Gerhard Hoffstaedter

Gerhard Hoffstaedter is an Australian Research Council senior research fellow in anthropology at the University of Queensland. He conducts research with refugees in South-East Asia and Australia. He is the author of Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia and co-editor of Urban Refugees: Challenges in Protection, Services and Policy.

Articles by Gerhard Hoffstaedter:

Published in Overland Issue 224 Spring 2016

The limits of compassion

Gerhard Hoffstaedter

This is not the first time a refugee crisis has washed up on the country’s shores: older Malaysians still recall the arrival of tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s. The boats were initially pushed back out to sea, until, after increasing pressure from the international community, the Malaysian government established a refugee camp on the tiny island of Pulau Bidong. Less than one square mile in size, the island was deemed to have a capacity of 4500 – at its peak, it housed over 40,000 refugees.