A case in point. A husband and wife newly arrived in Sydney this week (trying to make a better life for their two children, who have been left behind in Mauritius with family). All their savings spent on expensive airfares and a most likely useless business management course that some exploitative “immigration/eduction” agent in Mauritius has sold them (she would rather do hairdressing, and it would be so much more practical, but if she trys to change courses now they’ll lose much of what they’ve down paid).

The agent has also told them work will be easy to get in Australia (try finding work newly arrived in a foreign country with no networks, yeah, right). The agent has set them up in a house where six people are sharing a room (one room) and being charged $150 per person a week. Together they are paying more in rent a week for a shared room than we are paying to rent a two bedroom house. The husband has been out to the country to check out agricultural work, and if he took it, would have to live in a shipping container with every other desperate immigrant currently trying to eke out an existence in this lucky country.

What to do?

However, within the last week the Mauritius Government (apparently) directed Mauritian ISPs to block local access to Facebook for a period because a false profile of the Prime Minister had been discovered on it. Like a number of Mauritian bloggers I find that cause for concern.

• Facebook: A Mauritian Tragedy
• Facebook Outage in Mauritius – It’s Been Censored!!!

The only real writing I’ve managed all year is this article on the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection, for the monthly journal National Library of Australia News. It’s wonderful to see the Library’s beautiful painting of a dodo gracing the July issue’s cover, highlighting the rich holdings relating to Mauritius in their collection. I used the collection during research for Blue Mauritius.

Download a pdf of the article from the Library’s website here. A slightly extended version, fully footnoted and with an appendix documenting all the rare book holdings in the Collection will appear later this year in the Journal of Mauritian Studies. The article begins:

‘Mauritius is but a name to most people in England unless they collect stamps’. Thus begins a treatise on colonial cooking published in the then British colony in 1954. This book, in ‘English and in French with a glossary in Hindustani’, is one of some 4500 items that make up the National Library of Australia’s Mauritius Collection – an outstanding resource revealing the Indian Ocean island to be much more than the sum of the philatelic, tropical and ornithological parts on which its fame rests.

I thoroughly enjoyed researching and writing this. I must find the time to get writing again…