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Educated in the discipline of History at the University of Peradeniya and Oxford, *Michael Roberts* taught at Peradeniya from 1966 to 1976 before moving sideways into Anthropology at the University of Adelaide in 1977. His many publications encompass social mobility, social history, agrarian issues, peasant protest, popular culture, urban history, caste in South Asia, practices of cultural domination and nationalism. His main focus has been Sri Lanka, but there have been ventures into Indian socio-political history, Australian myth making and the sociology of cricket; while his present concern is a comparative study of martyrdom. He is one of the central figures behind the new site http://sacrificialdevotionnetwork.wordpress.com/ The recent political brouhaha in Australia about “boat people” has led him to intervene in the debate through efforts at publishing articles that are relevant to the issues under discussion. These are based on anecdotal knowledge picked up over the year's but largely proceed on *a priori* lines and are founded on a number of surmises. *Adjutant Australia* is critical of the fetish for order and the residual racism in Australia that underpins the hardline policy in place over the last decade or so in order to deter illegal immigration by sea. This critique of the Australian mind-set failed to make the cut in several Aussie media outlets, including *Eureka Street*, a radical website. So it has fallen back on the Lankan site www.groundviews.org * * *Speaking from Ignorance: Australians on Sri Lanka and Its Boat People *was drafted in order to present what I knew about both Sinhalese and Tamil migration over the last 60 years. A link to the *Australian’*s Opinions Editor drew encouraging signs. However, she was a kind of sergeant major in her own right and recast my text. This exercise involved deletions of criticisms of the media – hardly surprising that. The change of personality via style was a bit disconcerting, though perhaps there were pluses in the fact that some points were rendered sharper. I decided to bat within my limited powers and, aside from minor amendments, accepted the revised text. What I was not told and what caught me by surprise was a total change of title and shift of target. The revised text appeared in the *Australian *of 11 November 2009 as *Tamil Tall Tales*. Worse still the *Daily News* in Sri Lanka filched the essay from this source and published it on Friday 13 November. Needless to say many Tamils have reacted with the anger at what seemed to be a sweeping disparagement of their community. While this is in itself a body of data, I asked the editor if she would have been as insensitive if she was fashioning this title for the Yolngu, Wik or some Aboriginal group. Well, *Tami Migration Within and Beyond Sri Lanka* is a partial response to the cyber comments on the Australian website. It is presently in search of a media outlet because the *Australian*’s editors are not interested. In the interim I have also written *Crude Reasoning* after the Editor of an ABC website indicated which of the motifs in my unpublished draft, “Speaking from Ignorance,” that she was interested in. This time round there were only minor editorial changes and only a foreshortening of my original double-barrelled title. This essay has just gone up on web today. I have another one or two essays in mind. Links: Taken in by Tamil tall tales: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/taken-in-by-tamil-tall-tales/story-e6frg6zo-1225794053578 Adjutant Australia: Controlling Boat People http://www.groundviews.org/2009/11/07/adjutant-australia-controlling-boat-people/ Crude reasoning http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2736651.htm *Please send replies to: [log in to unmask]* ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Note: The material contained in this communication comes to you from the Forced Migration Discussion List which is moderated by Forced Migration Online, Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the RSC or the University. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this message please retain this disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. E-mail: [log in to unmask] List Archives: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/forced-migration.html Subscribe/unsubscribe: http://tinyurl.com/fmlist-join-leave RSS: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?RSS&L=forced-migration Follow the FM List and more on Twitter: http://twitter.com/forcedmigration