Delivering the inaugural Boisbouvier Lecture at the Melbourne Writers Festival on Thursday evening, award-winning writer Richard Flanagan confessed he had made a last minute change to his planned speech. He had intended to discuss the influence of literary greats on his work. Instead, he selflessly used the platform as a call to action in response to the Nauru Files, leaked by The Guardian, which describe abuse, suicide, self-harm and poor living conditions at offshore detention centres, described by Flanagan as “zoos of cruelty”.
Flanagan sardonically described the report as “the most moving Australian writing I had read for some time,” adding, “This writing has woken me from a slumber too long. It has panicked me. The stories are very short, what might be called in another context flash fiction. Except they are true stories. I suspect they will continue to be read in the coming decades and even centuries when the works of myself and my colleagues are long forgotten.”
The acclaimed author’s tone was unequivocal in its derision of the report, which records accounts of brutality and harm with alarming nonchalance. “These stories – so admirable in their brevity, so controlled in their emotion, so artful in their artlessness. Their use, for example, of the term “name redacted” instead of a character’s actual name to better show what is happening to a stranger, is not an individual act but a universal crime.”
He continued: “Everything has been done to dehumanise asylum seekers. Their names and their stories are kept from us. Their lives are stripped of meaning. And they confront this tyranny – our Australian tyranny – with the only thing not taken from them: their bodies. In their meaningless world, in acts seemingly futile and doomed, they assert the fact that their lives still have meaning. In the last year, what Australian writer has written as eloquently of what Australia has become, as asylum seekers have with petrol and flame, with needle and thread? What Australian writer has so clearly exposed the truth of who we are?”
Flanagan has long been vocal about causes close to his heart. Following his Man Booker Prize win in 2014, for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the author was publically critical of the Abbott Government’s stance on the environment, as well as Federal policies regarding asylum seekers and immigration.
The full transcript of Flanagan's Boisbouvier Lecture is available to read online.
