Cirrus@Austlit

'Australians haven’t had the present-day European experience of refugees on our streets. If families were napping outside our houses and walking single file along the highways, holding plastic bags containing all they own, thousands stuck in limbo at train stations, in squares - Melbourne’s Federation Square, a few centimetres between bodies and not one untaken bit of sandstone panel, summer, winter, they’re still there - if the living and the dead washed up at Trigg, on Clovelly, places our children go in bathers and arm floaties, how would it have been different? Would it have been different?' (Introduction)