Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia - Softcover

Julie Kalman (author) & Ruth Balint (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1742236898 ISBN 13: 9781742236896

Publisher: NewSouth Publishing, 2021

Synopsis

‘The sea was rough, waves a few metres, falling on top of us. We were just waiting and hoping and praying that we were going to make it.’ – Taozen, proud Australian, proud Hazara

Smuggled offers a previously unseen glimpse into the dangerous and shadowy world of people smuggling. It shares harrowing true stories of those fleeing persecution to seek asylum and reshapes our idea of those –sometimes family, sometimes mafia – who help them find it.

People smugglers have such currency in Australian politics yet they remain unknowable figures in our migration history. But beyond the rhetoric lies a rich past that reaches far from the maritime borders of our island continent – to Jews escaping the Holocaust, Eastern Europeans slipping through the Iron Curtain, ‘boat people’ fleeing the Vietnam War, and refugees escaping unthinkable violence in the Middle East and Africa.

Based on revealing personal interviews, Smuggled provides a compelling insight into a defining yet unexplored part of Australian history.

About this title

About the Author

Ruth Balint is associate professor of history at the University of New South Wales. She teaches and writes about forced migration and refugees in the twentieth century. Her family were refugees from Europe after the Second World War. Her latest book, The Last Million: Displaced Persons and the Quest to Leave Europe, is published by Cornell University Press, due out in 2021. She and Julie are old friends and are often mistaken for sisters.

Julie Kalman is associate professor of history at Monash University. She writes about the history of French Jews, after the French Revolution and also following the Second World War. She is the child of migrants from Europe, and she has researched and published on topics related to her own history, including the history of migration to Australia, and the Eurovision Song Contest.

Edition details

• Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1742236898
• ISBN 13: 9781742236896
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288