At the start of the book I referred to one of the many tragedies at sea that have befallen asylum seekers transported on people-smuggling vessels across the heavily-patrolled waters between Indonesia and Australia. As I noted, the five deaths in this particular instance, following a large explosion of fuel on board the asylum seeker vessel SIEV 36, were found at a coronial inquest to be the result of deliberate sabotage by ‘a passenger or passengers’ (Cavanagh 5), that is, one or more of the asylum seekers aboard the boat, in an attempt to ensure that they would not be returned by Australian Navy personnel to Indonesia. Reports in the wake of the 2009 event speculated that the cause of the boat explosion had been deliberate, but before the findings of the 2010 coronial inquest were published, it was all too easy for asylum seeker advocates, including academics, to doubt the veracity of this claim, perhaps assuming it to be part of a general strategy of character assassination akin to that which underpinned the ‘children overboard’ scandal of 2001. But the speculation turned out to be warranted, as well as inconvenient for a politics that implicitly depends upon asylum seeker innocence as a key reason for compassion to be extended to them. Of course, the trouble with pegging asylum seekers’ deservingness of humanitarian protection in Australia to innocence is that it promotes a morality instead of an ethics and that it struggles—indeed, is often unable—to absorb complex motivations, duplicity or recklessness: in the case of the boat explosion, a plea for asylum that turns into a deadly demand.