Free or low-cost higher education is a reality in most European countries and in many others worldwide. It is not an unfeasible pipe dream, nor a gross mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. It’s something that developed countries should be able to provide for their citizens. Tertiary education should not just be a place to spit out a workforce as quickly and efficiently as possible, but a place for people to develop, to discover, and to grow into the best versions of themselves.

Whether the deal is done or dumb, it seems politics is hyper bent on exploiting the defenceless for conservative votes, real or imagined. As a result, all over the world, refugees and asylum seekers are at the mercy of a series of craven and/or villainous bureaucrats and ministers. (See Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s recent comments on the fate of 7500 asylum seekers in Australia: ‘If people think they can rip the Australian taxpayer off, if people think that they can con the Australian taxpayer, then I'm sorry, the game’s up.’)

From my position as an Indian immigrant in Australia, a writer and scholar, Questions of Travel provided a selfie of a country that I and people like me could retweet and circulate, contributing to the flow of the literary selfie. In this book I saw a Sri Lankan Australian author writing about Sri Lanka, Australia and our larger world: a self enacting self. A text saying ‘see me showing you me’. Not through autobiography, but through the work that only fiction can do.

The perception that white Australians have the authority to dictate non-white identities fits more broadly into what anthropologist Ghassan Hage refers to as a ‘white national fantasy’. According to this fantasy, white Australians assume the role of ‘spatial managers’ of the Australian nation space. This fantasy does not prohibit the mere presence of non-white individuals. Rather, central to it is the assumption that white Australians have the right to ‘direct the traffic’.

In Australia – a wealthy and democratic country – we have a wealth of ‘shit’. But most of ‘it’ is invisible: the imprisoned refugees hidden in the torture prisons on Nauru and Manus islands; the homeless people of Melbourne who will soon be removed from the city’s centre; Indigenous peoples whose individuality and personhood is obscured by the tabloid spectre of blackness that links Indigeneity to alcoholism, barbarity, and violence.