Stories of migration and courage occupy a special place in Australian letters, and four celebrated Australian writers bring their own perspectives to the forces that shape these stories. Arnold Zable, Alice Pung, Behrouz Boochani and André Dao each have urgent things to say about how the best Australian stories are stories of compassion.
Zable believes that the stories of refugee journeys should be regarded as one of the central narratives of Australian literature, but how to tell these stories? ‘One useful way of telling the story in its fullness,’ he says, ‘is to be mindful of three distinct periods, a three-act drama. Act one is “the time before” – once I had a home, once I lived in a town, a village, a city in the country of my birth. Act two is what I would call “the rupture”, the many reasons that lead people to uproot their lives and flee their homelands in search of a new life. This act includes perilous journeys, odysseys, many detours.
