The man who would not be defeated
He was told he would never be allowed to set foot in Australia; but Behrouz Boochani has had the last laugh
IT’S his eyes that first grab your attention. Those same eyes that stare from the cover of his acclaimed account of life in Manus Prison, No Friend But The Mountains. Dark, brooding, unblinking eyes. Eyes that see everything, like video cameras recording, observing, filing it all away for future reference.
But his eyes are also sending you a message. They are defiant. They are saying to you that he cannot be beaten, that his spirit will not be crushed. And one day he will get his revenge.
His revenge is not achieved through physical violence or assault. Nothing so crude. It is through words. The words he first tapped out painstakingly on a mobile phone that became the first insight we got to the horror of the imprisonment of asylum seekers on Manus Island. Because they could lock him up, strand him on a remote island in the Pacific, but they could never stop those words from escaping.
Those words first appeared in newspapers and later formed No Friend But The Mountains, and now he is a free man, they flow from his lips and from his fingers.
He is Behrouz Boochani. Journalist, poet, film maker, author. Refugee. Human rights activist. The man who Peter Dutton said would never be allowed to set foot in Australia. But here he is, on the stage at Solidarity Hall inside Melbourne’s glorious Trades Hall Building, a free man, a successful and famous writer who the Australian government can no longer hurt. A genuine hero in the truest sense of the word.
On the final night of an Australian tour, before rising at 5 the next morning to fly back to New Zealand, which is now his home, Behrouz honours one last commitment to join Arnold Zable for a 90-minute conversation about “the art of resistance”. The event is sold out, the audience filling both downstairs and the mezzanine floor.
It is through Arnold that I became involved in a small way in Behrouz’s life. I already knew of him through those early articles in The Guardian and The Saturday Paper. Articles which revealed the systematic cruelty of life on Manus. The self-harm, the mindless monotony, the primitive living conditions. The murder of Reza Barati.
Arnold is a writer, a storyteller, a humanitarian. The son of Polish Jewish refugees, he is also a remarkable activist, a man who will not take no for an answer, whose mind is constantly whirring with ideas, a source of boundless energy and optimism. I had never met Arnold before, but when he got in contact and asked me, on behalf of my union, to help in the campaign to free Behrouz, it was impossible to refuse.
And so began our journey. Arnold introduced me to Janet Galbraith, a poet and the founder of Writing Through Fences and the selfless friend of dozens of asylum seekers trapped in limbo; and to Hoda Afshar, an Iranian born photographer whose stunning black and white images of Behrouz have become almost iconic.
We would meet sporadically, the four of us, in my office to plot out a campaign that included open letters, petitions, meetings with government officials and politicians.
At one stage, we organised for Behrouz to be issued with an International Federation of Journalists press card, a small acknowledgement that he represented the finest qualities of journalism: courage, the pursuit of truth, a commitment to the public’s right to know, and a determination to hold the powerful to account. We managed to get the card as far as the ABC bureau in Port Moresby, but efforts to have it conveyed to Manus Island were foiled several times. Somehow it got to Behrouz in the end.
Many times I wondered what was the purpose of these meetings. How could the four of us in Melbourne make any difference when successive Australian governments had a bipartisan stance of not allowing asylum seekers who arrived by boat to settle here. For almost two decades, refugees had been a political football, and it seemed nothing would convince those in power to change. And Behrouz was just one of several thousand asylum seekers being held overseas. It all seemed futile. But Arnold and Janet never gave up.
The re-election of the Coalition Government in 2019 was a particular low point as much of our planning had been predicated on Labor winning the election that year. It was at this stage that the journalist Peter Greste, who had himself experienced lengthy imprisonment in Egypt, told us that hope was dangerous, toxic even, because what can be worse than hope that is not delivered upon?
But Arnold never gave up plotting, and at one of those post-election meetings he arrived with a twinkle in his eyes and described a plan to get Behrouz to New Zealand that seemed so outlandish that it was hard to take seriously. By this stage, Behrouz was a published author, No Friend But The Mountains was both a best-seller and an award winner, and the detention centre had been closed down. But Behrouz still remained trapped on Manus Island.
And then, without warning, in November 2019, the news broke that Behrouz Boochani had landed in New Zealand. Arnold’s plan had worked, and it was only fitting that our union paid his airfare to fly to Christchurch to be united with Behrouz for his first weekend of freedom.
Now here he is three years later in Melbourne. Behrouz has spoken at Parliament House, appeared live on national television on Q+A, and once again it is Arnold who conceived of this final event on Monday night. We had little more than a fortnight to organise it, but as explained earlier, when Arnold asks you to do something, it’s almost impossible to say no.
I sit below the stage with my camera and stare through my lens at Behrouz’s dark eyes and notice one more aspect that must be mentioned. They are haunted. Haunted and hunted. Always suspicious, wary, on guard. They are eyes that have seen so much suffering.
But not defeated. Never defeated.
