By now, most of us should be fully aware of the arrival of refugees on European shores, and by extension, Australia. The descriptors used for these movements of large masses of people across land and sea are often described in fluid terms: a surge, a flood, a wave, a flow; a rising tide that is about to break open the dams and threaten the biodiversity of our precious ecosystems. This language isn't just tremendously invalidating and dehumanising: when scores of migrants are either locked up in detention centres or dying at sea, it helps to gloss over the fact of their mere existence.