It's a Good Life After All

With the horror of the asylum seeker-carrying wooden fishing boat smashing against rocks in rough seas off Christmas Island playing out across our televisions this morning, perhaps it’s time to readjust my attitude to living in Karratha. It might not have made international news so I will recap: early yesterday morning a tiny wooden fishing boat carrying around 70 asylum seekers from Iran and Iraq crashed into a rocky cliff amid huge waves in one of the coves off Christmas Island, a tiny land mass in Australian waters housing a number of immigration detention centres. In recent years hundreds of refugees have attempted to sail to Australia for a better life, knowing that if they make it to Christmas Island, which is actually closer to Indonesia than Australia, they at least have a shot of being granted asylum status.


Yesterday demonstrated the huge dangers these people are willing to place themselves and their children to escape from their own countries and attempt to provide a better life for their families in a free and prosperous Australia. A camera caught the unfolding events yesterday as the boat was dragged into churning water and thrown against the rocks as if it weighed nothing. As it crashed against the cliff again and again, it began to break up, smashing the wood into smithereens. Men, women and children, some as young as two or three, were catapulted into the huge waves. The number of dead has not been finalised yet but the toll is already up to 28, with others seriously injured. Witnesses told of feeling helpless as they watched children flailing their arms in the air, trying to keep their heads above the water, trying in vain not to get too close to the razor-sharp rocks, screaming and crying for help.

I watched all this from the comfort of my spacious, air-conditioned, three-bedroom house, on my big television, while typing away on my laptop, in the very same free, prosperous Australia that these people are so desperate to live in. Whenever I or anyone else begins to moan about the flies, the isolation, the heat, the lack of things to do here, I will remember those people who were so desperate to come to this country that they travelled for hundreds of kilometres in a tiny wooden boat, risking their lives in the process. They would gladly swat away a few flies, sit under a scorching sun, find things to do amongst themselves for entertainment, work every day of the week if they had to, if it meant they could live in a country that offered opportunities for those willing to take them, that provided good education for their children, a country where they could feel safe and free from persecution. We really don’t have it so bad here. We are the lucky ones.