Gotta watch what you say (or read!) in cafes in Geneva!

So I'm here in Geneva at the moment, doing an internship in the United Nations with the Australian Permanent Mission. Yesterday afternoon, one of the other interns and I were sitting in a cafe, having a chat about what was happening, how everything was going etc. On the table in front of me, I had a copy of 'Colloquial Persian', a notebook I'm using to practise my horrible Persian handwriting, and a copy of David Marr & Marian Wilkinson's book 'Dark Victory'. We were mid sentence, when a man in a dark pinstripe suit came up to us and said "I'm going to be presumptuous and ask if you two are interns with the Australian Permanent Mission??". Of course, we were, and he was one of the head honchos in the Mission. He spotted that I was reading 'Dark Victory', and commented that he was on Jane Halton's Tampa Taskforce as a bureaucrat, which placed him at the very core of the source of the shocking shocking terrible horrid bad awful legislation that came out of Tampa! He ALSO assisted in drafting the Migration Act amendments which were enacted to introduce mandatory detention in 1991-2! A very interesting conversation ensued, discussions of the "unofficial" opinions on Tampa of many of the bureaucrats in that particular room, and the current state of the refugee law. Haha how hilarious that at the time I had on the desk that particular book. I mean, really, it could have been ANYTHING else!

If you haven't read Dark Victory, get your hands on it like right now. It's amazing. Here's a link to it... http://www.allenandunwin.com/Shopping/ProductDetails.aspx?ISBN=1741144477

And don't forget to go to Left on Nauru... link in the taskbar ----->

Cheers!

J x