Julianne O’Brien
Houri, a 28-year-old Iranian primary school teacher, is floating in an inner tube in the shark-infested waters of the Indian Ocean. She holds up her six-month baby son to the Australian Navy officers on board one of two small crafts deployed by HMAS Albany. Although she is speaking a foreign language her meaning is clear: “Take my baby! Take my baby!”
It’s July 16, 2013. In eight weeks Tony Abbott will become prime minister and enact his “Stop
the Boats” policy.
Houri, her husband and her two tiny children had boarded their boat, number 795, in Bogor, Indonesia, with about 150 other asylum seekers from Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, heading toward the Australian territory of Christmas Island. The price paid to the “Ferryman”? $3000 a head. All knew it would take a dangerous two days on the water. But for some – at least four – it would be fatal. Is there any greater act of faith than getting on a dangerous boat and asking a foreign country for refuge?
Mid-journey, boat 795 springs a leak. Boys and men take shifts bailing rising water from the hull using only plastic soup bowls. All belongings are jettisoned to lessen the weight.
Someone flings Houri’s bag overboard before she can cry out that it contains the baby’s
formula, all he had to eat.
The last moments are witnessed and photographed by the Australian Navy. Refugees cling to the boat as it perches vertically on the sea. A hysterical 42-year-old Iranian woman has a heart attack and drops into the ocean. Then, without warning, the craft suddenly capsizes and disappears.
Houri’s husband, in another inner tube with their toddler son, cries out to his wife, but the towering waves make it impossible to see her. But he does see an eight-year-old girl from his own village, Kapurchal. He knows her name, her family, he knows her face. Unfathomable face. But she is out of reach. Then a brute wave erases her. He will see her face in his nightmares for the next eight years, before, for his sanity, he finally lets her go.
Houri, her husband and her two infants are pulled alive from the water. She has nothing but her wedding ring.
On that boat, Houri befriends a 20-year-old man who, in the chaos, has saved a baby. The navy personnel give him a nappy and Houri shows him how to put it on the infant. They get word that the baby’s mother, father and brother are alive and on the other rescue vessel, HMAS Warramunga.
That baby, now a year 8 Adelaide schoolgirl, celebrated her Australian citizenship last November, alongside her parents and brother.
It’s now 2026. Houri’s two beautiful sons, now teenagers, have come from school into their lovely Caroline Springs home, jousting loudly in English and throwing their backpacks down the white tiles of the spacious hall. She brings the boys their favourite Persian dessert made with honey, saffron and rose water.
And she thanks her god. Not everyone, that day, made it out of the water.
Julianne O’Brien is a Melbourne writer.
