Table Talk: Bob Ellis on Film and Theatre

(An extract from The Year It All Fell Down, co-written with Damian Spruce and Stephen Ramsey)

On Tuesday, February 14, Mardian El Ibrahimy flew for ten hours from Christmas Island to Sydney, on the same plane as the frozen corpse of his eight-month-old daughter Zahra. She, his wife Zmar and his son Nzar, had drowned when a boat sank and was filmed enormously heaving and lurching and splitting and passengers falling off it, near rocks in tumultuous seas and furious weather off the island on December 23. Zmar and Nzar had not been found and Zahra, he had been lately told, would not now get a proper Muslim funeral — a simple white cloth over a known, beloved and farewelled face on a stretcher unenclosed by a coffin, and open to the sky. ‘He’s very bad, very bad, very upset, very angry,’ said his brother Uday, who lived in Strathfield. ‘They’re two months in the fridge.’

They needed not just to see the body, Jemiah Daoud of the Social Justice Network explained, ‘but to wash the body, clean the body, dress the body and say goodbye to the body.’ The surviving families feared the bodies could have been interfered with, or suffered ugly decay and this was, literally, a cover-up.

After the tragedy, one witnessed by millions in epic, shocking detail within an hour of the event (a man in the water holding up an infant, calling out, in English, ‘baby dying!’ and then both disappearing), Prime Minister Gillard gave a memorial speech in which she named none of the dead, and none of the surviving bereaved, and extended her condolences only to those Australians who had watched the shipwreck through telescopes, binoculars and phone cameras, and felt guilty about not having been able to help in the ten or twenty minutes it had been possible to make, perhaps, a difference. She made no particular mention of any of the dead, the widowed, the orphaned, the traumatised, bankrupted and bereaved, and then herded them into a crowded funeral unsuited, and insulting, to their religion.

To this funeral came Sinan Acklacky, a nine-year-old Iranian, to bury his father but not his mother and brother, whose bodies had not emerged from the sea, though he waited for them every day on a hill overlooking it for six weeks. Very upset by the graveside, he kept saying, ‘I just want to be with my father, I just want to be with my father,’ and trying to throw himself into the grave. His many relatives in Sydney asked that he be allowed to stay with them but this was denied him, and he was dragged away from the grave, given ten minutes with his newfound kinfolk, ordered onto a bus and into a detention centre where he slept, or did not sleep, alone, then encouraged with a cattle prod (a detail some found hard to believe but seems to be true) onto another bus, and an aeroplane which was delayed for thirty-six hours in Broome, in whose airport lounge he slept, or did not sleep, and back to Christmas Island, the last place he wanted to be. There he sat on the same hill waiting for his mother and his brother to come back out of the ocean alive, resolute and unblinking, as before.

The Shadow Minister for Immigration Scott Morrison said the government should not have wasted the taxpayers’ money on the air fares of the refugees to the far-flung funerals of the dead. ‘Any other Australian,’ he said, ‘who wanted to attend a funeral for someone who’d died in tragic circumstances, would have put their hand in their own pocket.’ This was thought a bit much by many Australians and also by his Leader Tony Abbott who, however, praised him for ‘having the guts’ to reveal his true if heartless opinion, and cop criticism for it.

After eight days of public outcry the visibly contorted Immigration Minister Chris Bowen relented, and Sinan was again removed from Christmas Island and flown ten hours to Sydney and made to stay with an auntie, his drowned mother’s sister, who was herself so traumatised by family loss she was frequently hospitalised and medicated and was said to be ‘incapable of looking after him.’

The Prime Minister Julia Gillard then declared that no more children would be so endangered by wild oceans, and their parents would be ‘deterred’ from risking the journey by the threat of lifelong imprisonment in Malaysia, a non-signatory of the Human Rights Convention, if they tried it.

As after the Queensland floods, this coolness in the face of human suffering eroded her vote and she tumbled down into trouble from which, at year’s end, it was thought she would not emerge.