health status of the community. That preference for the short-term may be influenced by particular lobby groups – promoting food and alcohol, for example – industries whose interests would be endangered by regulation in the interests of health.

The Health of the People is motivated by concern that a focus on short-term medical services has left New Zealanders with almost no centralised planning and oversight of the kind that would have prevented what occurred in Havelock North in August 2016. In that disaster, 40 percent of residents became seriously ill because of unsafe drinking water, 45 people were hospitalised and at least three people died. While the issue hit the headlines when it occurred, the public learned little about the subsequent Inquiry, which found that the Ministry of Health failed in its duty of enforcing standards to ensure safe drinking water. The findings of the Inquiry were as invisible to the public as the bugs in the water.

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