Lammasuswatch

It has often been said that the greatest truth comes from fiction.

What is it about fiction that allows this? I think it's the capacity to inhabit a character's mind and feelings in a way that watching a documentary doesn't quite achieve. Certainly, I love documentaries; and some of them can be very powerful as well as being informative. But they tend to deliver only the hardest facts (which a lot of people deny anyway, and increasingly so with our ever more siloed media sources). And documentaries usually don't delve deeply into feelings or moral consequences. Even with eyewitness accounts or interviews, we are often not able to penetrate that experience barrier in the same way that fiction has of getting into someone's head.

And clearly in some issues, some people can never put their preconceived biases to one side. They can never step away from their political or cultural predispositions. Thus they never really get to walk around in anyone's shoes but their own. (OK, that suits some people just fine.) Books like Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" talk of making you literally step into the skins of the various characters in that book so that you experience the real truth of Atticus Finch's statement, "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." And walking around in someone's skin is exactly the sort of visceral thing that can finally shake people out of their experiential suit of armour.

"Stateless" was skillfully alive with this in-skin wandering! What's more, although the production warns that some liberty has been taken with some characters and incidents for the sake of the storyline, it seems to stick very close to the facts. (In fact, I would argue that it spares us the most sordid and depressing details.) Choosing the Cornelia Rau character's experiences as its central story, its strength is that it also tells the stories of others involved in varying degrees of detail not readily available at the time. So, the whole saga of the toll this story had on individuals (and even more so on our country's integrity) involves not only the inmates, but also people like the guards and their families, as well as the public servants who were just doing the jobs defined for them (but who were also often morally and physically conflicted in doing so). In fact, if you read the 2005 essay "The unknown story of Cornelia Rau" by Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at La Trobe University, you will realise that "Stateless" doesn't tell even 10% of the story of a completely dysfunctional, neglectful and morally corrupt system reminiscent more of Soviet gulags than what we Australians believe is the Aussie spirit.

You didn't know any of this? You just can't believe it? Well, if "Stateless" opens your eyes to it, and gets you to investigate and think further, then it is a truly remarkable series indeed.