Offshore Husband Quotes

Harsh times require difficult high-risk decisions. My grandmother was born in February 1884 on a small island off the coast of Norway. On the day of her christening, her father sighted a swirl of fish offshore. A heaven-sent gift for extra mouths to feed in a lean winter? He and his partner rowed out despite the waves. They hoisted their nets again and again, until the boat was full. Should they persist or go home? The fish were still there, and they might not come back, so the men also filled a spare dinghy, connected to their boat by a chain. The wind rose, the dinghy flipped, the chain could not be cut, and both boats went down. My great-grandmother was helpless onshore, holding her newborn daughter as her husband drowned. Optimism and boldness are often worthwhile, but occasionally they are fatal. The perils of risk-taking in a harsh environment may help to explain why my great-grandfather’s surviving descendants have tendencies to anxiety and pessimism.

One unintended consequence of this change was that the boats arriving after October 1999 carried an increased number of women and children. Presumably these women and children would not have risked the hazardous journey in the past because their husbands and fathers once recognised as refugees would have been entitled to fly them safely to Australia in the foreseeable future. Whereas only 127 children came on boats in the two years before the October 1999 changes, there were 1,844 children on boats after those changes and prior to the Tampa affair. After the Tampa incident the firebreak was further consolidated by denying the holders of temporary protection visas any prospect of permanent visas with the right to sponsor family if the applicants could have availed themselves of protection in a transit port where they had stayed more than seven days. Of the 1,609 persons held offshore since the Tampa incident, 368 of them have been children. Sadly, these aspects of the firebreak set up an attraction rather than a deterrent for women and children to join their men on leaky boats headed for Australia.

In the distance lay Fort McHenry, the site where, just offshore, “The Star Spangled Banner” was conceived. The coming of the dawn’s early light, which had awoken Francis Scott Key (himself an enslaver) to thoughts of the “land of the free and the home of the brave,