By Kathy Evans

March 12, 2021 — 4.00pm

Behrouz Boochani grew up with music as a second heartbeat. In the place where he lived, its rhythmic synchronicity marked time and occasion and gave voice to submerged feelings. And then one fateful day in 2013, it stopped.

That was the day the Kurdish-Iranian writer, academic and filmmaker was incarcerated in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, where all attempts at creativity were brutally quashed. Boochani recalls witnessing a fellow refugee clinging to his guitar, having it snatched from his hands by security guards. “It was surreal and horrific,” he says. “He was a musician; he relied on his guitar to survive, to feel freedom and find some beauty. Music had an important role in our lives there, in those circumstances.”

For six years Boochani lived in the dark existential uncertainty that defined life on the island. He chronicled his torment in the book No Friend but the Mountains, secretly tapping into a mobile phone in his native language, Farsi, and sending it via WhatsApp to be collated and translated, laying bare the dehumanising effects of life in detention. The memoir was critically acclaimed and won numerous prizes, including the Victorian Prize for Literature in 2019. Boochani is now a prominent figure in Australian history without ever having set foot on the mainland.

And his voice is about to get louder. The book is the inspiration for Australian composer Luke Styles’ symphonic song cycle of the same name. Using poems and lines from the text, it goes beyond Boochani’s harrowing experience on Manus to explore wider themes of incarceration and the search for a safe haven; recurring aspects of Australia’s story, both recent and past.

Boochani’s story is the most recent iteration of an important part of Australia’s narrative, according to Styles, who was drawn to the parallels that exist between the islands of Australia and Manus; both beautiful, remote and a distant paradise to many, while also being places of isolation and imprisonment. As much as Australian identity is shaped around optimism and discovery, it is also moulded from despair, disappointment and harshness. Incarceration, he reminds us, is very much part of our tapestry.

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