Hazara Nation

Bruce Elder, reviewer

The human face to the hardships endured by refugees.
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Author Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman
Genre Society/Politics, Biography
Publisher Insight Publications
Pages 259
RRP $24.95
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Robert Hillman is a writer who deserves to be as well known as Winton or Grenville. He is a superb stylist and his unusual book, The Boy In The Green Suit, deserved to win the Australian National Biography Award in 2005.

Now, quietly furious about the Howard government's treatment of refugees and determined to put a human face to the hardships endured by refugees, he has found an Afghani rug-maker, Najaf Mazari, and crafted his personal story into a moving tale of courage and tenacity.

This is the story of how Mazari, when confronted with persecution and possible death at the hands of the Taliban, decided to leave his wife and young child, flee across the border to Pakistan, make his way across the Indonesian archipelago, catch a leaky boat, reach Darwin and then be buffeted by the overtly political and less-than-happy experiences of being transported to Adelaide and the refugee camp at Woomera before being recognised as a legitimate refugee, settling in Melbourne, establishing an Afghan carpet and rug shop and finally bringing his wife and child to Australia.

Hillman never strays from Mazari's voice. Thus the story sounds like a monologue, written down verbatim. But there are subtleties.

It is carefully and artistically structured. And it contains lots of criticisms of the war in Afghanistan and the treatment of refugees.

Here, for example, is a careful critique of both Russia and the US in Afghanistan, heavy with understated sarcasm: "We Afghans had the undesired honour of being among the first human beings on earth to be blown to pieces by this state-of-the-art Russian weaponry."

Here, too, is a sense of the overpowering boredom of waiting in the middle of the Australian desert for some bureaucrat in Canberra to make a decision; of the stupidity of the government. It deserves to be read by everyone who was ashamed at the way Australia treated refugees through the Howard years.