A review by emkoshka
Between Us by Clare Atkins

4.0

The way Australia has treated asylum seekers and refugees in the past decade will surely go down as one of the great criminal shames of our history. This young adult novel does its bit to explore the mandatory detention system from the perspectives of three people: a young female Iranian detainee, a Vietnamese detention centre worker and his teenage son. Their lives increasingly intersect and intertwine, underlined by the tension, uncertainty and casual brutality and absurdity of life in detention. It's a quick read but one that I had to put down several times because of its intensity. Atkins doesn't shy away from revealing some of the horrors of life in detention (self-harm and suicide attempts, depression, dehumanisation, deprivation) but I suspect what she alludes to is only the tip of the iceberg. As she writes in the Acknowledgements section, the Border Force Act has effectively silenced anyone who works in detention centres from speaking out about what they witness there. Hello, authoritarianism. How ironic that Australia is narrowing into the very type of country that so many of our asylum seekers and refugees have fled in pursuit of freedom, equality and hope. The greatest threat to our national security is not the people we deprive of rights and freedoms, lock away and forget, but the complacency with which we willingly give up our own rights and freedoms.