Congratulations to Ruth Balint and Julie Kalman for the publication of Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia (NewSouth, 2021).
Smuggled recounts the journeys to Australia of refugees and their smugglers of the past seventy years – from Jews escaping the Holocaust, Eastern Europeans slipping through the Iron Curtain, ‘boat people’ fleeing the Vietnam War, to refugees escaping unthinkable violence in the Middle East and Africa. Based on original research and revealing personal interviews, Smuggled marks the first attempt to detach the term “people smuggler” from its pejorative connotations, and provides a compelling insight into a defining yet unexplored part of Australia’s history.