Author’s foray into the future

A NEW immigration detention centre near Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula requires detainees to work in a factory to pay off their migration debt in a new novel by a leading Tasmanian author.

In his third novel, Rohan Wilson, 42, casts his mind 50 years into the future when corporations prey on climate refugees from low-lying countries swamped by sealevel rise and relocated to Tasmania. While Daughter of Bad

Times is fictional, the author said it was not a stretch to describe its chilling circumstances.

“There’s almost nothing in the book that’s imaginary,” Wilson said. “It all already exists in certain parts of the world.”

The multi award-winning writer, who grew up in Launceston and now lives in Brisbane, says he remembers driving past the former Pontville Detention Centre, an old army camp near Hobart used earlier this decade to house asylum seekers.

“To see these refugees arrive and be rolled into these facilities made me start thinking ‘what comes next’,” Wilson said. “Given the current economic climate, it doesn’t seem at all like a stretch to think that those refugees could be put to work by a government to help pay for the cost [and that] a lot of people in the community would [support that].”

Wilson was in Hobart recently to attend a launch of his book, hosted at Fullers Bookshop by The Australian newspaper’s literary editor Stephen Romei. The author won The Aus

tralian/ Vogel Literary Award in 2011 with his colonial frontier tale The Roving Party, and followed up in 2014 with To

Name Those Lost, set in Launceston in the 1870s.

Wilson’s other prizes include the Tasmanian Literary Award, The Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature and the NSW Premier’s Literary Award.

Daughter of Bad Times is published by Allen & Unwin. Read the whole story in tasweekend today

To see these refugees arrive and be rolled into these facilities made me start thinking ‘what comes next’