Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Jonathan Green, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99.
The ‘five tales of stateless, asylum, arrest, settlement and home’ form a disturbing slice in the second issue of volume 80 of Meanjin’s winter 2021 edition. As editor Jonathan Green points out: “The boundaries of the state are elusive and arbitrary. Beyond and between them is a void”. He then goes on to elaborate.
He reflects after gazing from his workday window into several others opposite inside a hotel now co-opted as a detention centre. “A prison for men who fled one state under duress and are yet to find the comfort of belonging in another.”
Green ponders about them being “homeless in a powerful and punitive sense. In this room: Australia, and all the formal, legislated social comforts our state affords. Over there, just out of reach: a no man’s land, liminal and constrained”.
“These have been written by men and women who have left one in the hope of finding the other. Across the way, other stories remain words in progress. Let’s hope we hear them told.”
“The world knows that the Australian immigration process is very tough.” In the magazine’s cover feature Still Lives, five people (Khan, Hafsar, Aziyah, Jasmin and Abbas) now resident in Australia and New Zealand tell in vivid first-hand accounts the stories of lives stilled by statelessness or detention, and lives settled in a new home and a sense of belonging.
In Monopolies of the Australian Mind, Mark Pesce considers the recent battles between the Australian Government and the world’s major players in social media and the online world, an epoch-defining clash, he argues, between state sovereignty and technological monopoly.
Anna Spargo-Ryan looks at recent cases of sexual harassment and violence in and around the national parliament under National Accounts. She concludes “This government cannot deliver action on sexual violence. They have told us to our faces: they simply do not understand how”.
