A Certain Maritime Incident (Tony Kevin, Scribe, $32.95 tpb, ISBN 1920769218, August) ****

In October 2001, in the midst of an Australian election campaign that had already been dominated by the Tampa crisis and the 'children overboard' affair, another Indonesian fishing boat overloaded with asylum seekers set off toward Australia. The boat, which sank with the loss of 353 lives, was later names the SIEV X by Tony Kevin when he was before a Senate committee, investigating the sinking. In this exhaustively researched and convincingly argued book Kevin presents a wealth of evidence to argue the chilling scenario that the Australian government was very well aware of the circumstances surrounding the SIEV X tragedy the whole time it was taking place, and, had the political will been different, could have prevented it. Along with the Indonesian government, the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, our defence force and the federal police had been actively running a 'disruption program' to try to stop people smuggling. Kevin's thesis is that the Australian media, people, and most distressing to him, a Senate inquiry, have been systematically denied full access to all the evidence and spun a web of lies. Taking up where Marr & Wilkinson's Dark Victory left off, this book makes for alternately disturbing, anger-making and ultimately depressing reading.

Tim Coronel is AB&P's assistant editor

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2004, Thorpe-Bowker