I got to know them and they kindly read the first draft of Boy Overboard and helped me hugely with details of life in Afghanistan. They had come to Australia as refugees, had been locked up in a detention centre in Western Australia for two years, and then released. I was lucky enough to meet such a family. But most of its people are ordinary families who want to live the same peaceful loving lives we all do. Afghanistan was a violent dangerous place then, and in many ways still is. It was the first time I’d written a story partly set in a place I’d never been to. A story where the people on the boats have names and faces, and as we get to know them, thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and grumpy moments and anxious moments and loving moments. A sort of antidote to the nameless faceless fear one. So I decided to tell a different kind of story.

But I felt it was very unfair of the government and certain media commentators to tell this type of story about people who seemed pretty scared themselves as far as we could glimpse, and miserable and in danger. Which can be lots of fun in the dark in front of a movie screen or curled up late at night with a scary book. It’s kept at a distance so we have to fill in the details in our imagination, and there’s nothing like our imagination to make things scarier. We’re never told its name or its favourite TV show or what it likes to have for breakfast. There’s always a monster or a maniac or an evil presence in this type of story, one we never see up close. I call it the Nameless Faceless Fear story. Gradually I realised we were being told a story, a very familiar story. But still we weren’t getting to meet any of the people ourselves. They were criminals, we were told, health-risks, cheats, queue-jumpers, and some of them, it was claimed, were probably terrorists.īig and scary accusations. Just far-off glimpses.Ĭertain government ministers and media commentators had plenty to say about them. Back then we didn’t know much about who was on those boats, and the government didn’t seem to want us to. For weeks I’d been seeing small overcrowded boats on the TV news. Which is how it was with Jamal and Bibi and Boy Overboard. When I do it’s often because of something that’s happening in the outside world. Usually characters appear in my imagination unexpectedly, seemingly for their own reasons. For me it’s mostly an internal process.īut not entirely. The essence of their story, what happens in their thoughts and feelings as the story unfolds, the ways the characters change by the end of the story, everything grows out of that meeting. Which is really good.Īll my characters first appear in my imagination. I’m Manchester United and I’ve got the ball and everything is good.

Boy overboard by Peter Wells