'The subject is very topical. No More Boats tackles the fear of refugees head on, portraying the anxieties of a man who was once a migrant himself, brought to breaking point by the Tampa crisis, when the nation itself is thrown into a xenophobic frame of mind.
'It is 2001. 438 refugees sit in a boat called Tampa off the shoreline of Australia while the TV and radio scream out that the country is being flooded, inundated, overrun by migrants. Antonio Martone, once a migrant himself, has been forced to retire, his wife has moved in with the woman next door, his daughter runs off with strange men, his deadbeat son is hiding in the garden smoking marijuana. Amidst his growing paranoia, the ghost of his dead friend shows up and commands him to paint ‘No More Boats’ in giant letters across his front yard. The Prime Minister of Australia keeps telling Antonio that we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstance in which they come, but Antonio’s not sure he wants to think about all those things that led him to get on a boat and come to Australia in the first place. A man and a nation unravel together.' (Publication summary)
Dedication: For My Father who came here on a boat.
Epigraph:
'For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share'
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia Fair'
'In Western Sydney, writers such as Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Felicity Castagna have produced novels written from the working-class and multicultural perspectives that are a far cry from mainstream visions of Sydney. Ahmed’s The Tribe (2014) is a multigenerational saga of a Lebanese Australian family that examines ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion, and exclusion, which touch, but also exceed, identities of ethnicity and religion. Castagna’s novel No More Boats (2017), explores how an Italian migrant to Australia in the 1960s becomes, in the 2000s, a fervent conservative opponent of further migration to Australia by people from Asia and the Middle East. This chapter shows Western Sydney as the place where twenty-first century Australian literature is most vitally happening.' (Publication abstract)
' This chapter provides an overview of Australian suburban literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, discussing the history of the subject matter, the reasons for the scarcity of Australian suburban literature published before 1950, major works and writers of the genre, various approaches to the subject, primary concerns of the literature and the rise of Australian suburban literature after 1960, arguing that Australian literature set in the suburbs has flourished during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The chapter provides close analysis of Lachlan Brown’s Limited Cities (2012) and Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats (2017) before concluding with the assertion that Australian suburban literature is fully established, highly significant and enjoying a creative peak.'
Source: Abstract
'As compared to American or British literature, Australian literature has had far fewer overtly political novels or poems, particularly those attuned to actual electoral politics or public ideological configurations. Yet recently more concrete references to actual political figures occur in poetry, and contemporary Australian poets have spotlighted not only the sheer fact of the politician but the way the political affects the limits and conditions of the literary. In fiction by Peter Rose, Ellen Van Neerven, and Alexis Wright, fictional Prime Ministers represent possibilities and dangers of the political imaginary, while Charlotte Wood, Michelle De Kretser, Sara Dowse, and Alice Nelson pursue a literary path of writing around the nation rather than in or of it, showing how politics can at once be tacit and focal, interstitial and implicit. Importantly, these writers show that politics cannot just be included in narrative but can operate as a narrative.'
Source: Abstract.
'From the first few pages of this novel the reader is left in no doubt about Castagna's views on Australia's immigration policy.'
'Six Degrees from the City is a podcast about writing in Western Sydney, hosted by the writer and critic Fiona Wright. In each episode features a writer based in or hailing from the western suburbs of Sydney, one of the most diverse – as well as most maligned – areas in Australia, and the site of some of our most interesting and challenging literature and conversations. This episode features the prize-winning novellist (and newly-turned playwright) Felicity Castagna.' (Introduction)
'In Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats, we are repeatedly reminded that the novel’s locale, Parramatta, marks the shifting aqueous site in Sydney’s Western suburban landscape where ‘saltwater meets fresh’. Historically, this is the place where Australia’s early colonial explorers, travelling up the Parramatta River from Sydney Cove in 1788, could take their boats no further. It is also one of numerous sites of resistance to European invasion by the Aboriginal warrior, Pemulwuy. In Castagna’s hands, this rich and multi-layered history of place is embodied in the topography of the Parramatta River and its intricate estuarine environment, creating a wonderfully nuanced metaphor.' (Introduction)
'The Miles Franklin award is famously for “a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases”. That’s a very broad palette, yet for most of the award’s existence — 1957 to the present — it has recognised a rather narrow field of “Australian life”.' (Introduction)
