Exposing Islands of Refuge

Refugees and wealth refuges are two sides of the same coin by which global human and financial inequality, illegality and injustice find their most extreme expressions. At opposite ends of the spectrum, both embodied humans and disembodied wealth are stateless, untouchable, out of sight, and exist outside of the experience and understanding of most people. Journalism is an important mechanism to expose and criticise the social, legal and political frameworks that allow and encourage these discourses of silence. This essay analyses the impulse to reveal, divulge and shock, and its potential to change public perception, laws and policies through aesthetic representation as resistance in Behrouz Boochani’s journalistic refugee memoir, No Friend but the Mountains (2018), and in investigative financial journalism that exposes offshore wealth havens by Oliver Bullough, Moneyland (2018) and Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands (2011).