There is a Bugarrigarra story from north-west Australia about spirit children, the rayi, who emerge from the water to create future children in the minds of dreamers. Among other things, the story suggests that rights and obligations can be inherited as well as bestowed. The story is significant to Paddy Roe, a Nyigina man from Broome in Western Australia, whose authority and custodianship is linked to a vision of a pregnant stingray he experienced with his wife, Mary Pikalli. In part, the vision conveyed the future coming of children in his family.

If ‘Omelas’ shows us that people can act in wilful ignorance of inequity, it also shows us that people are entirely capable of forgetting inequity altogether. Further still, it suggests that those conscious of the child in the tower are morally capable of calculating its impact upon the world and proceeding anyway. By personifying this calculation of human life, Le Guin shows us that injustice is often a product of a system of justice.

“I hope one day to welcome Behrouz Boochani to Australia as what I believe he has shown himself to be in these pages. A writer. A great Australian writer”, Richard Flanagan writes in the foreword to Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But The Mountains (2018). In a comment designed to spark public conversation regarding Australia’s ethical obligation to the incarcerated immigrants on islands inside and outside our coastline, Flanagan puts into play the tenuous category of the ‘Australian writer’.