No More Boats
Felicity Castagna
No More Boats
Felicity Castagna
The new novel by Felicity Castagna, whose previous book, The Incredible Here and Now, won the 2015 Prime Minister’s Award for Young Adult Fiction and was shortlisted for the CBCA and NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.
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.
Review
George Delaney
No More Boats follows two previous works of fiction by Australian author Felicity Castagna: a collection of short stories and a YA novel, which won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. This latest is a family drama about an unconventional breakdown, suffered by Antonio Martone, a post-war Italian migrant who has been pushed into retirement after an accident at his building site, in which he was injured and his best friend killed.
When we think about migration and diaspora, we often dwell on memory; current scholarship is interested in intergenerational memory and inherited cultures. Castagna, very astutely, draws a link between migrant histories and the forgetting and distancing which happens between first- and second-generation migrants as they encounter social and economic pressures to fit another cultural mould. The results are explored as the Martone family’s fundamental misunderstandings of each other unravel against the backdrop of the Tampa crisis in 2001. The wave of bigotry and fear that flows out of Canberra and into the streets of Parramatta adds to Antonio’s confusion and isolation, as he is seduced by an odd group of right-wing troublemakers in his front room. Antonio’s incongruous racism, portrayed as a sort of madness, rocks his family and mirrors the dislocating and alienating events happening in politics – the effects of which we are still encountering now.
No More Boats is a striking work of suburban Australian realism. Though the premise seems to belong to an absurdist novel, it’s grim and absolutely relevant to our present, disappointingly similar as it is to the new-old rhetoric of assimilation and blatant xenophobia that is hurled around by politicians now. Castagna makes an essential point about the connection between our long history of cognitive dissonance when it comes to settlement, migration and dispossession, and how necessary it is that we try to remember and connect in order to maintain our humanity.
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