I wrote up some of the most surprising facts that I’ve come across in putting together my comedy show Boundless Plains To Share for The Age and you can read them here.
The issue of what to do with desperate people who arrive on our shores on leaky boats has plagued Australian politics for more than four decades. In January 1969, eight West Papuans – later dubbed “raft men” – fled the Indonesian occupation of West Irian and set out for sanctuary. A month later they landed at Moa Island in the Torres Strait. The group’s leader Alexander Toembay declared: “I hope that Australian people give us political protection and allow us to live in peace.”
We didn’t. We whacked them on a plane to New Guinea and their claims for political asylum were quickly processed and denied. All eight were then returned to West Irian, to the very government they were running from.
At the same time we were dumping border-crossing West Papuan refugees in a poorly resourced camp on a delightful little getaway named Manus Island. There the refugees held little hope of gaining employment or education and they become depressed and unmotivated and called their new home “Devil’s Island”. Good thing we learnt our lesson there, then.