Irony, like graffiti, was once an act of rebellion. It was used as a means for the powerless to comment on the powerful: an encoded way of using language, 'when to state anything plainly would lead... &gt; Stop the Boats? Elliot Perlman Elliot Perlman comes face-to-face with the consequences of our skewed and obsessive attitude to refugees It took me almost six years to research and write my most recent book, The Street Sweeper , a novel that deals with, among other things, history and various kinds of racism. One of the things I did for my mental health as much as for my physical health during those six years was to jog or at least walk, pretty much every day. One morning, unusually early for someone so frequently in the merciless, tepid yet unforgiving grip of insomnia, I was pounding my way down the road when I noticed a tradesman of some kind inside the cabin of his ute with a fork in his hand, focusing his attention on the fork and the contents of a transparent plastic container. The man had black hair and brown skin. He looked thin. There are so many places on earth he could have come from and now he was in my neighbourhood. As I got closer I tried to see what it was he was eating. It was early enough for it to be the man's breakfast, but the dust already on his clothes allowed the possibility that, even that early, he