Boy Overboard

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism and gender discrimination.

The action of Morris Gleitzman’s novel Boy Overboard alludes to real events in 2001, roughly five years after the extremist Sunni faction known as the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan. An extreme fundamentalist group, the Taliban gutted the country’s semi-Westernized liberties and culture, banning music, movies, TV, and many forms of recreation. Women and girls were forced into purdah (seclusion) in their homes and denied education and many other basic freedoms. Non-Sunni sects and ethnic minorities were subject to special persecution. In the novel, Jamal’s family, members of an unspecified minority population, see their generations-old home firebombed by the Taliban’s “morality police,” who also sentence Jamal’s mother to death by firing squad because she has broken the law by teaching girls.

The family’s subsequent attempts to flee the country and settle in Australia closely mirror a series of harrowing events that, in 2001, fed into Australia’s heated political discourse regarding immigration. In August of that year, a Norwegian freighter rescued over 400 asylum seekers, many of whom were of Afghani Hazara origins, from a sinking boat headed for Australia. The refugees, mostly women and children, were hungry, dehydrated, and deeply traumatized by their long ordeal; nevertheless, Australian Prime Minister John Howard refused to allow the rescue ship to enter Australian waters. Instead, he ordered the Australian Navy to deposit the migrants into a camp on an island, Nauru, near Australia—just as happens to Jamal’s family in the book. Meanwhile, Howard pushed “retroactive” legislation through Parliament to prohibit the asylum seekers and refugees from settling in Australia—a clear violation of the guarantees of the United Nations Convention on the Refugee, which Australia itself helped to draft.

In October 2001, the Australian Navy intercepted another “Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel” (SIEV), a ramshackle fishing boat much like the one that Jamal and Bibi almost die on. Seeking an excuse to demand a federal election in November, the Howard government politicized the incident to fuel national anxiety about border security: Demonizing the 223 asylum seekers aboard the SIEV, Howard falsely claimed that the refugees had tried to “blackmail” the Navy into giving them safe passage by threatening to throw their children overboard (Australian Senate Select Committee. “A Certain Maritime Incident.” Parliament of Australia, 2002). The desperate passengers on Jamal and Bibi’s boat, who hold up their children to keep the warship from shooting at them, allude to what probably actually happened. The “children overboard” story quickly gained traction in the national debate about border protection, which catapulted to the center of Australian politics because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US. In November, Prime Minister Howard’s anti-immigration coalition won the election handily. Gleitzman, an Australian author, refers satirically to the “children overboard” event with the title of his book. He also touches on Howard’s political gambit by having the Navy officer Andrew tell Jamal of a recent election in which “the Australian government thought they’d get more votes by keeping [asylum seekers] out” (179).

Boy Overboard was written to counter a popular narrative among Australians (and the global community) about asylum seekers and other migrants. Jamal and his family want only to be productive citizens of a “kind and caring” nation, as far from and as different as possible from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the government of which tried to murder them (80). That migrants like them can be scapegoated as potential terrorists, Gleitzman implies, is a way of denying them the basic human right to safety and asylum. However, as of 2025, Australia aggressively polices its borders, and in 2021, the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan, once more abolishing basic human rights, particularly for girls and women.