Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is the first major literary work to emerge from Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime in the Pacific. This essay examines Boochani’s landmark poetic-philosophical memoir for the way it exposes the systematic torture inside Manus Prison, Papua New Guinea. If, in the 1990s, the field of diaspora studies was reinvigorated by the apparently accelerated movement of people, money, and products, what purchase is a diasporic framework in the face of proliferating regimes of immobility? The chapter proceeds by thinking through three tropes common to diasporic narratives: first is the account of oppression that forces flight from the homeland; second are practical and ethical questions of hospitality/hostility, inclusion/exclusion, in the land of arrival; and third is the politics of collective identity in relation to the homeland. In short, how might we think of diaspora with its seeming opposite, detention?

This chapter outlines “refugee ecology” as a concept through which to engage how refugees are depicted in relation to the environment. Focusing on portrayals of water, it compares recent media portrayals of refugees with refugee narratives to understand how maritime entities shape understandings of refugees. While more mainstream accounts often depict waterways as sites of danger from which refugees must be rescued, refugee narratives offer a wider array of aqueous representations. Examining Nam Le’s short story “The Boat” suggests that, for Vietnam War refugees, rivers, seas, and oceans are not simply merciless forces that threaten refugee life. Rather, they are also repositories of the dead, archives of memory, and spiritual forces that reflect intimate human–nonhuman ties and reveal Vietnam’s deep seafaring past. Interpreted through the lens of refugee ecology, “The Boat” reveals how mariner history and knowledge are critical to the survival and emergence of diasporas.

From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.