The Man Booker prize-winning author Richard Flanagan has called the Nauru files “an extraordinary trove of anonymous short stories” that will continue to be read long after his own work.
In a powerful and provocative keynote address delivered at the Melbourne writers’ festival, Flanagan said he had planned to speak about writers such as Márquez, Baldwin, Carver, Chekhov, Kafka, Tolstoy and Conrad – but then he read the Nauru files.
“It was the most moving Australian writing I had read for some time,” he said. “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 coming decades and even centuries when the works of myself and my colleagues are long forgotten.
“And when people read 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.”
In his speech, titled Does Writing Matter? he said readers of the future would be led to question what sort of people were the Australians of our time. He then read out nine of the 2,116 incident reports that make up the Nauru files.
The reports he read included allegations of asylum seekers detained on Nauru attempting suicide by drinking bleach and insect repellent, of sexual harassment, rape, assault, and the sexual abuse of children.
The final report he read was about a young woman sewing her lips together and guards laughing at her.
Flanagan continued: “Everything has been done to dehumanise asylum seekers. Their names and their stories are kept from us. They live in a zoo of cruelty. 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, who won the Booker in 2014 for The Narrow Road to the Deep North, said a “nation-sized spit hood” was being pulled over Australians and that there was only one real explanation of why the Australian government did what it did: because it could.
But it was too easy, he said, to ascribe the horror of Nauru to “a politician, to a party, or even to our toxic politics”.
“These things have happened because of a more general cowardice and inertia, because of conformity; because it is easier to be blind than to see, to be deaf than to hear, to say things don’t matter when they do. Whether we wish it or not, these things belong to us, are us, and we are diminished because of them.”
He said no Australian was innocent, and that these crimes were being committed in our name. “There is such a thing as a people’s honour. And when it is lost, the people are lost. That is Australia today. If only out of self-respect, we should never have allowed to happen what has.
“Every day that the asylum seekers of Nauru and Manus live in the torment of punishment without end, guilty of no crime, we too become a little less free. In their liberation lies our hope; the hope of a people that can once more claim honour in the affairs of this world.”
