Until West Island found its happy home with Otago University Press, it was rejected by one or two major trade publishers. An odd thing to note in an afterword – except that the reasons are pertinent to the subject of the book. It’s a New Zealand book, said the Australian publisher. It’s an Australian book, said the New Zealand equivalent. Australians don’t want to read about New Zealanders, said the Australian. Vice versa, said the New Zealander.
The two countries were at one time so much closer than they are now. If any of our five subjects was alive today, how sad they would be about the major trans-Tasman stories featuring in our media in the past couple of years. On 25 July 2018 Radio New Zealand reported that there are more New Zealanders than people of any other nationality languishing in the infamous Australian immigration detention centres. Joanne Cox, spokeswoman for the organisation Oz Kiwi, explained that in accordance with changes to the Australian Migration Act in December 2014, many New Zealanders who have lived in Australia since childhood face detention and deportation for crimes committed many years earlier. This so-called ‘bad character law’ gives officials the power to cancel visas of suspected or convicted criminals. Special attention is given to those who have done more than a year-long stretch of imprisonment or who were convicted of sex offences.
In June 2018 News Hub reported on a 17-year-old boy who is being held in Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation (MITA), which is supposed to be for adults only. At 17, the detainee is still legally a child. His detention is in direct contradiction of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. He is denied access to his computer and cellphone, and MITA is around nine hours’ drive away from his family. His one previous crime was of a non-violent nature. A few weeks after this story broke, the Guardian ran an article featuring New Zealand’s Acting Prime Minister Winston Peters speaking of more than a thousand Kiwis forcibly deported from Australia since 2016.
In that year Greg Barns from the Australian Lawyers’ Alliance predicted that New Zealanders would be sent home in their thousands: in other words, the figure given by Winston Peters was only the first trickle. The statistics are disturbing – roughly 23 detainees are deported each month. Forty per cent of those returning re-offend within months of arrival. The New York Times reported that more than 60 per cent of those deported are Māori or Pacific Islanders. The men repatriated – and they are predominantly men – frequently find themselves isolated and alone in New Zealand. Many have Australian accents, no family in Aotearoa to help them and no immediate means of earning a living. There has been at least one reported suicide. These people think of Australia as home, even though it is a home that no longer wants them. In the detention camps they call themselves the 501s, naming themselves after the clause in the change to the Immigration Act.
Just these few facts and figures speak volumes. Despite decades – centuries – of immigration from all over the world, Australia is racist. Representation in government by either the Indigenous people or those who grew up in households that spoke languages other than English is miniscule. The lucky country feels itself under siege. It is a global phenomenon, and New Zealand, it must be said, is not immune either. All over the world countries feel themselves plagued by unwanted arrivals, whether they are ‘boat people’, or desperate evacuees travelling overland in the face of climate change and geopolitical unrest.
Australia’s situation, then, is not unique. But do they really have to turn against their nearest neighbour?
They have many reasons for doing so. Long-term resentment of migrants gaining New Zealand citizenship only to use it to get into Australia through the ‘back door’; legions of young Kiwis getting into trouble on their first step away from home – and, equally, New Zealanders ousting Australians from top positions in commerce, media, the arts, industry, politics, sport, almost every field of human endeavour possible. It is well beyond the scope of this book to try to pick apart the reasons for our falling out of love, but they’re behaving as if they hate us. When we are serious about becoming Australians we have to prove that all our links with New Zealand are broken – no property owned and no bank accounts held. Individually we have to earn a minimum of A$53,000 for three years before we can apply for permanent residency. Teenage children, taken across the Tasman as babes-in-arms or toddlers, are unable to access tertiary education without paying enormous fees. The situation, in light of our shared history, is barbaric.
In 2016 HarperCollins Australia published a nice fat novel called Jarulan by the River. It is a big, sprawling saga about a trans-Tasman family written by a Gold Coast chick called Lily Woodhouse. She is Australian. And younger than me. After the book was published, I did all my radio interviews in an Australian accent. Sometimes the interviewer knew I was not really Lily Woodhouse. Sometimes, depending on whether they’d bothered to read the guff sent to them by the publisher, they thought she was the real deal. It was great fun and also, in retrospect, a strange thing to do. Maybe a little mad. I tried it out for a while, a return to the life I might have had if I’d stayed in Australia and not come back to New Zealand. Then Lily wrote another book, but the publisher knocked it back on account of her first book not selling in the numbers required. So my experiment is over before I’ve even earned my first 53 thousand.
I will live happily in New Zealand for the rest of my life. I know that now, as I zoom towards 60. But I miss Australia. I miss our son and youngest daughter who live there. I miss my dear West Island émigrée Rosie Scott who made her life there as a well-loved writer, mentor and social activist. She died on 4 May 2017.
15 August 2018