Book Review
Perhaps
one of the most difficult things to cope with in our human
relationships
is a lack of truth telling. It’s not
just that most of us don’t like being conned. Outright
lies or the distortion of the truth result in the break-down
of trust between people and ultimately the failure of relationships.
The
lack of truth telling is far more than a personal problem and
has come to be one that has the potential of damaging us
as a society. This reality has been made clear by the recent
publication of Dark Victory by the journalists David Marr and
Marian Wilkinson.
The authors
have done us a service by recounting the dramatic chain of
events in 2001 that began when the people
aboard a
sinking boat were taken aboard the Tampa, a Norwegian cargo
ship. These
asylum seekers, and others, were to be detained in Nauru
and Papua New Guinea as part of the so-called “Pacific
solution”.
With access
to information that resulted from a subsequent Senate inquiry
and other sources we now have a
more complete
version
of the events than what was offered to us at the time.
Underlying these events was a manipulation of aspects of the
law, a
misrepresentation of events to the Australian people, a
misuse of the Australian
defence forces and the use of the public service in a political
campaign.
For many
we remember these events because of the shameful way in which
the asylum seekers were treated. But
we as
a nation
were also profoundly harmed by the events in which normal
standards of truth telling and accountability were lost.
As the country
was in the lead-up to a national election the temptation
to fudge the issues was great. Unfortunately lost standards
are
hard to
recover.
Dark
Victory is an important record of the
working of government. The events are recounted clearly and
in simple
statements
of fact. The prosaic style highlights the way in which
truth of
the events was denied or manipulated.
What Dark
Victory reveals is that when the Afghans were transferred
to the
Manoora they were not housed
in the
accommodation
section but were locked below deck on the tank deck,
the ship’s
garage. Here there was no daylight, no relief from
the stinking heat or the incessant noise of the engines,
no privacy. They
had access to three bathrooms from ten at night to
six in the morning for 438 people. After eight days
below deck the Afghans
were allowed onto the helideck for a couple of hours
twice a week.
As it has
been famously noted (John 8:32) truth and freedom go together
for all of us,
asylum seekers
or citizens
of this nation.
In the events covered in this book we all lose
out.
Dark
Victory,
D Marr & M Wilkinson, Allen & Unwin,
2003
Kath Luchetti
rsj, Perthville NSW
