Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001

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Our Patch
Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001
The year 2001, the centenary of federation, was the year of the Tampa and of Australias entry into the global war on terror. Since then, new border protection and security regimes couple with interventionism in the Pacific to redraw our national and regional maps. Internally, new arrangements for Aboriginal communities redirect 1990s debates on sovereignty and self-determination. In this book commentators at the cutting edge of social and cultural theory link these developments together for the first time.
As the risks caused by Australian neoliberalism meet the panics constructed by its security apparatus, the question of sovereignty becomes ever more urgent. With First Peoples and refugees as its targets, this risk-panic complex needs to be chronicled and challenged. Our Patch does just that. Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside
Through detailed studies of how the violence of colonial practices comes clothed in the familiar, everyday sentiments of nationalism, Our Patch offers many lessons in how the sovereign power of the nation is established through violence enacted on racialized bodies, a violence understood as civility. Sherene H Razack, University of Toronto Author, Dark Threats and White Knights: Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (University of Toronto Press, 2004)
Our Patch offers robust and critical engagement while navigating the intellectual landscapes of sovereignty and border politics ... It makes an important contribution to our thinking about justice and nationalism in the twenty-first century. Aileen Moreton-Robinson Quandamooka First Nation Professor of Indigenous Studies Queensland University of Technology
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Our Patch
Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001
Edited by Suvendrini Perera
Symposia Series NETWORK
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Australia Research Institute Published in 2007 by Network Books The API Network Australia Research Institute Curtin University of Technology GPO Box U1987 PERTH WA 6845 Symposia Series General Editor: Production Editor: Cover Design: Richard Nile Nina Divich Nina Divich
www.api-network.com
Cover image by Guan Wei, Looking for enemies: No 2, 2004, acrylic on canvas 140 x 126 cm overall, Private collection, Courtesy the artist and Sherman Galleries, Sydney. 2007 Copyright is vested in the individual authors. Apart from any fair dealing permitted according to the provisions of the Copyright Act, reproduction by any process of any parts of any work may not be undertaken without written permission from the API Network. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Our patch: enacting Australian sovereignty post-2001. ISBN 1 920845 38 0. 1. Sovereignty. 2. Aboriginal AustraliansGovernment policyAustralia. 3. RefugeesGovernment policy Australia. 4. AustraliaPolitics and government2001. 5. AustraliaRelationsPacific Area. I. Perera, Suvendrini. II. Curtin University of Technology. Australia Research Institute. Series: Symposia (Curtin University of Technology. Australia Research Institute). 320.150994
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Contents
Introduction
Acting Sovereign Suvendrini Perera 1
Part I Sovereign Imaginaries

1 Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities Irene Watson Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty Maria Giannacopoulos Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation? The Limits of Australian Sovereignty Henry Reynolds 23 45
2 3
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Part II Sovereign Horizons

4 5 6 Sea Changes: Native Title, Sea Rights and Sharing the Sea Maxine Chi Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy Ruth Balint Fond Illusions: Some Reflections on Australian Dependence, Pacific Interventions and Indigenous Land Tim Anderson Our Patch: Domains of Whiteness, Geographies of Lack and Australias Racial Horizons in the War on Terror Suvendrini Perera 73 87
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Part III Sovereign Terror

8 A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare: Palm Island and Australian Sovereignty Dinesh Wadiwel 149
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Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death Jon Stratton Security Politics and Us: Sovereignty, Violence and Power after 9/11 Anthony Burke
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Endnotes
Contributors
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Introduction
Acting Sovereign
Suvendrini Perera
In August 2001 an unattributed image circulating on the Internet showed an Indigenous man shouting out a warning as a ship in full sail enters what will become Sydney harbour. In the manner of a newspaper report the caption reads:
January 1788. Boatloads of illegals arrive off Australias eastern seaboard. Many are expelled from their own country. Many are sick and have chronic diseases unknown here. None possess valid travel documents. Locals oppose them coming ashore.
The image refers to a defining incident for contemporary Australia. In the week before the terror attacks in the US changed the world forever, a Norwegian container ship, the MV Tampa, rescued almost four hundred asylum seekers from a sinking boat off the Indonesian archipelago. The captain sailed for Australia, but was denied permission to enter its territorial waters. In a performance of sovereign authority that recalled a nineteenth-century gunboat expedition, troops boarded the Tampa and forcibly removed the occupants.1 To extraordinary displays of public acclaim, the Prime Minister declared that none of the illegals on board would ever set foot on Australian soil. Through a simple juxtaposition of past and present, the image powerfully lays bare the hollow foundations of the states assumption of sovereignty. The Indigenous figure on the shore gives the lie to terra nullius, the enabling ruse of Australian colonisation. Simultaneously it turns the question of legality back on the state, exposing the states own illegitimate inception and reasserting the sovereign authority of Indigenous Australians to decide who comes into this country.
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The Indigenous figure on the shore speaks also of an ethical and embodied relation to land that endures despite the colonising presence. When the Gungalidda elder Wadjularbinna spoke out against the turning away of the Tampa she invoked the continuing sovereignty of Aboriginal law: If we as Aboriginal people are true to our culture and spiritual beliefs, we should be telling the government that what they are doing to refugees is wrong! Our Aboriginal cultures do not allow us to treat people this way We cant separate ourselves from other human beingsits a duty.2 Imposed colonial law cannot override the sovereign law or duty of Indigenous peoples. In Irene Watsons words:
The colonial state cannot grant us who we are, for it was never theirs to give. Who we are emanates from law. We cannot seek back the ability to be from the one who has not yet become a (legitimate) being of the law. Yet we dialogue with the muldarbi in the language of self-determination, in the struggle to reclaim a territory, which is free of its genocide.3
* * *
Federation ought to afford this country, yet another chance to reflect, but we must be honest. There are solutions here and so are tears. We must not lose focus: whose land? ...
Lisa Bellear, Federation Statement 20004
The fraught dialogue between Indigenous peoples and the state in the language of self-determination was the central question engaging Australians in the lead-up to the centenary celebrations of federation in 2001. For many, a treaty represented a first step towards formal acknowledgment of Aboriginal sovereignty by the state: the necessary recognition that, unlike in other white settler colonies such as the United States or New Zealand, in Australia sovereignty was never formally ceded to the invader. Fiona Nicoll points out that while in these societies treaties formed the basis for a type of domestic sovereignty within circumscribed limits, in Australia the doctrine of terra nullius ensured the continued denial of Indigenous ownership.5 In the decade leading up to the bicentenary of colonisation in 1988, a number of Indigenous groups, in particular the Aboriginal
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Treaty Committee and the National Aboriginal Conference, firmly put on the agenda the need for a compact or treaty between the state and Indigenous peoples. Although the Mabo judgment of 1992 overturned the principle of terra nullius in relation to property law, the High Court excluded the question of sovereignty from consideration, finding it non-justiciable (see Watson and Giannacopoulos, this volume). Henry Reynolds writes:
Application of the doctrine of continuity to Aboriginal sovereigntyeven to the extent of recognising a right to some form of self-governmentwould, in the view of the court, lead to unacceptable trauma. What then should be done about injustice if it is ingrained in the bones of the system? Do diseased bones have to be saved from surgery at all costs? For 200 years Australian law was secured to the rock of terra nullius. One pinioned arm represented property, the other sovereignty the high court recognized native title in the Mabo judgment and released one arm from its shackles. The other remains as firmly secured as ever ... but in the long run the situation will prove unstable.6
As a way of addressing the outstanding question of sovereignty, various models of autonomy, self-determination and a treaty were widely debated in the decade between the Mabo judgment of 1992 and the centenary year of 2001. Treaty, a term that held different meanings for different people, came to signify almost as a synonym for sovereignty for some. Throughout the 1990s the band Yothu Yindi implanted the notion in popular consciousness with its hit song, Treaty. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the official body set up by the state to represent Indigenous peoples, actively pursued the idea of a treaty. Invested with both symbolic power and a reassuring materiality amidst the welter of abstraction, injustice and despair that characterised contemporary race relations, treaty seemed a graspable objective for the Australian state one hundred years after its inception. Despite a warning by the longtime activist Gary Foley that Native title is not land rights and reconciliation is not justice, reconciliation, land rights and a treaty were imaginatively linked by many Australians broadly supportive of a decolonising agenda.7 Some faint spirit of hope was abroad that the burden of illegitimacy and injustice troubling the Australian state could yet be officially recognised and redressed, if not resolved. Across the public sphere,
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from community groups to academic fora, as people explored the meanings and implications of saying sorry in the wake of the 1997 report on the Stolen Generations, an idea emerged, inchoate, uncertain, that with the new millennium the time might have come to say not only Sorry but also Sovereignty to Indigenous Australians. Five years later in 2006, public discussion of a treaty has all but disappeared. Elected representation for Indigenous people no longer exists even in the limited and compromised form of ATSIC. Models for self-determination and autonomy have been replaced by a doctrine of mutual obligation that seeks to enmesh Indigenous communities more closely with the institutions of the state. Although sovereignty is once again at the centre of public consciousness, the focus has shifted from the fraught question of acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty at home to the violent enactment of national sovereignty abroad through practices of border protection, regional hegemony and military interventionism. Where pastoral land and suburban backyards figured as the battlegrounds of the 1990s, since 2001 the ocean is the new front line for the performance of, in Aileen Moreton-Robinsons devastatingly succinct phrase, the white patriarchal sovereignty of the Australian state.8 Official energies are maximally mobilised in patrolling our surrounding waters for asylum seekers boats and illegal fishing vessels. These apprehended incursions, seamlessly linked in with the war on terror, license the hunt for foreign bodies in our midst. As Joseph Pugliese points out, for particular racially marked subjects in the urban landscape, everyday activities such as standing at a train station or walking on the street are inscribed by suspicion, threat and fear.9 In December 2005 people perceived as Middle Eastern or Muslim were targeted by a pogrom on Cronulla Beach in Sydney. In Angela Mitropouloss words, the event demonstrated how, as border policing became central to the conduct of government policy the border was bound to proliferate across social relations and spaces, whether on the beach, as the emblematic AngloAustralian site, or at other border points across the racialised topography of Australia.10 The starting point for this volume is this apparent shift in focus from the pivotal question of internal or domestic sovereignty and the relationship between the state and its Indigenous subjects to the exercise of sovereignty at the extremities of the national geo-body
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over its oceans and neighbouring regions, as well as upon enemies imaginatively located at the limits of the nation. Our Patch attempts to provide a conceptual framework for mapping the dispersed practices by which the state seeks to exert and extend its sovereign authority over different spaces and bodies in the second century after federation. These practices can be broadly grouped under three categories. The first includes attempts to contain Indigenous sovereignty, both at the level of rights and self-determination and at the level of the ability to be, through a renewed insistence on assimilation.11 Its measures include the replacement of elected representation, however flawed, by ATSIC with an appointed advisory body; attacks by influential think tanks on forms of Indigenous and collective title as part of the ongoing history wars and culture wars; the introduction of mutual obligation and contractual agreements in return for basic services; new forms of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous communities in conjunction with calls for increased assimilation, more centralised control and a new paternalism in Indigenous affairs. The second category relates to the consolidation of national borders, either through excision or expansion, and a preoccupation with maritime security in the form of Operation Resolute, a military initiative that combines punitive responses to perceived incursions, whether by asylum seekers or illegal fishermen, in Australias surrounding waters. These are accompanied by new technologies of control over immigration and the redefinition of citizenship in ethnocultural and ethnoracial terms, reinforced by anti-sedition laws that afford unprecedented powers to the state. The final category concerns regional expansionism through external policing, military and peacekeeping operations (as in Solomon Islands); bilateral negotiations (such as with East Timor over maritime borders); broad policy initiatives (pooled regional governance in the Pacific) and aid programs tailored by Australias security needs to countries such as Nauru and Papua New Guinea. These activities are framed within a climate of (in)securitisation, characterised by the expansion of the defence budget, the rehabilitation of imperial ambition in global affairs and what Marilyn Lake describes as the militarisation of Australian historical memory through an active program of state-sponsored commemorations, pilgrimages and publications.12
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Connecting these seemingly disparate initiatives is a renewed insistence on territorial sovereignty, the protection of national borders and the promotion of a racially coded model of citizenship, developments that in turn authorise a set of movements radiating both outward into the surrounding region as well as inward to the denied Indigenous sovereignty that founds the Australian state.
The Homeland and the Place of the Non-Citizen
The new pre-eminence of national borders and territorial sovereignty has a global context. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, among others, argue that after the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the US and its allies, sovereignty and its ultimate expressionthe ability and the will to employ overwhelming violence and to decide on life and death have been reconfigured:
The war on terror and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that underneath the complex structures of power in modern liberal societies, territorial sovereignty, and the foundational violence that gave birth to it, still remains the hard kernel of modern statesan intrinsically violent truth of the modern nation-state that remains its raison detre in moments of crisis. Jus ad bellum, the possibility of waging war against those one declares as enemies remains a central dimension of how a state performs its stateness.13
Even as the war on terror involves a new emphasis on national borders, however, it also paradoxically requires the blurring of distinctions between outside and inside. Hansen and Stepputat argue that the renewed emphasis on territorial sovereignty does not operate so much at the level of relations between states, but at the level of the internal constitution of sovereign power within states through the exercise of power over bodies and populations.14 The war on terror functions as a war on internal enemieswithin nation-states and within the global empire of the US.15 In the case of Australia the violent truth of the modern nation-state was staged as a triumphal spectacle in the days and weeks immediately leading up to, as well as following, the events of 9/11, when the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were entwined with the arrival of refugee boats, or SIEVs (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels), in Australias surrounding waters.
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Even as the attacks in the US, construed as an assault on our way of life in the west, elicited an instant commitment to the war on terror, the offensive against the Tampa asserted Australian territorial sovereignty in a convergence of domestic and international imperatives that was anything but coincidental. Refugees and asylum seekers figured as the exemplary noncitizens through whose bodies Australia sought both to perform its stateness, by a show of force at its borders, and to consolidate its nationness, by identifying the mostly Muslim Iraqi or Afghan refugees as the enemya process that occurred in an exchange with the criminalisation by association of other reorientalised and reracialised bodies within the country.16 In doing so it reasserted national identity as white and reaffirmed its kinship with the Anglo diasporic family of the US and UK.17 As targets of this assertion of sovereign violence by the Australian state, asylum seekers and refugees acted as the media through which the global war on terror was normalised into the war at home. As the interface between the war on terror and the war at home, the bodies of asylum seekers, refugees and of others cast as noncitizens, become subject to new technologies of racial violence and the reactivation of old ones. Heightened forms of surveillance at internal and external borders combine with new powers of monitoring, targeting and criminalising. Old and current racisms couple in fresh alliances and are reinforced by legislation such as the Border Protection Act of 2001 and the Anti-Sedition laws of 2005.18 The renewed emphasis on the territoriality of the state links the defence of national ground (terra) or homeland with the exercise of new forms of sovereign violence and terror over bodies within its borders. It affirms certain bodies, identities and histories as legitimate within the nation, while marking others as suspect or illicit. In the ultimate evidence that citizenship is now understood as racially and linguistically constituted, between 2001 and 2005 over two hundred Australian citizens of varying non-Anglo ethnicities may have been wrongfully incarcerated in immigration detention camps, while at least one, Vivian Alvarez Solon, was deported as an unlawful non-citizen.19 At the level of popular culture, the preoccupation with protecting borders has spawned what one critic describes as one of the unlikeliest commercial TV mega-hits I can recall: a reality show titled Border Security.20 Produced with the full cooperation of the
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three official agencies responsible for customs, immigration and quarantine, Border Security claims to document the action on the front line when it comes to protecting our country from drug runners, illegal immigrants and potential terrorists [and] the last line of defence against harmful pests and disease coming into the country.21 The programs runaway success is one indication of the drive to quarantine and exclude, and of an increasingly frenzied climate of threat, as borders multiply and are enforced within the body of the nation. Meanwhile technologies of excision, deterritorialisation and annexation create new spaces of exception in the form of onshore and offshore detention camps for the containment of bodies cast as inimical to the state.22 At the same time, the demand intensifies for allegiance to a singular national story and to a set of values naturalised or native-ised as belonging to the national territory or homeland. Amy Kaplan points out in the US context, citing President Bushs ultimatum, you are either with us or with the terrorists, that the term homeland now carries an exclusionary effect that underwrites a resurgent nativism.23 In a homeland figured as a site of native origins, ethnic homogeneity, and rootedness in common place and past for Australia as a white diaspora nation there is no place for acknowledging Indigenous peoples sovereign relation to land. Similarly, migrants who may understand more than one land as home have no place in the homeland.24 Australia as a nation under arms is gathered into a collective narrative that affirms war and colonial conquest and reiterates the logic of empire. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues, the valorisation of Australias role in the war on terror ramifies at multiple levels across time and space, referring back to the foundational act of British conquest:
[Prime Minister] Howard strategically deploys the digger, connecting the First World War to East Timor and then Iraq to substantiate our involvement in war He will be at ANZAC Cove Gallipoli, when Australias latest contingent of armed forces, who will be under the command of British forces, arrives in Muthana Province, Southern Iraq The icon of the digger defending all that his country represents, in the guise of protecting other peoples land and sovereignty, reaffirms in the national imaginary that the nation is a white possession.25
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As the Australian nation state is spatiotemporally anchored and recentred as a white possession (in Moreton-Robinsons words) through war, it reiterates its sovereignty over the bodies and histories of its constitutive non-citizen, the Indigene.26 To quote Watson: I was never invited nor ever consented. I am still living in the place of law, a noncitizen, preferring the unsettled myall frontier: in respect of the place held by the ancestors. A place of my lawful being.27 In a climate of national fear Indigenous assertions of sovereignty, when they cannot be tethered to national ends such as patrolling the coastline for illegal fishing boats, figure as security threats or as potentially seditious acts. So Camp Sovereignty, a protest site established at the 2005 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, was attacked from all quarters, including by some Indigenous leaders, before being forcibly closed down (see also essays by Watson and Perera, this volume). An offshoot of the Tent Embassy in Canberra, Camp Sovereignty reiterated the status of Indigenous people as an alien and sovereign nation within Australia.28 By naming itself a Camp it also recalled the spaces of exceptionmissions, reserves, quarantine centres, onshore and offshore immigration detention campsthat define the racial and ethnocultural limits of the Australian nation.29 The Prime Ministers call to uproot Camp Sovereignty clearly illustrates the nature of the challenge the site represented:
These are the sorts of things that really set back the cause of reconciliation because its the unacceptable face, in a way, of reconciliation, he said. The sensible face is where you cooperate to try to remedy wrongs and help people become part of the community in the fullest possible sense.30
The sensible option of becoming part of the community in the fullest possible sense reads as a call to assimilation against the unacceptable face of an Indigenous sovereignty that stubbornly refuses to accede to the colonial demand to turn the other into the same. At a global level too, as a number of commentators have observed, the war on terror relegitimises the imperial project. Empire and the white mans burden are once again scripted as civilising and moral forces across the planet (see Perera this volume).31 What are the local implications of this relegitimation of empires moral authority? How does the war on terror produce not
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only new kinds of illegal subjects within the nation, but enable sites of control over the foundational non-citizens of the state? What forms of sovereign authority over Indigenous bodies are implicitly and explicitly endorsed? What forms of disciplining, exclusion and biopolitical control are (re)legitimised as Anglo-Australian history and values are reinstated as supreme? Essays by Watson, Chi, Wadiwel, Giannacopoulos and Perera, among others in this volume, address this question from different positions.
Sovereign Spatiotemporalities and the Politics of the Protection Racket
Paired with the Australian states technologies for remapping its spatial boundaries and its proliferation of spaces for the containment of unruly bodies are technologies that recast the temporal limits of the nation. The arrival of the Minasa Bone on Melville Island in 2003 and the landing of a group of asylum seekers from West Papua in 2005 both prompted retrospective legislation that excised their landing sites from the Australian migration zone: in effect a declaration that these arrivals never arrived. In his discussion of the Minasa Bone and the Australian states fantastical undertaking of a pre-emptive strike on that which has already taken place Prem Kumar Rajaram discloses the forms of sovereign power that underpin such acts:
the advent of the refugee or irregular migrant into the sovereign space disjoints time As a response to the potential chaos of unstructured and unpredictable time, the sovereign proclaims its capacity to set things right. The sovereign enforces the notion that protection against the divisive, disruptive and inchoate other may best be provided by the sovereign It is an act which presumes knowledge of a linear order, of how to map things in such a way that optimal levels of peace, prosperity and security may ensue.32
Rajaram reveals how the realignment of time in response to the disruptive entry of the refugee/terrorist into national space in turn elicits a demand to repledge allegiance to the sovereign order endorsed by the state:
The presumption that time is out of joint, that the intruding stranger has disrupted our very way of living, is an articulation of danger by the sovereign which presupposes that that danger may be
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met by the sovereign. It is only by re-attaching ourselves to the logics and purposes of the way of life guaranteed by the nationstate that that danger may be effectively met.33
Citing Michael Dillon, Rajaram argues that this is politics as protection racket: it demands that danger can only be met by repledging oneself to the state and the way of life it guarantees (and disavowing the ways of life it finds threatening).34 This demand to repledge oneself to the sovereign order of things is a demand to re-endorse the foundational white teleology of nation. Ordered within the temporal and territorial logic of a national history, white teleology eras[es] the time prior to colonisation, casting it as unproductive, empty and meaningless time, and so legitimating its own claim to the land as it also usurps the place of the Indigene in casting non-Anglo migrants as aliens to be progressively assimilated or excluded.35 This sovereign power to map things in such a way that optimal levels of peace, prosperity and security may ensue is the power to recast borders in space and time.36 In his essay in this volume, Reynolds argues that the effective sovereignty held by the Australian state at federation was of a qualified and limited order, circumscribed externally by British imperial power and internally by Aboriginal sovereignty. Yet the state assumes and aspires to exercise absolute authority over the bodies within its borders, an authority that is enacted as much by a power to exclude, reject and place outside, as by the ability to include, manage and administer.
Society Must Be Defended
Hansen and Stepputat stipulate that:

Sovereign power is always a tentative and unstable project whose efficacy and legitimacy depend on repeated performances of violence and a will to rule. These performances can be spectacular and public, secret and menacing, and can also appear as scientific/technical rationalities of management and punishment of bodies. Although the meanings and forms of such performances always are historically specific they are always constructing their public authority through a capacity for visiting violence on human bodies.37
Contemporary understandings of the relation between the sovereign aspiration to power and its violent enactments are
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informed by what Foucault identifies as a critical shift in the way sovereign power is exercised in modernity. Foucault proposes that sovereign power, in effect a power exercised until then chiefly through the right to kill or take life, was displaced in European modernity by a new form of power focused on the conduct of life rather than the threat of death. The function of sovereign power in modernity, Foucault argues, is perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through thus marking the beginnings of an era of biopower.38 Biopower refers to the power of the sovereign to administer and organise the lives of its subjects at every level, through themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species.39 Sovereign power thus shifts from a sanguinary power centred on death and the ability to make die and let live to the managerial power to regulate life, to let die and make live. Responding to the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and biopolitics, Achille Mbembe introduces the terms necropower and necropolitics to describe the persistence of contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death particularly for inhabitants of the formation he characterises as the postcolony (see also Wadiwel, this volume).40 Mbembe questions whether Foucaults argument that modern sovereignty centres on the management of life rather than on the power to kill is in fact
sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill.41
He proposes that the racially marked bodies wounded or slain in the guise of war, of resistance or of the fight against terror cannot be accounted for solely in the register of biopower, but are inscribed in the order of both life and death, through new combinations of biopolitics and necropolitics.42 In Australia biopolitics and necropolitics operate as paired modalities by which a colonising sovereignty continues to be exercised over the bodies of Indigenous peoples. In 2006 a statement by the Health Minister calling for a new paternalism in Indigenous affairs inscribed itself within a long history of colonial tutelage and protection under which Aboriginal lives were subject to the constant disciplining and supervision of the state. As Mick
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Dodson remarks, the Ministers statement does not position Aboriginal Australians as entitled to the same services as other citizens.43 On the contrary, it posits them as objects available to the interventions of the state for their own good. At the same time, representations of Indigenous communities as places set apart from the body of the nation, and as the locus of unspeakable violence and abjection, situate them within Mbembes formulation, via Giorgio Agamben, of the camp and the postcolony as spaces of exception.44 Positioned both inside and outside the nation, Indigenous communities share with immigration detention centres such as Baxter and Nauru the characteristics of the camp, as necropolitical spaces whose inhabitants are subject to the sovereigns right to kill, to allow to live or to expose to death.45 In a 2002 essay, What is a camp?, I detail the structural continuities between the immigration detention camp and the Aboriginal mission-camp complex, arguing that both are enabled by specific policies and histories of racialised punishment.46 As Foucault elaborates in Society Must Be Defended, where the sovereigns powers of death are exercised in modern states, their operation is predicated on and normalised by racism:
If the power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work with the instruments, mechanisms and technology of normalization, it too must become racist. When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.47
Essays by Stratton, Balint and Wadiwel, among others in this volume, explore the ways in which racism enables the continuing deployment of the sovereigns sanguinary power against particular bodies and spaces through forms of political death, expulsion, rejection and so on in the name of societys defence. The exercise of racist violence in these spaces of exception enables the civility, peace, prosperity and modernity that prevail in the elsewhere of national space. Despite continual attempts to delineate them as distinct, however, camp and nation or society are revealed not as
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discrete locations but as reciprocally constitutive, intertwined and contiguous. The essays in this book examine specific enactments and formations of sovereign power, mapping its operations across bodies, spaces and temporalities. Placed in the framework of what Anthony Burke describes as Australias ontology of permanent threat the chapters reveal the continuities that characterise the sovereignty of the white settler state. As Dinesh Wadiwel puts it, the tightening of laws, the expansion of surveillance and regulatory powers, the annexation of territories from regular juridical rule to enable racialised internment, and the increased accumulation and deployment of military and paramilitary forces are not new features of Australian white sovereignty [but rather] point to an evolution of the elements that have always underpinned sovereign power in Australia. In bringing together the ways in which sovereign power is enacted upon different non-citizen populations, at the multiple borders of the nation, Our Patch hopes to illuminate both the continuities and the reconfigurations of Australian sovereign power after 2001.
Our Patch
This volume takes its title from the Australian Prime Ministers characterisation of the region, one that seems to assert an unassuming, local, modest and provisional claim to title, while at the same time claiming the right to cultivate, order, correct, civilise, own and secure.48 The essays assembled in this book examine the heterogeneous forms in which sovereign power acts upon, and in, a nation and region designated as Our Patch. Written from varying, sometimes incompatible, political, theoretical and institutional locations, the essays range from Indigenous studies to political science, history, economics, critical race theory and cultural studies. The volume is divided into three overlapping sections. In the opening chapter of Part I, Sovereign Imaginaries, Irene Watson argues that although the war on terror provides the Australian government with the opportunity to further empower both the symbolism and the reality of the one-nation state as being fundamental to the security of all Australians, this point of seeming (im)possibility is precisely where the work of asserting Indigenous sovereignty must (continually) begin again. Taking her cue from
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Jacques Derridas reflection on aporia as a test or a location of (im)possibility, Watson considers the present as an opening to a future which had not existed before. From the seeming (im)possibility of the present she poses the questions: What makes the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws impossible? What needs to be done to recognise Aboriginal laws? To what extent are acts of recognition sites of power, where human differentials are produced? In thinking through the processes of recognition, what does it mean for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples who occupy this country? Following on from the crucial questions posed by Watson, Maria Giannacopoulos examines how contemporary Australian law constitutes itself as the law precisely by its exclusion of Aboriginal law and sovereignty. Discussing the High Courts invocation of the category of non-justiciablity in the Mabo and the Tampa judgments, Giannacopoulos discloses the founding violence of the law, a violence that the law itself renders invisible and insulates from critique through the very category of the non-justiciable. Both the Mabo and Tampa judgments, Giannacopoulos argues, function to reproduce the founding violence of the state as the assumed rightness of border protection and national sovereignty become synonyms for the law itself . In her discussion of the Tampa judgment Giannacopoulos argues, drawing on Agambens discussion of the sovereign prerogative to create a zone of indistinction between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion, that the refugees are made to represent the antithesis of the Australian nation, even though it is precisely their exclusion that constructs the Australian border. In Part of a continent for something less than a nation? Reynolds takes up, in the context of Australian sovereignty at federation, the question Giannacopoulos raises of the paradoxical role of the alien non-citizen in constituting the limits of the nation. Revising the famous slogan attributed to Edmund Barton, the first Prime Minister of federated Australia, Reynolds contends that because of the constriction of its external sovereignty by British imperial power and the limits enforced by the practice of Indigenous sovereignty internally, one of the few areas over which the new Australian state could exercise its sovereignty was by closely controlling what and who could enter the country. But while border protection was the single most important manifestation of Australian nationalism it
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also paradoxically functioned to perpetuat[e] colonial dependence as Australia looked to British protection to maintain its racially exclusionary policies. Thus, Reynolds concludes, Australia was willing to forgo independent statehood in order to bring its sense of race based nationalism to fruition. His essay closes by putting forward a set of parallels between Australias involvement in the Boer war at Britains behest at the end of the nineteenth century and its engagement in the USs war on terror in 2001. The four essays in Part II, Sovereign Horizons, all centre on the exercise of sovereignty over the ocean and surrounding regions. In Sea Changes Maxine Chi discusses her research into the role of fishing and the sea in the lives of her Bardi family and kin: their relationship to the sea, their belief systems, their worldview, traditional ecological knowledge of seasons, their place within these seasons and their traditional economy as hunter-gatherers. The research takes place in a climate transformed by Mabo where [o]ur identities were being redefined, challenged and strengthened because of the era of native title claims in the Kimberley and the need to identify in a certain way and according to the rules of the Native Title Act. The essay concludes by outlining the areas in which the Act and subsequent legislation all fall short of, or fail to address, vital questions of entitlement and property in regard to sea rights. One of the most contentious contemporary issues relating to sea rights concerns the arrival of fishing boats from the Indonesian archipelago in Australian territorial waters. Throughout 2005, and in previous years, Bardi and other Indigenous people along the Kimberley and Northern Australian coast raised strong objections to the presence of these boats.49 In 1990 Marcia Langton discussed how these movements impinge on Indigenous sovereignties and could be problems not just for Australian officials in Customs [and] police forces but also for Aboriginal landowners and communities:
After all, Aboriginal people have been interacting with Australias northern neighbours for quite a few more centuries than have white Australians. In the past, Aboriginal people have dealt summarily with poaching, wife-stealing and other anti-social behaviour by Macassan and Javanese fishermen.50
However, as Indigenous objections to the fishing boats are recentred within the narrative of national self-defence and Australian
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territorial integrity, they are mobilised into and subsumed within the framework of state sovereignty and a native title regime that simultaneously, and paradoxically, denies their title to the ocean. Within this framework, land and ocean alike become domains to be inscribed by a sovereign white imaginary. Bruce Campbell and Bu Wilson have located both the evictions of Macassan fishermen in the early years of federation and more recent expulsions of Rotenese and Madurese fishermen in the 1970s on a continuum of the colonial process which had earlier dispossessed northern Aborigines of their hunting and fishing grounds. They note that both are underpinned by the same myths of emptiness, primitivism and subsistence cultures.51 Ruth Balints chapter, Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy, extends these parallels, situating the expulsions of Indonesian fishermen and the denial of their long history in regional waters in the context of Australias politics of maritime security, access to the resources of the Timor Sea and the making of an Australian national history: Australia has succeeded in killing off its Indonesian history so that out of the ashes of a mythical, mare nullius seascape, an Australian history can be forged. She argues that the states punitive treatment of the fishermen is an exercise in the eradication of their history in these waters, the story of which tells the lie of Australias empty sea. The two following essays in this part turn to the relation between recent regional initiatives and their implications for internal sovereignty. In Fond Illusions, Tim Anderson suggests that Australias attempts to reshape Pacific nations constitutions, electoral and land tenure systems can be much better understood through a parallel examination of the problems of Australian national identity and institutions. Through a detailed examination of two policy initiatives in Papua New Guinea, the failed Enhanced Cooperation Program and attempts to undermine customary land tenure systems, Anderson shows how Australian regional policy can be seen to be driven by self interest, but also to be consistent with the steady assault on shared institutions in Australia. Following Andersons essay, my own essay locates Australias recent policing operations in Solomon Islands in the context of both domestic interventions into Indigenous communities constructed as failed states, and the geopolitics of global interventionism in the war on terror. Starting from the Prime
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Ministers characterisation of the Pacific as our patch, the essay attempts to remap Australias imaginative and affective borders of the nation and the region. It argues that state projects of maintaining security, peacekeeping, nationbuilding and aid in the region in turn reflect back on and reinforce an ongoing internal project of enacting colonial sovereignty over Indigenous bodies, populations and lands. The final part of the book, Sovereign Terror, centres on necropolitics or the sovereign power of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection.52 The part begins with Dinesh Wadiwels discussion of Palm Island as a zone of combat within Australia. Wadiwel argues that Although Palm Island most certainly does not exist within a zone of war in a conventional sense, it is not clear whether the Island exists, or has ever existed, within the normative space of Australian juridical rule. He examines the functioning of Palm Island as a space of exception within the logic of Australian sovereignty, and the role of government in managing sovereign violence in the mission and reserve system, arguing that Australian sovereignty post 2001 must be understood through the nexus of government, war and the zone of exception. The next chapter in this part returns to the ocean border as the scene of violence. Jon Strattons Dying to Come to Australia begins by referring to an infamous series of videos produced by the Immigration Department with the intention of deterring potential asylum seekers. The videos represented Australia as a deathscape, characterised by a lethal environment and vicious wildlife. Stratton interweaves histories of migration policy, popular film and serial killing to argue that the ethical and literal violence inflicted on asylum seekers has spread through the community. He explores the ways in which the figure of the refugee/migrant and the backpacker/tourist both converge and diverge along racialised axes of the alien and the foreign, reminding us of the pathological formations that underpin (in Burkes words) Australias ontology of sovereignty. In the concluding essay, Security Politics and Us, Anthony Burke turns to the three dangerous, self-regarding axioms that underpin Australias ontology of permanent threat. He details how these axioms, We are insecure, We are good, We must act, signify a particularly powerful and dangerous security politics and a fearful,
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exclusivist and repressive formation of sovereignty, arguing that they constitute:

a pathology that is a distinctive feature of the modern sovereign state, especially those with imperial and settler-colonial histories histories still continuing if Iraq and the occupation is any guide that are enabled by a refusal of historical complexity, moral ambiguity, political constraint and ethical responsibility and insist on conceiving terrorist threats as opposed to a body-politic and a civilisation that is morally, politically and historically innocent.
Burke ends by calling for analyses that do more than diagnose the white anxieties that characterise Australian nationalism, analyses that can rise to the double task of adequately theoris[ing] and understand[ing] the true complexity of the political formations that are in operation, and, on the basis of that understanding, begin to think through ways of countering them. The essays in this volume are all contributions to this vital double challenge.
Acknowledgments
It is rare to be able to identify the exact moment when an idea first takes shape, but in this instance I can pinpoint the beginnings of Our Patch precisely to an exchange with Aileen Moreton-Robinson during the Body Politic conference at Queensland University in 2004. Moreton-Robinsons remarks about the ways in which a usurped Indigenous sovereignty grounds and enables the Australian states manoeuvres in the region were the kernel for the linkages and relations mapped in this book. I am grateful both for her formative role and the intellectual inspiration she has provided through her own writings on Australian sovereignty. This volume took shape at a symposium titled A New Backyard Blitz? I convened at Curtin University in August 2005. The contributions of the original participants, Tim Anderson, Ruth Balint, Anthony Burke, Maxine Chi, Maria Giannacopoulos, Henry Reynolds and Irene Watson, were later supplemented by essays from Jon Stratton and Dinesh Wadiwel. Warm thanks to all the contributors for their ready involvement, intellectual engagement and ongoing commitment to the project. I am grateful to the Curtin colleagues who lent their support in various ways: Darlene Oxenham, Krishna Sen, Tom Stannage,
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Antonio Traverso and, especially, Richard Nile for his enthusiastic invitation to publish the volume in the Australian Public Intellectual Networks Symposia series. Thanks, too, to Nina Divich for her meticulous work on the production of the book. Wendy Brady, Carol Johnson, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Fiona Nicoll, Goldie Osuri and Prem Kumar Rajaram all took time from busy schedules to share their insights and expertise along the way, as did Anthony Burke, Jon Stratton and Irene Watson. Joseph Pugliese was a key interlocutor for the project from the start. Kristen Phillips provided unflagging research and editorial assistance, despite having to share her time between the book, her thesis and a new baby daughter. Her dedication went far beyond the call of duty. Mahinda Perera, as ever, provided every kind of support, every day. Dedicated to Lisa Bellear (19612006), poet, teacher, photographer, broadcaster, activist, and one of the last people at Camp Sovereignty when the embers of the sacred fire were salvaged, held ready to blaze into flame again another day.
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Part I
Sovereign Imaginaries
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Chapter One
Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities

Irene Watson
Aporia is not something negative, not something which in fact paralyses us, but on the contrary it is an ordeal, a test, a crucial moment through which we have to go, even if we are stuck, we have to experience this moment of aporia in order to make a decision, in order to take responsibility, in order to have a future.
Jacques Derrida, Time and memory, messianicity, the name of God1
When I first presented this paper I began as always by acknowledging Aboriginal peoples across this land, giving special acknowledgment to the traditional owners, who have struggled long and hard to be heard on one critical question: Aboriginal sovereignty. I spoke of the importance of fora which engage the question of Aboriginal sovereignty, particularly in a political climate where the space even to speak and think outside the square of possibility appears to be diminishing. In writing and speaking it has always been important for me to give context to my voice and, while my Aboriginality privileges an Aboriginal voice, I am mindful and am reminding others that whilst we sit and speak into this invaded, urban-modern space, and that when I am present in other Aboriginal peoples country, I am both respectful and also hopeful that what is spoken will create spaces where we can think, speak about and action positive outcomes in the quest for Aboriginal
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sovereignty, while also retaining the memory and the histories of peoples who have lived and continue to live in these colonised spaces.
The (Im)possibility of Sovereign Aboriginal Laws
In the struggle for Aboriginal sovereignty, a struggle that arises in Australia from the fact of colonialism,2 the dominant voice, or the prevailing reality is that the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws is an impossibility. For more than 200 years the colonial paradigm has lectured us on the impossibility of Aboriginal laws and sovereignty. Yet for many Aboriginal people, Aboriginal laws, or sovereignty, simply exist, perhaps not in the ivory towers, or the power houses, of the Australian state, but elsewhere; Aboriginal laws live. This is an idea which creates controversy and tension between the state3 and Aboriginal peoples; nevertheless Aboriginal laws exist in the face of the reality that Aboriginal laws are seen as no longer relevant. Yet the idea of Aboriginal laws and their redundancy has grown further in the current global political climate and the war on terror. It is here I want to call upon Derridas engagement with the theme of impossibility:
So in order to give or to forgive, I have to go through the experience of the impossible, I have to forgive the unforgivable, to take this example, and to give what I dont have, what I cannot give. If I make a decision which I can make, that is something which Im able to do, something which Im strong enough or have the capacity or the ability to do, so that the decision then follows my potentiality, my ability, my possibility-then there is no decision. For a decision to be a decision, it has to be, to look impossible for me, as if it were coming from the Other. So thats why the experience of the impossible is the experience of the possibility of such things as responsibility, a gift, forgiving, and a number of related things. So, just to start with this, I wanted to emphasise the fact that these words, aporia and the impossible, are not for me negative words, or neutral words, neutral concepts. But in order to demonstrate this in a convincing fashion, you have to rethink the heritage, to rethink what possible may mean, what does it mean that it is possible for me to forgive only to the extent that it is impossible for me to forgive, what does possible mean in that case? Thats what we have to think thats where thinking starts, where thinking is
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impossible. It is impossible, one cannot think we cannot conceive of this as a possibility. It is impossible, its inconceivable, but thats exactly where one starts thinking.4
It is in thinking through how to engage with Aboriginal sovereignties that Australian society in the main becomes stuck, where the ground of impossibility lies, but it is this ground exactly where our thinking should begin. An example of being stuck is found in the Mabo (No 2)5 decision, and the limits this decision places on further engagement with Aboriginal sovereignty. Throughout Australias colonial legal history there has been a failure to engage with Aboriginal sovereignties, and where an attempt at engagement has been made with Aboriginal peoples it has never been on just terms. Aboriginal laws were never deemed sovereign, but rather a bundle of primitive customary practices, that real Australian law could deem in and out of existence, extinguished or otherwise. Or as Moana Jackson puts it when discussing the relationship between Maori and the imposed legal system in Aotearoa:
Very few would consider the Maori legal system which may have existed before, or ask what happened to it. Few would therefore ask how the status quo came to be, or question whether its authority over Maori is legitimate.6
In the Mabo (No 2) litigation the question of sovereignty was not a question that was pleaded before the court but it was a question that was critical to the outcome of Mabo (No 2). The plaintiffs in Mabo (No 2) did not claim sovereignty over the Murray Islands; the issue between the parties was one of entitlement to property. However the question of sovereignty was inextricably linked to it and of concern to the High Court. The problem for the court was to recognise a form of property entitlement while not fracturing the skeletal frame of the law.7 However, since 11 September 2001 there has been a further retreat from engaging with the question of the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws. The war on terror has provided the Australian government with the opportunity to further empower both the symbolism and the reality of the one-nation state as being fundamental to the security of all Australians. But we (Aboriginal peoples) should hold the ground, not only for Aboriginal peoples,
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but for all peoples who struggle to hold law against its displacement and extinguishment through fear and ignorance. What makes the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws impossible? What needs to be done to recognise Aboriginal laws? What is an act of recognition, and who qualifies as the recognizable human and who does not?8 To what extent are acts of recognition sites of power, where human differentials are produced? In thinking through the processes of recognition, what does it mean for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples who occupy this country? Walking towards recognition (whatever that might mean) might appear impossible, but in returning to Derrida, where he speaks of that moment of impossibility as being an ordeal, a test, a crucial moment through which we have to go, even if we are stuck, we have to experience this moment of aporia in order to make a decision, in order to take responsibility, in order to have a future.9 My suggestion is that that moment of impossibility in recognising the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws, is the moment which provides Australians with the opportunity to take responsibility in order to have a future.10 In the possibility of taking those steps, what could be created is an opening to a future which had not existed before. But what space is there to act, and should someone direct the action? Here I am unsure of taking up the mantle or suggesting who could do this as I am not one for supporting political groups or leadership models, and yet until we experiment and begin the process of creating openings, how will we know? In not taking those steps it begs the question, what will become of us if this opportunity is turned away from? Thought is rarely given to this question for it is assumed Aboriginal laws are largely a relic of the past, and that there are no other views of law outside state sovereign power to even consider. While our dispossession goes on, spaces have always been reclaimed by Aboriginal peoples whilst surviving/living under colonial rule, and in March 2006 Camp Sovereignty was set up by Kooris11 at Kings Domain in Melbourne, where they called for a black GST, no more Genocide, Sovereignty, and a Treaty. The Melbourne Commonwealth Games provided a space to create a dialogue with the State and Commonwealth governments on the question of Aboriginal sovereignty. However, at the time of writing this paper the shelters at Kings Domain Camp Sovereignty had been removed
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by the police, leaving a number of Kooris to maintain the sacred fire,12 unsheltered from the rain. Without positing myself as being representative, I could say that it is common thinking amongst a number of Aboriginal peoples that we should begin again.13 The time of Captain Cooks arrival was when the impossibility of recognition/acknowledgment first emerged, and all flowed from that momentthe injustices of invasion and colonisation, the denial of our Aboriginal presence, our laws, our culture, and our ways of knowing the world. This point, where recognition/activation is deemed inconceivable, is the exact point we should begin to engage in conversations that work towards the building of justice as the foundation for law in Australia. Is there anything that makes this idea of building a future justice framework impossible? In the beginnings of Australia its foundation relied upon the power of force and so it does stillso how do we begin to engage with the continuity of an overpowering force? Our stories have told us howthe frog teaches that through laughter we come to find an alternative to violence.14 Violence was not the way of our past.15 But do the old ways still work? Where the dominant opinion on the impossibility of Aboriginal laws prevails it is hard to imagine that it could, but where there is a will and a faith in the possibility of their functionality, perhaps we can gain sight of another way through the fog of impossibilities. Throughout Australias colonial history there has been no engagement between the state and Aboriginal peoples on questions of Aboriginal sovereignty. This position was further entrenched since the early to mid-1990s. This was the era of the Pauline Hanson phenomenon, Mabo (No 2) and native title.16 The spaces allowed by the state for engagement on the question of a just relationship between Australian law, the state and Aboriginal peoples are occupied by pragmatists, one of whom, stated, outside a 1994 UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples meeting, that Aboriginal sovereignty was a wet dream. Perhaps that is true for those working in such spaces, who see no choice, but I would argue that there is a choice in whether or not we accept the interpretations that are given by these institutions with respect to Mabo and the future of Aboriginal sovereignty. I see it differently. I see Aboriginal sovereignty as a dream for the future possibilities of a growing up of humanity, an opportunity for all peoples to see how they, like the
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Aborigine, are also subjugated by the state, (more comfortably perhaps, but leading to the same endings). I see that the dream of Aboriginal sovereignty if turned away from results in the continued decline and genocide of Aboriginal lives, and the missed opportunity to engage with thinking beyond the impossible.
Sightings Ahead
Aboriginal Australia is a complex and layered landscape, a place of not only Aboriginal sovereignty but a diversity of those sovereignties, sovereignties which underlie this countrys past, haunting its present and calling it to justice as we enter the future. If we dont engage with the impossibility of an Aboriginal sovereignty, then what concept of justice will we hold? Will the foundations of this country remain as dodgy as they were and still are both pre- and post-Mabo (No 2)? Against the view that Aboriginal sovereignty is no more than a wet dream is one of an Aboriginal law which lives, and one which cannot be extinguished, for the law lives in this landa fact, a belief, a way of knowing the world that is still alive and waiting that impossible moment of recognition and activation. To say that Aboriginal law cannot be extinguished is to question the power and authority of Australian laws, laws which inscribe and position themselves over Aboriginal sovereign possibilities, as they enact and construct themselves so as to erase and extinguish Aboriginal laws. But in these acts of erasure what is the state doing? Can Australian laws erase a different Aboriginal way of knowing the law, a way which sits outside Australian law? How can you erase and extinguish that which you have denied? Power allows for the act of erasure, but is it law-full? And if these acts are un-lawful and Australian law then affirms its own lawfulness, what kind of laws are they? Are we moving from genocide to juriscide?17 Where does justice live in acts that are deemed in the name of law; can you have justice in that place where one law purports to extinguish the law of the other? How can Australian law erase Aboriginal law when Aboriginal law sits outside of its proclaimed legal foundation? We have in Australia two ways, two different frameworks; one that refuses to recognise the existence of the other, stating that to give recognition would be to fracture the states very foundation.18 But how does a thief recognise the victim of the theft, if not to give back what they
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have stolen and to no longer hold claim over the object of the theft? As a thief the state is all powerful in the force of law, while Aboriginal laws, first laws of place, live differently, living in the land, bodies, minds and spirits of those who carry and still hold to the law. So where does the force of one law to extinguish the laws of the other draw its legitimacy from? Is it simply because it can, because it has the force and power to do so? The High Court in Mabo (No 2) answered this question: confirming that Australia was lawfully settled as an act of state, when at the same time the court rejected terra nullius as the foundational principle of Australian law.19 In the High Courts rejection of terra nullius many thought that there would appear an opening for an Aboriginal presence, but instead it was a recognition of the limits of Australian law, and a measuring of the natives remaining connection to land in a contemporary colonial context, as the court decided it would not give recognition to an Aboriginal presence that held any possibility of dismembering the skeletal framework of the body of an imposed Australian law. The fiction of settlement under international law prevailed in the Mabo (No 2) decision, as did the skeleton of Australian law remain intact; the question of its legitimacy did not arise as the court found no need to address its own legitimacy. Meanwhile the body of Aboriginal law continues to reside in the land, bodies, minds and spirits of its peoples, as the skeleton of Australian law lays itself out across the land. The High Courts attempt to shift the darkest aspects of Australian history in Mabo (No 2) did nothing but re-invent and relegitimise the fiction of Australia as a settled colony, thereby perpetuating the conflict and contradictions of Australian law with principles of international law, the paradoxes created in the imposed spaces of domestic law over the rights and obligations of Aboriginal peoples continued.
The Impossibility of the Present
What do we teach future law students and students of history? Do we teach them that the Australian legal system was based upon the fiction of peaceful settlement? The High Court in Mabo (No 2), when it had the opportunity to correct legal history, merely reinstated the effect of terra nullius by upholding the status of Australia as a settled colony, founded as an act of state, instead of correcting
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the lies of legal history and calling a conquered territory exactly that. What difference would it have made anyway, in the overall life and the re-living of Aboriginal laws? We are left to imagine that possibility, but we are also left with the decision in Mabo (No 2), and the courts failure to provide a remedy beyond the possibility of meagre acknowledgment of a lesser right to land. We are also left to jump the hurdle to establish a native title right to land, one which is almost insurmountable.20 Even if native title survives the hurdles of proof, then it is still required to stand against the power of the state to extinguish it. It is from this marginal position of the very few Aboriginal peoples and their communities who have been able to establish and gain native title, that the entire population of Aboriginal peoples of Australia has endured the myth of recognition since 1994. I say endured, because this myth of recognition has fuelled a racist backlash directed at Aboriginal peoples, based on the misrepresentation of what native title constitutes, and the misunderstanding that every Aboriginal person in this country could get their native title. There was never a full public debate on what it all meant or the fact that very few Aboriginal people would benefit from native title, or that native title was itself a vulnerable and lesser form of title to property than the common Australian backyard. These misunderstandings have nevertheless empowered the obvious political identities of Pauline Hanson and others less transparent or flamboyantly out there, such as many of the current members of parliament. There have been few, if any, politicians who have spoken of the illusions cast by native title, and few if any who have attempted to address the racism targeted at Aboriginal Australia. The illusion of native title recognition assisted in gathering popular opinion against Aboriginal peoples and drawing a force of opinion which has enabled the federal government to implement regressive, paternalistic, and assimilationist policies against us.21 The newly appointed Minister of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, was reported on 25 January 2006, the day before Australia Day celebrations, thus: Mr Brough said he paid a great deal of personal attention to indigenous affairs when he was employment services minister and believed in the further mainstreaming of Aboriginal affairs.22 The flimsy threat of native title recognition instilled fear in the minds of many Australians that their properties would be claimed
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back although this was and is clearly an impossibility. If only the media were able to convey a deeper discussion, perhaps then the racism of Pauline Hanson wouldnt have been so easily embodied by the Howard Governments policies of assimilation. The fear of native title claims enabled a policy shift which resurrected the ghosts of assimilation, with the renewed expectation that Aboriginal peoples would become fully absorbed into the one nation. There probably never has been a time in Australias colonial history when it was otherwise, but now there is a quicker movement than ever before away from talking about Aboriginal sovereignty and towards policies which are steeped in economic rationalism and fast talking about future economic development of native titled lands. Talk of justice is now ever more easily replaced with the discourse of the market, while other views are not heard, discussed, let alone engaged.23 Is assimilation the only possibility? It appears so, but if we begin our engagement, our conversation, from that position, what will our future be? Completed by absorption?
Who Can Speak? Political Representation Voicing the Other
Whenever I talk I preface speaking by giving my voice a context, that is, I am not speaking for or about anyone, any group or peoples or the Aboriginal peoples of Australia or indigenous peoples globally. I cant do that, no one can. So I begin with a proviso, because the Aboriginal voice seems easier to appropriate, commodify and translate. So this voice has clear conditions attachedit means nothing beyond the body of myself. I am not representative of any peoples and I would call into question anyone who stood in that position: what and how is it that you represent? Now, what does this have to do with questions of sovereignty? I think the question of political representation is critical.24 The idea of speaking for is alien to my knowledge of the possibilities of an Aboriginal political representation. The idea of the generic Aboriginal perspective or political voice is colonial in its framing, an idea that holds no lawful or proper way of an Aboriginal legitimacy. A dialogue which is entered into between Aboriginal representatives and the state is a communication that is distinct from the idea of proper Aboriginal ways of doing business, or talks between independent autonomous peoples. However the colonial players (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) on both sides of
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the border construe this discussion as being representative in its status, that is representative of both Australian and Aboriginal peoples. But clearly the frame is colonial; the purported representation of Aboriginal peoples is in reality taken from a context of subjugation and confinement. There has never been an Aboriginal dialogue or process that has given over to this concept, that is, of giving the Aboriginal voice a political representative quality. All previous talks of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, reconciliation, native title, and now mutual obligation agreements are communications between colonial players: colonisers and native informants. The native informant holds a position that is legitimised by the colonial space. However, a true representation of Aboriginal interests would be the voice that is legitimised by the Aboriginal space, one that holds a law-full authority of those peoples who are being represented, in connection to country or land represented. While the Aboriginal concept that peoples traditional to country have the authority to speak is a truth, it is also true that our voices are spoken as a collective/people. However, the collective or the peoples voice speaking into spaces dominated by colonialism is now affected and subjugated by that domination. The impact of colonialism can be identified in many of the native title negotiations, where individuals are deemed as speaking for and on behalf of the group while not necessarily holding a consensus position that is mandated by the collective of a traditional group of people. So we have speaking for not from. Questions of representation recently arose at Camp Sovereignty when Aboriginal individuals declaring they were the traditional owners of the lands encompassing the Kings Domain site in Melbourne publicly disputed the continued presence of Camp Sovereignty. It is not apparent the extent to which a dialogue with the community of traditional owners occurred for these individuals to reach and publicly declare their opposition to the sovereignty camp. So was the decision made for or from the people; was the decision made through the participation and consensus of traditional owners; or was it the voice of individuals which prevailed? The colonial space denies us the opportunity to re-group, decolonise and re-establish our collective and consensus ways of making decisions. Who can speak for the community? This question is particularly important in native title litigation where speaking for country, who
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can speak, what can be spoken and what can be agreed to, are particularly potent questions. Who can agree to what? One part of any particular traditional Aboriginal peoples community may disagree with, for example, the development of a uranium mine, or a nuclear waste depository site, so who is it that can speak and who will be listened to? The results of recent native title agreements answer these questions. It is generally those who speak the same language as the most powerful player in any of the negotiations, who become the voice which is heard. For what is said and heard is the voice that is desired by the holder of power. The captured voice of the native informant is accommodated and becomes characterised as being representative of their people. This has been repeated throughout Australias colonial history and it continues today. Political models and structures are imposed by government and adopted by communities who are wanting to or are forced by economic necessity to engage; however, these practices generally erode Aboriginal models of engagement. Community discussion is now replaced more and more with shifts to Aboriginal think tanks. Recently a meeting25 was held between a small number of Aboriginal leaders and Prime Minister John Howard to support the policy shift towards mutual obligation agreements;26 however, what is missing from these discussions is the diversity of voices of Aboriginal peoples. Some of those Aboriginal leaders present may argue that they are representative, and that they need to be there to fill what might otherwise be a void in representation. But I am not convinced that a handful of Aboriginal people can achieve much more than entering into a framework that John Howard was already committed to. His political power enables this position, a position that is business as usual and the maintenance of Aboriginal Affairs at a constantly declining bargain basement cost, while at the same time de-legitimising collective ownership by Aboriginal peoples of our lands and natural resources. Aboriginal affairs as they are currently managed function within a colonial context, and what is passed off by the state as Aboriginal representation is a false concept. A true Aboriginal context is something else, still waiting for the time and space to emerge, or for that impossible space to open up.27 Perhaps in this time of waiting what is required is the teaching of what a proper law-full foundation is, one from the law of place, the Aboriginal laws of place. In that teaching one question which may
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be asked could be: what is the relationship between peoples when they fail to acknowledge each other and proper ways to come into country? As first laws are violated, we know the incapacity of other laws (international and domestic) abilities to find a wrong of law,28 so what might there be which could give focus to this wrong of law? The way I look at this is that the speaking voice is that of Aboriginal peoples29 in connection with Aboriginal laws of place. The problems arise when the voice is disempowered, dispossessed, scattered and disconnected from country. Does the history of colonialism and its power to disempower, dispossess, scatter and disconnect legitimately sever that voice, so as to wash voice from the history of place? Since the planting of the British flag and the coming into country the wrong way,30 the Aboriginal voice, along with the country, was captured and violated. The voice became oppressed, awaiting that (im)possible moment of liberation to speak. How is the voice of the collective represented, particularly when colonialism has reduced us to less than two per cent of the Australian population, to become a scattered minority within a large country, with a large proportion of the Aboriginal population in prison and juvenile detention centres, and existing at the lowest rung of social and economic indices? In a traditional context one speaks from connections to land, family and law. With that context stripped from us, how do we speak? Can we de-colonise a space in which to live?
(Im)possible Spaces
Decolonisation, for Australia, is it an impossibility? Perhaps. Can it be dreamed and visioned? Yes. Can the dream be realised? It has been before. The question is, does that time belong any more to the future? I ask this question because it was talked about by the old people in my life. In their passing some took knowledge with them, refusing to leave traces of it behind because, from my understanding of their views, it was knowledge they saw as no longer holding a sovereign place in this world. Why do you think they left without a trace? Mostly because of the impact of colonisation and genocide but also because some of the old people made a conscious choice, that is, that their knowledge no longer belonged to this world. So
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where might it belong? I have struggled with the knowledge of this loss but I can better understand now how our old people had come to this conclusion. They perceived that the colonial frame could give no proper space to their knowledge, to knowledge which had no utility within a colonised space, and held no context beyond the risk of commodification as a form of exotica: to becoming knowledge not adhered to but voyeuristically observed as a form of entertainment. So how can I speak beyond notions of exotica of a knowledge that still lives in the land and sings unheard? Is it impossible to engage with Aboriginal world views, and what is the future of the planet if we dont engage? Does it even matter? I think engagement is critical to the future possibilities of the planet and all peoples. In my work and in addressing my fear of attack or of being hunted into submission, I will shamelessly state that I want to stand rooted to the earth, growing outward, in a dialogue that is not unfixed, or de-stabilised, or blowing rootless in the winds of a globalised scape. Instead of a place that is rootless, I want to take root, and to re-grow into a voice that is earthed. I want somewhere away from the carnival of appropriation, commodification, and words that are lost in translation and taken and absorbed and eaten up by an alien framework. But is it possible to do this, to find a space to speak? Can it be an act of an individual, from a displaced place, one of the scattered pieces; can the individual gather self from that scattered place and hold the truth or the concept? Does the concept have life if it is only the individual that is growing and working to create that space? In my witnessing the ruin of the collective, what value is given to the individual voice?31 Alain Badiou states:
This means that each of us, and not only the philosopher, knows that today, if we are confronted with the inhuman, we must make our own decision and speak in our own name. One cannot hide behind any great collective configuration, any supposed force, any metaphysical totality which might take a position in ones stead. But in order to take a position in ones own name when faced with the inhuman, a fixed point is needed for the decision. An unconditional principle is needed to regulate both the decision and the assent.32
What do I make of this statement? How might this position impact on my question regarding the representation of Aboriginal voices, particularly when Badiou seems to advocate a return to universal
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principles?33 In this return to the universal how will all of the other Aboriginal voices be heard and in what context, particularly when the Aboriginal world is being disappeared by the political forces of both the left and the right? Is there no possibility of a political space to be heard on the concerns we hold as Aboriginal peoples? Concerns which go far beyond spaces of the universal embrace of white privilege?34 The problem for myself in coming to speak is that I cannot become the native representative and translate for the group. To translate the position from which all persons had the time to speak, I cannot be the native representative in this time now where we have no time to speak, or no space to be heard. As Badiou suggests, for philosophy there is no time, and at a more basic, grass roots level there is also no time to speak, listen and be heard. The pace, as we know, is fast. Now when we speak about the land, family, caring and sharing it goes unheard even more than any time before. Perhaps a simple challenge is to find ways of being heard? How hard is that, particularly when the question of justice in relation to Aboriginal peoples has become boring to the mainstream public? For example, when I speak of the destruction of a traditional fishermans cave in my mothers country being sacrificed for the building of a yacht club it is seen as a minor complaint.35 Or the protection of Aboriginal burial grounds against windmill farms is seen as Aboriginal people in conflict with the ecology movement. Or when Kevin Buzzacott36 speaks about the need to stop the expansion of Roxby Downs uranium mine, he is now seen as opposing a viable option to global warming. Or the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjutja who have spoken against the building of a nuclear waste dump on their traditional lands are seen as too small a minority group when in the face of global warming the need for the state to dump its nuclear waste is in the common good of man.37 It is similar to back in the 1950s when the nuclear bomb testing at Maralinga displaced Aboriginal peoples and when there was very little public condemnation. That time appears to have returned. So can we speak of caring and sharing of our environment without it becoming a fashion fetish item where our ideas are taken in, or rejected by the market when no longer current, sexy and/or fashionable, or are misinterpreted by the prevailing powers of the media?
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Where Does Colonialism Situate, or What Spaces Might Be Free of It?
How is it that some commentators can speak of a colonising violence in one location and ignore that same violence in the space which they occupy?38 For example, within the USA the focus given to the racism which oppresses one group (African Americans) is privileged over the genocide which occurred against the aboriginal peoples in the Americas. Silent systematic genocides still occur all over the planet. Similarly in Australia the inhuman treatment of refugees in detention centres is well known, as it should be, but the ongoing cultural genocide of Aboriginal peoples is a whisper. The mandatory detention of Aboriginal children continues unchallenged, but the mandatory detention of refugees is challenged. In 2005 the Northern Territory Government went to the polls promising to clean up the streets and get tough on crime. There was no denial that this would lead to an increase in the incarceration rates and the mandatory detention of young Aboriginal people but there was no public outcry against it. What enters the media and the public domain for consumption and analysis? How do market forces determine the inclusion of news of one genocide and the exclusion of another? Perhaps these questions tease out or help illustrate the commodification of human rights issues, that is, where human rights violations are pitched against each other, each political lobby group vies for the media spotlight, to highlight its struggle as being the most critical. In these competitive spaces the possibility of community is lost and we are then left with no community to assist in building strategies that might deflate the dynamic of power and greed. Instead we are left with contested struggles with their own distinct human traumas which begin to eat each other. The principle of community does not exist in those places of trauma.
Sovereign Acknowledgments
The historical genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal peoples left a silence; proper law-full acknowledgments of the sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples in connection to place stopped. We have recently brought back that practice of giving acknowledgment of the first peoples of country. But in giving that acknowledgment I want to examine what it is we as Aboriginal peoples have re-initiated. For me
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it was an affirmation of a continuing Aboriginal sovereignty in the face of the Australian history of denial. Today the practice of giving acknowledgment to first peoples is commonit has been appropriated by the state and is used to begin most ceremonies and government functions. But in its current popular form what does it mean? It does not have the meaning we argued for and asserted during the long struggle for a dialogue on land rights, selfdetermination and sovereignty. During the 1990s and the time of reconciliation movements, the acknowledgment of first peoples took on a different meaning; it was not the acknowledgment of sovereignty that we had originally asserted. In popularising the acknowledgment of first peoples, what has this idea become? Has it been commodified into a quaint tradition within Australia, some customary practice that invokes nothing in terms of recognition or more importantly a call to action? So what is the state acting out in giving acknowledgment? Is it some song and dance routine thats become popular and then used to assist in constructing the illusion of the freedom and recognition of the Aborigine? The state acting out its symbolic acknowledgments of the country of traditional peoples has created a commodity, which trades in the illusion of the happiness and recognition of first peoples. It is an illusion of the traditional native, alive, well, healthy and free, after more than 200 years of an unrecognised colonial violence. It is a deemed Mabo victory of reconciliation. But is it the truth? It is not mine; in addition, the statistics kept by the states own records reveal the truth to be otherwise also.
What Is There to Do and What Tools Are There to Assist?
Over a number of years concern for Aboriginal survival has resulted in discussion confirming the obvious, that is, Aboriginal peoples have to do a lot of the necessary work ourselvesKevin Gilbert said this in Because a White Man Will Never Do It.39 Ward Churchill40 has also suggested that the struggle embraces us all and that until white people or non-Aboriginal peoples understand this, our struggle remains constant and difficult, and continues until there is a coming to see the unity or the way we are all collectively victims of colonialism. In doing the work, some of my efforts have been to develop a clear Aboriginal vision, but that is always threatened, I think, by the fog of colonialism. Initially when I engaged in
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discussing ideas, I felt disinclined to engage with dead white male philosophers who saw the native as sitting outside of history, or outside philosophical discourse. Yet Benin philosopher Paulin Hountondji does engage with European philosophy and attacks the idea that there is an African philosophy distinct from the western philosophical tradition.41 He argues that an African philosophy must both assimilate and transcend the theoretical heritage of western philosophy. I am not sure, however, how I could assimilate European racist philosophical discourses, without severing the racist bits. But if, for example, I was to sever the racism of Hegel, to what extent is the remainder of the philosophers work uncontaminated or tainted by his racist position on history or progress? I am not sure and it is a problem I remain committed to working through. But while I am still standing in the position of resisting engagement with the philosophy of dead white males, is it possible to speak entirely from an Aboriginal world view? Hountondji suggests not, arguing that western philosophy is the only intellectual method capable of leading to the transformation of Africa. I disagree. In my work I seek to find a place where I might stand in the place of women in the Aboriginal world view of the grandmothers and grandfathers. Is this a possibility? I am not sure. The only certainty is that it was done in the past, so I guess my journey is to see what of the past may still stand, re-grow and replenish the earth. Speaking against such a journey Hountondji suggests that an African ethno-philosophy would encourage a pious rumination of the past,42 and what I have found interesting here is the similarity of Hountondjis position to that of the work of the Australian anthropologist Peter Sutton; however, Sutton takes his critical gaze of returning to the past to an even heightened level when he suggests that contemporary violence in Aboriginal communities originates from our past and that is it is inherent within Aboriginal culture.43 It is these attacks on Aboriginal culture in isolation from the history and impact of colonialism which have provided the state with the white knight defence and their justification for dropping a rights agenda or the possibility of recognition of Aboriginal selfdetermination. I guess it is considered that Aboriginal life is safer when determined entirely by the state. In this globalised scape where is my centre as an Aboriginal woman? In the presence of a colonising violence, how can I speak, and what is it I am speaking into? I see the task as to remain loyal to
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the call to position Aboriginal world views, and the obvious commitment to an ongoing Aboriginal presence, one which remains a point of interruption to the white settler myth. The call to Aboriginal sovereignty interrupts the colonial process, as does the question of the truth or untruth of legitimate or illegitimate foundation. On this question of truth, or multiple truths, does it help to ask how I can speak my truth as it falls apart before and under the pressure of a colonising violence? What is the truth/untruth of my narrativeis truth an impossibility? It feels very true to me, but can this truth be read external to the truthful Aboriginal sovereign self/selves/mob? I am not sure; Aboriginal sovereignty is a difficult truth to speak, into the colonising space. My vision is to clearly develop my own de-colonising practice. The more I think into other theorists and their ideas as being tools to appropriate I wonder if I am somehow becoming lost in space that is not my own and becoming assimilated into the concepts of others rather than finding a conceptual space that is already known to sovereign Aboriginal grandmothers/grandfathers. So I resist as always absorption, and remain committed to the lighting of the fire. Even though there may be no one else at the fire, at least it is burning.
Some Conclusions and a Return to the Problem of Colonialism
To what extent does colonialism remain the future of this country and what could constitute an act of de-colonisation? Should the colonial history of the past be negated and what of present-day Australians taking responsibility for the deeds of the British in 1788? Is there a connection between the past and the present and should Aboriginal people be held fully responsible for their lives now, lives affected by the violence of colonialism? I think there is an ongoing need to reflect upon the legal and political history, and the capacity of Aboriginal peoples to take responsibility. If we look at legal history, most of the Australian states Aborigines Acts were not repealed until the late 1960s. These acts provided the legal framework to control almost every aspect of Aboriginal peoples lives. They enabled the removal of Aboriginal children, the exploitation of Aboriginal workers, and the containment of Aboriginal peoples into small concentration camps, while our lands and waters were taken from us.
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The capacity or opportunity for Aboriginal peoples to take responsibility was controlled in most states of Australia until the 1960s when the Aborigines Acts were finally repealed. In comparison to all other peoples living in Australia, the inequality of opportunity should be obvious, that is, white Australians had no impediment or similar control over their lives which restricted their freedom of movement, or which threatened containment, or removed their children and themselves from their traditional lands. However, the idea of a progression to equality was based on the assumption that all facets of discrimination had instantly disappeared with the repeal of the Aborigines Acts and the purported policy shift to that of self-determination. When we examine the statistics on Aboriginal containment we see people moving from the Aboriginal reserves away to public housing in cities and towns and another steady flow that continues to this day, of Aboriginal peoples to Australian gaols and juvenile detention centres. For many, the site of containment merely shifted from reserves controlled under the Aborigines Acts, to control via the criminal justice system. Far from an end to colonialism we find there has been no end. The sites of Aboriginal subjugation have merely shifted from Aborigines Acts concentration camps to prisons, mental health institutions and juvenile detention centres. In my humble opinion colonialism is alive in these contemporary institutions; we just call their containment by its right name or another name, but whatever name is used to describe the subjugation of Aboriginal peoples, the act remains linked to the colonial history of this country. This link should not be allowed to be white-washed from our history. In speaking recently at a student conference I urged students to resist attempts by the universities and the state to remove critical studies from the university learning experience. Subjects in this area are shrinking or being revised and re-written.44 On 25 January 2006, John Howard called for a chronological and narrative approach to the teaching of Australian history and a turn away from what he termed deconstructive approaches to the subject.45 If successful, this move will once again suppress Aboriginal voices speaking back to an historical and continuing Australian colonialism. We risk again the reinscribing of history. In an Australian Broadcasting Corporation program that was screened during 2005, we observed the re-enactment of white colonial settlers making good on the
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colonial frontier, met and welcomed to country by a Wiradjuri elder,46 an image that gives a surreal take on the colonial frontier of that time. In 2006 Aboriginal peoples lives are no longer lived under the control of the Aborigines Acts, but many of those lives still remain contained by the states criminal justice systems. Yet it is the detention of Aboriginal peoples in this country that we have turned our gaze away from; a much more deserving victim has emerged, along with another human rights struggle, the refugee. There has been a shift in focus from the social justice position of Aboriginal peoples, and this has occurred even though the Aboriginal position has remained unchanged and while also in many regions the position socially, economically and spiritually has deteriorated. At the same time, we are observing much of the white Australian public expressing a fatigue of feeling guilt for an ever-present past. So who should take responsibility? Should non-Aboriginal Australia take responsibility for its inherited history of colonialism? They are quick to take benefits from the inherited wealth of colonialism. Is there a price to be paid to balance out the debts of colonialism? And should Aboriginal people be expected to take responsibility without the capacity to do so, without the benefit of a wealth inherited from the past, but the conversean inheritance of oppression and poverty and lives controlled by the Aborigines Acts. Should Aboriginal people be reconciled to an oppressive past and assimilate into white Australia? Should we be expected to become disconnected from the past, as though our past is not with us in this present or future moment? The problem is that it is connected and cannot simply be washed away as the High Court suggested in the Mabo (No 2) decision.
The Future: Is It an Impossibility?
Is a future itself dependent upon Aboriginal ways, but an impossibility when an Aboriginal presence is being disappeared before our eyes? Without Aboriginal living connections is the future of humanity impossible? Are these impossible spaces where we should begin, rather than avoid? In the event of turning away, where is there even to turn? Last year on Hiroshima Day I listened to a speaker47 talking about how we may look back at this time in fifty years and see it as
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a nuclear stone age. Equally I hope that it might be seen as a stone age in terms of concepts of justice, and we will be looking back from a time which gives recognition to all Aboriginal peoples sovereignty of laws, and coming to know that the limit placed upon us in this time now, that of an impossibility, was itself an illusion, a trauma brought upon us by an age of violence. So yes, I am hopeful and a believer in future cycles of humanity relating to each other as well as the natural world, but there is much work to do and many shifts and changes that need to emerge. We have to begin here, right now!
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Chapter Two
M a b o , T a m p a and the NonJusticiability of Sovereignty

Maria Giannacopoulos
It has been some time now since the Tampa sailed into and then back out of the national consciousness.1 But there is violence in this act of forgetting. In August of 2001 when the refugees on board the Tampa were floating off the Australian coast awaiting legal permission to enter, they expressed their sense of distress and confusion to the Australians they could neither see nor reach in a letter they handed to the Norwegian ambassador:
We hope that you do not forget that we are also from the same miserable people and oppressed refugees and now sailing around Christmas Island inside Australian boundaries waiting permit to enter your country. But your delay while we are in the worst conditions has hurt our feelings. We do not know why we have not been regarded as refugees and deprived from rights of refugees according to International Convention (1951). We request from Australian authorities and people, at first not to deprive us from the rights that all refugees in your country enjoy. And in the case of rejection due to not having anywhere to live on earth and every moment death is threatening us. We request you to take mercy on the life of (438) men, women and children.2
My aim in this work is to remember Tampa by interrogating the exclusion of the Tampa refugees with particular emphasis on the notion of your country. I will focus on this statement to expose the multiple exclusions contained within this seemingly singular act of exclusion. In the first instance, it opens up the critical question about the ownership of Australian land and nation. Who are the
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owners of this land? Who answers the refugees awaiting mercy? Do the owners decide if the refugees are allowed entry? In the Tampa case, the law in the guise of the Federal Court decided to exclude by invoking sovereignty. Sovereignty was invoked as if from the heavens and applied un-problematically. Law and sovereignty operated as though their own foundations were/are mystical.3 This exclusion that kept the refugees at bay proceeded along the assumption that both law and sovereignty are one and singular. In this work I want to interrogate the multiple levels of violence and the multiple exclusions that follow from such logic. When the sovereign decides to exclude refugees, this is violence. When the sovereign is invoked as a category that is singular and requires no interrogation, this is an instance of a deeper violence. Mabo and Tampa are both in their own way about sovereignty and yet in both cases it is precisely the category that is insulated from critique.4 Whilst the respective courts do justice to the question of sovereignty by finding it to be a category requiring no questioning, the question of sovereignty remains aporetically non-justiciable. I place sovereignty under the critical spotlight to expose not only the racial exclusions that flow from it, but to argue that sovereignty and law are by definition constituted by exclusion. Law is exclusion. Contemporary Australian law signifies as the law, precisely because of what it excludes. When law signifies as being neutral, as being one and as mystical in its foundation it hides the violence of its origins as well as the violence involved in its continuing operations. Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that:
Australia was acquired in the name of the King of England. As such patriarchal white sovereignty is a regime of power that derives from the illegal act of possession and is most acutely manifested in the form of the Crown and the judiciary The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty is predicated on exclusion; that is it denies and refuses what it does not ownthe sovereignty of the Indigenous other.5
Moreton-Robinsons work is inundated with repetition. References to patriarchal white sovereignty permeate her text and her analysis. Her repetition forces me to ask why I understand her repeated reference to patriarchal white sovereignty as repetition, but do not think it repetition when law or sovereignty are continually invoked without descriptors attached to them, in cases like Tampa and Mabo
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and indeed throughout my own legal education? These strategic repetitions in her text highlight the role that repetition plays in naturalising dominant and normative meanings that accrue around concepts such as law and sovereignty. With the ideological function of these categories hidden, they come to signify as the normal, neutral and in that sense the only legitimate form of law and sovereignty. To be considered non-ideological is precisely the ideology of patriarchal white sovereignty. According to MoretonRobinson this is achieved by informing and circulating a coherent set of meanings about white possession as part of common sense knowledge.6 Moreton-Robinsons work is critical to re-theorising law and sovereignty precisely because she disrupts the common-sense assumptions that are instrumental in perpetrating racial violence, whether it is literal or symbolic. The invisible power of patriarchal white sovereignty comes from its ability to appear neutral and transparent.7 As I have argued elsewhere, invisible violence is produced when law is invoked and applied as though its meaning is self-evident and as though its foundation is mystical.8 By identifying the racial and patriarchal dimensions of sovereignty, and by naming it as a power regime born from illegality, Moreton-Robinsons work disrupts the common-sense notion that Australian law and sovereignty are categories free of violence. Her work offers an important challenge to legal scholarship to find ways to disrupt the highly ideological common sense notions of law and sovereignty and to make visible the idea that law and sovereignty do not exist in the singular only. Derrida has argued that:
On the one hand it appears easier to criticize the violence that founds since it cannot be justified by any preexisting legality and so appears savage. But on the other hand it is more difficult, more illegitimate to criticize this same violence since one cannot summon it to appear before the institution of any preexisting law: it does not recognise existing law in the moment that it founds another.9
Although coming from a different angle, Derridas work also highlights the complexity of critiquing law and the sovereign moment that brought it into being. Once a legal system is established through force, it eradicates all other forms of law that might judge its legitimacy. It declares certain questions, including the
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one about its own legality, to be non-justiciable. Non-justiciability is the legal category that makes it illegal to question the laws foundation. The category of the non-justiciable then is the legal process through which the violence of law is relegated to the realm of the invisible. Derrida through the work of Pascal reveals that to critically investigate the category of the non-justiciable is highly political terrain: Whoever traces [law] to its source annihilates it.10 According to Derrida it is the key features of law, its so-called mystical foundation and its self-authorisation, which make possible this type of deconstructive project.11 In other words, law itself creates the conditions, and has housed within it the conditions of possibility for its own critique or deconstruction. Even though contemporary Australian law cannot be summoned to appear before the institution of any pre-existing law, it seems that in order to unpack the multiple dimensions of laws violence, critical attention needs to be focused on what other forms this critique could take. An acknowledgment of the annihilation of systems of law that came before is a critical step in disallowing contemporary law to operate as though it is transcendent and has arrived mystically and without violence. Moreton-Robinson says that the illegal act of possession that founded Australia is most acutely manifested in the form of the Crown and the judiciary.12 I will deploy the cases of Mabo and Tampa to attest to this statement. However, prior to doing this it is important to complicate the relation between law and sovereignty. Giorgio Agamben argues that sovereignty is something that is both inside and outside of the juridical order.13 Sovereign power is the power to declare, I who am outside the law declare that there is nothing outside the law.14 Agamben uses Schmitt to state that the sovereign decision proves itself not to need law to create law. Agambens work makes visible the mutually constitutive relation that exists between law and sovereignty. Moreton-Robinson states:
The law in Australian society is one of the key institutions through which the possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty operates. White patriarchs designed and established the legal and political institutions that control and maintain the social structure under which we now live.15
If the logic of Agamben and Moreton-Robinson is followed, then violence, racial and otherwise, cannot be understood as a single
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moment that can neatly be relegated to the past. The original moment of sovereignty lives through the operation of contemporary law: law that retrospectively and repetitively constructs this original moment of sovereignty as being free of violence and as being beyond question. Agamben uses Pindars fragment to offer this definition of sovereignty:
The sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.16
Following Agambens logic that there is no clear delineation between inside and outside,17 so too there is no clear line between inclusion and exclusion. So far I have argued that law and sovereignty exclude because they deny the existence of other systems of organisation in this country. In that sense, contemporary law and sovereignty are very much predicated on exclusion. However, this type of exclusion can be understood as carrying within it precisely the thing that it excludes. Australian law brings into itself the very things it needs to exclude, making it simultaneously inclusive and exclusive. MoretonRobinson states:
The possessive logic of white sovereignty operates to discriminate in favour of itself, ensuring it protects and maintains its interest by the continuing denial and exclusion of Indigenous sovereignty.18
In the case of Mabo, Indigenous sovereignty is denied. This exclusion works by way of an inclusion into the legal realm of the High Court. The High Court, by actively finding that the question of its sovereignty is non-justiciable, re-produces itself as the only legitimate sovereignty. This is a repetition that does not get recognised as such, since the High Court through its elaborate rationales discursively produces the knowledge that comes to be understood as common sense. The High Court is not the conduit through which sovereignty innocently passes. Sovereignty is simultaneously activated and insulated from critique by the findings of the High Court. In the High Court case of Mabo (No 2):
The common law of this country recognises a form of native title, which in the cases where it has not been extinguished, reflects the entitlements of the original inhabitants, in accordance with their
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laws or customs to their traditional lands and that, subject to the effect of some particular Crown leases, the land entitlement of the Murray Islanders in accordance with their laws or customs is preserved, as native title under the law of Queensland.19
This excerpt from the Mabo judgment graphically dramatises the way exclusion operates by way of inclusion. This excerpt posits an unnamed and unmarked version of sovereignty as the centre of judgment of all that is valid and legal. By positioning patriarchal white sovereignty at the centre, the High Court can comfortably concede the existence of some other law and custom. Once this other law is in the higher realm of the High Court, it can be excluded by way of invisibly violent discursive manoeuvres. The two I will examine are organised around the use of the words custom and extinguishment. In the one short excerpt I have quoted above, the use of the word customs accompanies both references to laws of the traditional inhabitants. I argue that the statement laws or customs works discursively to produce Indigenous laws as customs. By situating Indigenous law as being synonymous with custom, there is no concession that any real law existed. The High Court, which is a product of enlightenment theories of civilisation, continues to perpetuate racial hierarchies by positioning its law as higher than what it positions as custom. According to this logic, white law remains the only law. If law and custom exist in a hierarchical relation with law being superior, then how is it that attention is not paid to the reason why law has come to signify as superior? Tacit discourses on racial supremacy operate to disguise the fact that when law comes to overpower already established modes of organisation, it must by necessity be a regime of force and violence. These tacit discourses of race manifested themselves in Mabo when Chief Justice Brennan asserted that where the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance to traditional customs, the foundation of native title has disappeared20 and cannot be revived.21 In Bruce Buchans analysis, the tide of history acts as a euphemism for the active removal of Indigenous inhabitants from their lands, and the severance of traditional observances by colonial (and post-colonial) administrators.22 The invocation of the natural flow of history rewrites colonial violence as inevitable.
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The concept of extinguishment operates along similar discursive lines. Even if Indigenous laws were stated to have been in existence by the High Court, they would then have to prove their strength in order to survive extinguishment and continue to be in existence. This enactment of racial superiority, which is reminiscent of social Darwinist ideals of survival of the fittest, operates at a subtle discursive level. Yet the effects of this discourse are real and material when Indigenous people face the burden of proving the survival of their laws to a system that has always already deemed them to be either non-existent since they are custom, or extinguished. The discourses of racial supremacy that are operating in Mabo function in an obfuscatory fashion, to situate the imposition of white law as an effect of its inherent superiority and not as an effect of its brutal violence. Even though the discussion of these very concepts by the High Court is an acknowledgment of a prior system of organisation, it is also a discussion that operates to deny the validity of anything outside itself. By discussing these concepts the High Court is implicated in a discussion about its own legitimacy and its very existence. But somehow this High Court decision that is, in fact, about the nature of sovereignty, comes to signify as a location that cannot discuss or decide this question. This decision purporting to not be a decision is violence for this very reason as well as for the effects it produces. Irene Watsons work serves as a scathing critique on the representation of Australian law as a location that is free from violence:
In imposing sovereignty over indigenous laws, the state through military force rapes its way into existence, creating a sovereignty of violence, and not of law that is always known This muldarbi sovereign erases peoples memories and ideas of laws, in constituting its own statehood, one which assumes a foundation based on law, and not by force.23
Watsons work is not only powerful because of its critical insight in naming white law as violence, but also because by identifying herself as a survivor of terra nullius her voice operates to suggest that no matter how violent attempts have been to achieve genocide and exclusion, she survives to speak of the laws that came before. She identifies the British imposition of terra nullius as operating over territory/land, law and people. The myth of emptiness, created by
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the British as a justification for the lie that a space existed/exists for their invasion, covered every part of her Nunga being.24 She testifies to the way in which their claimed sovereignty denied ours and in planting the flagsupported by violencean act of state, they violated the laws of the first peoples.25 Watsons work is pivotal to the task of tracing the operations of sovereignty and the multiple forms of violence it produces. Her explanation of sovereignty as claimed in a way that was supported by force, is tellingly antithetical to the Federal Courts description of sovereignty in Tampa. Justice French decided that:
The executive power of the Commonwealth covers a wide range of matters, some of greater importance than others. Some are connected with Australias status as an independent, sovereign nation state. The greater the significance of a particular executive power to national sovereignty, the less likely it is that, absent clear words or inescapable implication, that the Parliament would have intended to extinguish the power these powers may be exercised for good reasons or for bad. That debate however is not for this court to enter.26
The sovereignty of which the Federal Court speaks is one without origin and one that needs no justification for its violent operations. I have argued elsewhere that these kinds of decisions make invisible the enabling relations between law, state and violence. The assumed rightness of border protection and national sovereignty become synonyms for the law itself. Sovereignty and law are produced as incontestable by the Federal Court but made to appear as transcendental in their status, as existing in some extra-systemic space outside of the parameters that create the conditions for its operations.27 The protection of the border and the re-production of sovereignty are precisely the instances where the national border is being produced. By being kept at bay, by being violently denied entry to Australia, the refugees are made to represent the antithesis of the Australian nation, even though it is precisely their exclusion that constructs the Australian border. As Suvendrini Perera points out, the Tampa refugees were made to function as outside the nation.28 They functioned as the outside of the law even as they were incorporated and inside the very operations of both the nation and the law.29
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The myth of emptiness of which Watson speaks is the ideology that enabled the land to be filled with the law of the coloniser. This colonial logic of possession30 manifests itself in the Tampa judgment, albeit in a transformed sense. The Federal Court no longer uses the myth of emptiness. Rather, it overturns the myth of a land empty to a land fully occupied through the discourses of sovereignty that function to keep refugees at bay. This myth now operates in what seems to be an opposite sense to terra nullius. Australia is made to signify as full and unable to embrace refugees. This was most explicitly dramatised by Prime Minister Howards assertion at the time of Tampa that:
every nation has the right to effectively control its borders and to decide who comes here and under what circumstances, and that Australia has no intention of surrendering and compromising that right We will take whatever action is neededwithin the law of courseto prevent the landing occurring.31
The contemporary sovereign naturalises its authority to decide to exclude in such manoeuvres. The power and right to do such violence conceals the violence that came before, as well as the violence upon which the right to make such a decision is predicated. Watson writes that the coloniser viewed Indigenous laws as prehistoric tribal systems and exotic customs.32 In the logic of the socalled civilised state, only peoples who form part of a state would be considered peoples capable of being governed by law. The formation of the new social order was, according to Watson, founded on the possibility of our disappearance.33 I make this point to highlight the necessity of understanding both the imposition of, and the current manifestations of, social order to be premised upon the physical and ideological violence done to the Indigenous owners of this land. The starting point of any discussion of Australian law needs to acknowledge that this is what is written out of law. This understanding is necessary for two reasons. The first is that it draws critical attention to the way in which Aboriginal people are still subject to colonial practices precisely because of the imposition of this order. The legal system is a critical dimension of this violence, even as it presents itself as a remedy for the evils of colonisation as exhibited through the decision of Mabo. The second reason is that it is this same order that denies entry to refugees seeking safety in this country. Watsons
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argument, that the continuation of the current (colonial) social order is founded upon the possibility of the disappearance of Indigenous people, could be extended to include the understanding that this form of violence forms the enabling conditions for white power to perpetrate violence towards refugees and, in so doing, asserts itself as the only law and sovereign power, and therefore as the only power capable of deciding the question of hospitality.34 The historical events leading up to the Mabo decision, as tracked by Watson, are illuminating. The decision by the International Court of Justice to remedy the international guilt that surrounded the underlying racism of terra nullius in relation to the Western Sahara people, found that this principle could no longer legitimise state acquisitions based on occupations where people were living as organised societies.35 In the aftermath of this theoretical discrediting of terra nullius came the High Court of Australia decision of Mabo. Watson tracks the way in which prior to the decision in Mabo (No 2), Paul Coe in a representative application for the Wiradjuri, Ngunawal and Arrente peoples/nations wrote to the Secretary-General of the United Nations to gain support for an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice. His application sought their opinion on similar grounds to the Western Sahara application on the recognition of Nunga sovereignty.36 Despite these similarities, the application was overshadowed by the High Court Mabo decision and by the Native Title Act 1993. The United Nations viewed both these developments as progressive advancements towards the rights of indigenous peoples.37 I am tracking these developments prior to the High Court decision to highlight the problematic way in which the decision functioned. The Australian Court system, ably assisted by the institutions of international law, by way of the Mabo decision, removed from focus the loud critiques that had been made of sovereignty up until that point.38 Watson eloquently states that the Australian High Court and the Native Title Act operated as a:
Quieter and more pragmatic voice, one that no longer calls into question in international forums the nature of the sovereignty and law held by the Australian state.39
The reasoning offered in the Mabo decision is highly relevant to the understanding of executive power in Tampa as it relates fundamentally to the non-justiciability of sovereignty. The High
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Courts decision in Mabo determined the ongoing genocide of Nungas by accepting that Australian sovereignty was based on a non-justiciable act of state. The court refused to inquire further into an area it said would fracture the Australian legal system.40 Thus this is a moment where sovereignty is identified as existing outside of law. And yet by the Courts own admission if this question is opened up, it has the capacity to de-stabilise the entire legal system. It is my argument that in both Mabo and Tampa, the finding that sovereignty is outside the reach of justice is precisely what brings sovereignty inside the legal order. And it is also this finding, in other words the continuing insulation of the category of sovereignty, which makes possible the racial violence in the name of nation. According to Watson, survival inside the white nation compels Nungas to go before the states native title processes where native title applicants are required to prove the extent to which their nativeness has survived genocide. If nativeness is not proven it is considered extinguished. If it is proven, it is open to extinguishment.41 This led to her very significant point that native title is extinguishment and that this extinguishment is a form of genocide.42 While Watson concedes that for some people there are benefits that emanate from this legislation, her analysis is significant precisely because it casts into view those aspects that the courts seek to write out. In effect, she is naming the way in which the systems and processes of an ongoing colonial law are implicated in the process of producing violent outcomes even as the face of the law takes on the appearance of benevolence.43 Her analysis draws attention to the multiple levels of laws violence. Indigenous peoples systems of organisation are made invisible and excluded and yet Indigenous peoples must be included by way of coming before this violent law to prove their claims to land.
In a dream where there is no fear of retribution Nungas face the Australian state and ask, by what lawful process have you come into being? Who are you really? The state responds, international law. An act of state, says the High Court, and it is as though these doctrines of state supremacy conjure a magic, which absolves the centuries of unlawfulness and violence against indigenous peoples. The question now terra nullius is known to be deadis what
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constitutes the state? The question is met with a silence of an unrecognised violencea power of the state to annihilate all that is different.44
Why is Watson asking these questions in a dream? I suggest that she does so in order to vividly demonstrate that the logic of contemporary white, colonial law does not allow a legitimate space from which to interrogate/undo the violence that is endemic to it. If it did, then the question of law founding violence, that is sovereignty, could be justiciable. Watsons important work challenges normative legal understandings that celebrate the death of terra nullius. This colonial and violent doctrine is not and cannot be dead simply because it is declared to be so in a High Court judgment. Even if this doctrine has been formally overturned, the logic of patriarchal white sovereignty remains intact. Seen in this light, Bain Attwoods assertion that it is not incorrect to apply the term terra nullius in historical terms but that it is incorrect in legal terms45 seems to miss the critical point. By arguing over whether it was legally correct, the violent and ongoing effects of the concept are removed from view. Terra nullius is implicated in a project that declares law and sovereignty to be one and singular and exclusive of Aboriginal law and sovereignty. This happens regardless of whether the concept is upheld or rejected in the legal realm. When Watson asks in a dream, Who are you really? I am reminded of the confusion of the refugees on board the Tampa. They had said, whilst floating off the coast of Australia, We do not know why we have not been given permit to enter your country. Watson is addressing patriarchal white sovereignty and drawing attention to the very violent and illegitimate nature of its being. The refugees are addressing the same patriarchal white nation but are confused because they may have misunderstood Australia as being hospitable. The nation that presents itself as benevolent shows its true white colour to the refugees when it slams the door violently in the face of their suffering. In a sense it does this legitimately, this is an instance of law conserving violence, a violence that cannot directly address Watsons question of who or what it really is. Instead Justice French in Tampa talks around Watsons question when he says:
The power to determine who may come into Australia is so central to its sovereignty that it is not to be supposed that the government
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of the nation would lack the power conferred upon it directly by the Constitution, the ability to prevent people not part of the Australian community from entering.46
Justice Frenchs ability to legally and violently deny entry to refugees is premised on forgetting the violence that founded his ability to do so. His narration of sovereignty as absolute and as one is part of erasing laws violent origin of presenting Anglo law as one, transcendental and without origin. Derrida says that parliaments, and in this instance I will add courts:
Live in forgetfulness of violence from which they are born. This amnesic degeneration is not a psychological weakness, it is their statute and their structure.47
The Federal Court judgment in the Tampa decision narrowed the terms of its inquiry to the question regarding the exercise of executive power. In Tampa, this power was narrated as being legitimately invoked in order to exclude because, according to Justice French:
Section 61 is the primary source of executive power. Its content extends to the execution and maintenance of the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth. It is also limited by those terms in so far as it will not authorise the Commonwealth to act inconsistently with the distribution of powers and the limits on power for which the Constitution provides. Nor will it authorise the Commonwealth to act otherwise than according to the laws of the Commonwealth.48
I argue that the most significant words in the above passage are the words maintenance and source. If the question in Tampa is framed as simply being one of maintaining the Constitution then this judgment re-iterates the so-called proper starting point of Australian law. The Constitution is simultaneously positioned as the proper origin of Australian law and yet it also signifies as though it itself has no origin. When the Constitution is read in light of the exclusionary practices that made it possible, its origin becomes blindingly visible. Importantly, Geoff Clarke questions the credibility of the extremely problematic white argument that Aboriginal people surrendered sovereign rights to legal institutions at the time of Federation. This was impossible given that Aboriginal people were excluded from the discussions leading up to the
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establishment of the 1901 constitution.49 The origin of Australian law as symbolised by the Constitution was not only about excluding Aboriginal people who were already internal but about the exclusion of other inferior peoples who were both offshore and therefore a potential threat, but were also already internal in the form of Asian workers.50 These are among the historical conditions that mark Australian law as being inextricably implicated in a project of producing racial violence. The continuation of this violence is dramatised when the exclusion of the Tampa refugees from Australia was narrated as legal because of the use of the executive power. This power was narrated as being capable of being invoked to ensure the maintenance of the Constitution. And yet it was the Constitution that is said to be the source of the power. The term source cannot be overestimated. It suggests that there is a single location from which power emanates. Whilst this may appear to be a point of origin, the origin ceases to appear as one. This is because when this particular point of origin is vacated of the violence that produced it, as well as the violence it continues to do, it comes to signify as transcendental, neutral and as existing since time immemorial. In other words, the point from which power emanates is positioned as being the singular location of the Constitution. The Constitution becomes, through these repetitions a location that signifies as being above and outside of violence. However, when this self-perpetuating circular logic is disrupted one comes to understand Derridas idea that:
Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law cant by definition rest on anything other than themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.51
My concern in this work has been to show the way in which the courts, by way of non-justiciability generate silence around the question of sovereignty even as they discuss it and rule on it. The silence produced around how sovereignty is framed and understood legally is tantamount to violence. Who then, can speak about this violence of law? The first time I presented a version of this work at an academic conference I was rendered momentarily silent by one of the responses from the audience. While this woman had found my paper interesting she was clearly troubled. This became evident when she prefaced one of her questions by saying, Im not sure what your background is, and then proceeded to express that she
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thought my work was problematic because it spoke for Indigenous people and refugees. I want to examine, by way of conclusion, the question of what is achieved ideologically by a white audience member who questioned my right to open up law to its racial history and sovereignty to justice. She had called me indirectly to confess the truth of my race since my racial identity was ambiguous to her. This would then seem to have implications in terms of what I would be allowed to say. It seems that since she could not relegate me as unambiguously us or them then I could be afforded no position from which to speak. This is extremely problematic in the sense that it requires that I leave the work of examining the violence of sovereignty and law to someone else; to someone who has really been affected by it. To avoid the problem of speaking about someone elses problem I become absolved of the responsibility to consider the violence done in the name of nation. The fact that she could not designate me as unproblematically part of us suggests that she was perhaps categorising me as what Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos term the perpetual foreigner within the nation state or as white-but-notwhite-enough.52 Regardless of whether this is what she was doing, it does trigger me to think of the broader question of what is achieved discursively by this manoeuvre specifically in relation to sovereignty. Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos assert that southern Europeans are conferred status by dominant white Australia that is sufficiently like, while remaining suitably unlike the dominant white Australian subject position.53 And in:
recognising the Southern European (im)migrant as a formal subject, dominant white Australia qualifies the migrant to participate in the process of mutual recognition through which white Australia can claim rightful ownership of the country. In turn by recognising white Australian authority, the Southern European becomes fully complicit in the ongoing violent dispossession of the Indigenous peoples and the nation building processes that manifest our collective criminal will.54
Thus, white sovereignty is produced as an authority that must be recognised by a series of persons who are simultaneously included and excluded in the corpus of nation. The perpetual foreigner within must be simultaneously distinguished from white Australia
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yet must be present to give recognition to, and therefore become complicit in, the process of generating authority for white sovereignty.55 The work of Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos graphically illustrates the way in which the discourses of gratitude operate to implicate migrants in the process of violent dispossession. In this light, I cannot leave the work of sovereigntys violence to someone else. I am a beneficiary of the violence and must therefore continue the work of exposing the Australian laws violent history and sovereigntys antithetical relation to justice.
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Chapter Three
Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation? The Limits of Australian Sovereignty
Henry Reynolds
In 1901 Edmund Barton, Prime Minister of the fledgling Australian federation, declared that for the first time in history there was a nation for a continent and a continent for a nation. While geographers may agree that Australia is indeed a continent, the second of the two claims is much more problematic, although it has not usually been seen in that way. But in 1901 Australia only had some of the characteristics of a nation state. It was not independent. The external sovereignty still resided with the imperial government. Australia had no international personality. It remained a colony. Internally the new federal administration in Melbourne was not in effective control of much of its territory, particularly in the tropical north. In actual practice it shared the internal sovereignty with independent Aboriginal nations, the members of which had rarely, if ever, seen a white person. These two quite distinctive characteristics of early twentiethcentury Australia worked together to shape many aspects of its politics and external relations. They should be considered in turn. The question of internal sovereignty has a number of problems which require examination. One relates to the nature of sovereignty itself. The traditional English view has been that the sovereign was the supreme, absolute, irresistible, uncontrolled authority.1 But this interpretation of an all-powerful, indivisible sovereign gets in the
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way of any understanding of the manner in which the law actually worked in the empire. Federations were premised on the idea of divided and shared sovereignty. The great array of political arrangements around the world in the empire with protectorates and spheres of influence made it quite clear that in practice internal and external sovereignty were divided in a great many ways. In a major late nineteenth-century study, A Treatise on the Foreign Powers and Jurisdiction of the British Crown, W E Hall drew attention to the disparity between contemporary legal theory and the practical realities of imperial administration. While jurists still spoke of indivisible sovereignty, constitutional arrangements made it clear that it could scarcely any longer be seriously argued that the sovereign powers of a state were incapable of being divided between different persons or bodies of persons.2 Contrary evidence was always plentiful but the eyes of English lawyers decline to rest upon it.3 There were many examples right across the empire which showed that the division of sovereignty was both manifest and various. Once it was established that sovereign powers were divisible there was no reason why the Crown should not acquire a portion of the territorial sovereignty of a state or tribal community.4 These ideas were not seen as having any relevance to Australia. The eyes of local lawyers had no reason to rest on them. Things here were quite simple. It had always been assumed that the Aborigines had neither laws nor government and therefore no sovereignty. When Britain annexed Australia, serially, in 1788, 1824, 1829 and 1879, the Crown became the absolute sovereign because there was no other. There was no need to acquire a pre-existing sovereignty by conquest or cession. Treaties were unnecessary. Australia, therefore, was borderless, without frontiers. It was a popular and comforting story seized upon by historians and novelists. In his classic work Australia of 1930, W K Hancock explained that for six generations the settlers swarmed inland from the sea pressing forward to their economic frontiers which were the only frontiers Australia knows.5 The same theme was taken up by Arthur Adams in his 1920 novel The Australians in which a character observed:
The only frontier that the Australians had, or ever contemplated, was the sea: and, a thinly-scattered people over an immense space
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of empty land, the Australian felt intensely the instinct of possession, and regarded every square mile of this vast tract as his personal property.6
We could not wish for a better illustration of Halls premise regarding internal and external sovereignty than Britains argument presented to an international arbitration commission in the 1880s concerning the situation of the Mosquito Indians living on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. The central American state presented the sort of case which the Australian colonies would have argued if pressed on the question. Its sovereignty as a successor state to the Spanish Empire was beyond question, having been settled, and accepted internationally, for many years. The Indians lived within the acknowledged borders of the Republic and beside that were too primitive to exercise any degree of independence. They lived by the chase and by fishing; they were without arts, commerce, law or religion or any of the other attributes which would suggest to the civilised world that they composed a regular society. It is the British case which holds the most interest. Nicaragua, it was asserted, did not have an absolute sovereignty over the Atlantic littoral but one that was of a qualified and limited order. This was due to the fact that neither Spain nor Nicaragua had actually exercised the pretended rightful sovereignty. The claimed occupation of the territory lacked the essential element of taking possession in fact. Consequently the Indians were able to maintain not only their actual freedom from the Nicaraguan government but to operate as a separate community. In fact, the incorporation of the Mosquito district into the Republic was a relative and incomplete incorporation. The Indians were legitimately exercising the remnants of the freedom and self-dependence claimed by them for centuries.7 We should note that Britains case was favoured by the mediator. This might help us think again about the question of internal sovereignty in Australia and more particularly about the matter of whether the colonies had only a pretended sovereignty because their claims lacked the essential element of taking possession in fact. This was far from an abstract question in the late nineteenth century. The doctrine of effective occupation influenced all the imperial powers at the time as they sought a way to reduce conflict as they scrambled for colonies in Africa and the Pacific. It was
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discussed at the international Berlin Conference of 1885 which laid down guidelines for the acquisition and administration of colonies. While designed for African conditions, the principles embodied in the Conferences General Act came to have much a wider application and to provide benchmarks for colonial policies everywhere. A critical issue was what requirements were necessary for an imperial power to be able to claim possession of an area to the exclusion of other states. The main method adopted was the test of effective occupation. In his classic work of 1928 The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law, the English jurist M F Lindley explained that effective occupation could only be established if there was sufficient authority over the territory in question to protect life and property. The broad rule was that the possession of a power extended as far as, and no further than its administrative machinery was in efficient exercise.8 Britain applied these principles in its dealings with African colonisation, denying that Portugal had any claim to territory in central Africa lying between Angola and Mozambique. In justifying his decision, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Salisbury, pointed out that in the greater part of the region in question there was no sign of Portuguese jurisdiction or authority and he refused to recognise any claim to sovereignty which was not based on real occupation. The relevance of Salisburys statement for contemporaneous Australia will be immediately apparent. The Australian governments exercised little authority at all over much of northern Australia and there were only a few thousand Europeans in the whole, vast area. It is very hard to see how it could be established that Australia was in effective occupation of the territory claimed. Local commentators and politicians along with international observers were aware of this problem. During the debate in the federal parliament in 1901 on the Immigration Restriction Bill Alfred Deakin remarked that settlement was concentrated on the eastern littoral and that members were legislating for the future of the country before they had effectively occupied a quarter of the continent and with the great bulk of its immense extent little more than explored or with a sparse settlement. It would be for future generations to enter into and possess the country of which we at present only hold the border.9 Australia failed in one of the other crucial tests applied in questions of effective occupationthat is the provision of effective
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policing sufficient to provide for the protection of the local population. The slightest acquaintance with the history of the North will provide abundant illustration of this point. Contemporaries were only too well aware of the problem, the Government Resident of the Northern Territory explaining to the South Australian parliament in 1898 that he was quite unable to prevent white men from kidnapping and raping Aboriginal women:
Considering the vast area of country, sparsely populated, over which it is impossible to maintain any control, it is difficult indeed to suggest any remedy which would effectually cope with the evil which undoubtedly exists. Those who occupy the back-blocks are, in most cases, a law unto themselves as regards their relations with the natives.10
It is surely an eloquent illustration of an inescapable conclusion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Australian governments were not in effective control of their territory. Their claim of internal sovereignty was insubstantial. It was not absolute but one of a qualified and limited order. At the time there would have been people who would have agreed with this assessment. But while the assumption persisted that there was no other, competing sovereignty, the deficiency did not matter all that much. British power shielded Australia from other states who might potentially contest the control of the North. But if we assume, as now I think we must, that the Aboriginal nations exercised internal sovereignty over their homelands, the picture becomes quite different. Australian governments only very slowly asserted authority over many parts of the north and did not manage to do so until after the second world war. We can catch a glimpse of the situation on the ground in the report of the Protector of Aborigines written in 1940 for the Administrator of the Northern Territory. He referred to those Aborigines who lived:
More or less permanently in remote areas, who are not under any form of permanent European control, assistance or supervision, and who depend for internal stability on the free exercise of their own native customs.11
The question of internal sovereignty was, then, more complicated than Edmund Bartons famous aphorism would suggest. But so too was the situation in regard to external sovereignty. Australian
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federation saw the division of sovereignty between the six existing colonies and the new federal government, the detail outlined in the constitution. But there was no transfer of sovereignty from Britain to Australia. The new nation spoke with greater authority than any of the individual colonies, but it was still a colony which came under the authority of the Colonial Office and could not deal directly with foreign powers. This was to remain the situation, albeit with minor adjustments, until the development of the status of the Dominions in the 1920s and 1930s. Even then Australia was much more reluctant than either Canada or South Africa to assert its independence. But while Australia was a reluctant and slow maturing state, it had a strong commitment to a distinctive nationality closely related to white racial identity. It is a fascinating and important story how nation and state reacted upon each other and what implications this had for the question of sovereignty. In the early twentieth century Australians were strongly committed to the empire. The republican movement was never strong and declined in importance after the 1890s, overtaken by the imperial enthusiasm of the last years of Victorias reign and the jingoism whipped up during the Boer war. But while their allegiance flooded out beyond Australia, they had a strong sense of territory and an awareness of being a country without international borders or contiguous states. The new federal government was able to assert its independence not by hauling down the Union Jack but by closely controlling what and who could enter the country by means of tariffs, immigration controls, customs and quarantine regulations. These forms of control, rigorously exercised, came to be the surrogate assertion of independence by an impaired nation state. While happily entrapped in the embrace of empire, colonial Australia aspired to the characteristics of contemporary European nationalism as defined by the much-read Mill and Mazzini. Central to the message they bequeathed to the colonists was the importance of a homogeneous population which alone would allow the putative nation to express its distinctive identity. The advanced democratic nature of the Australian colonies gave further impetus to the required crusade. All adult menand women as well by the turn of the centuryhad to be able to access the privileges and assume the responsibility of citizenship. There was no easy resting place for minority communities who could not measure up, who were thought to be unable to earn and exercise the franchise, who could
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not become equal. So new world democracies like Australia became intolerant of difference. And in Australias case the situation of being far from Europe and close to Asia meant that the hope of homogeneity became overwhelmingly involved with race. So while the political unity achieved by federation was important, it was overshadowed by the unity of nation to be secured by the White Australia Policy. While speaking in the federal parliament on the Immigration Restriction Bill in 1901, Deakin declared that unity of race was an absolute essential to the unity of Australia. It was more, he insisted, in the last resort than any other unity. He pushed the argument even further. Racial homogeneity was, indeed, the real unity that made the Commonwealth possible. In a passage approaching the lyrical, Deakin described the overwhelming support given by the Australian people to racial exclusion:
How entirely and absolutely they realize the fundamental character of the principle which lies below their declaration for a white Australia, and that it may be seen that there is no uncertain note, there is no divided feeling, there is no conflict of opinion within the House, or without it that the Unity of Australia must be secured on this question if not on any other 12
Deakin explained that the various measures already being planned this chain of legislation supplemented by executive action would considerably reduce the numbers of aliens living within our borders. And the threat on the borders from outside also had to be addressed because the country had to deal with an inflow that would seek every crevice in the statutory amour. What was required was that the government would block all possible leakages effectively one after the other, as many of them and as rapidly as possible.13 Deakin turned to America for his lessons about the overwhelming problems produced by racial conflict and it was to American political philosophers that Australia turned for harsher prescriptions than they could find in Mills mild, mid-century liberalism. In their authoritative analysis of the Australian constitution, Quick and Garran discuss the question of immigration and refer to the work of John W Burgess, Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, who wrote:
The reigning nationality is in perfect right, and pursues, from a scientific point of view, an unassailable policy, when it insists, with
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unflinching determination, upon ethnical homogeneity here. It should realise this, of course, through the peaceable means of influence and education, if possible. When, however, these shall have been exhausted in vain, then force is justifiable.14
Burgess argued that a government was justified in moving minority communities within its territory or actually expelling them. There is no doubt that it was here that the Australian government found its intellectual and moral justification for deporting the Pacific Islanders in 1906. The strong desire for the Australian colonies to discriminate against Asians led to a long-running battle with the imperial government. Britain held to the view that the common law did not discriminate on a basis of race or ethnicity and that doctrine became more rather than less important as the nineteenth century advanced and the empire became increasingly multi-racial. By the end of the century the rise of Indian nationalism forced the Colonial and the India Offices to reaffirm their opposition to overt racial discrimination. The complication was that the white Dominions had been granted responsible government in the middle years of the century and there were strong principles as well as good practical reasons for not intervening in their political processes and rejecting legislation passed by elected assemblies. There was, then, a constant tug of war between two principles underpinning the empire. The Australian colonies passed a series of acts aimed at limiting Chinese migration during the 1880s. But popular pressure built up for more stringent measures and in 1896 both New South Wales and South Australia passed legislation which set out to prohibit the entry of all non-Europeans. This was too much for the Colonial Office, which refused the royal assent still required when colonial governors reserved Bills for consideration in London. A compromise was offered at the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897. The Dominions could not legislate to control non-European migration but they could do so covertly by using a dictation test already put in place in Natal. This test was the means used by Australia in 1901 and proved a most effective instrument in stopping all possible leakages.15 Of all the issues which caused friction between Australia and Britain, the control of immigrationborder protection, if you willwas always the one which united the electorate. As Deakin
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said while debating the Immigration Restriction Bill, on this issue the community stood shoulder to shoulder with practically an inconsiderable minority against us, so small as to be scarcely discoverable.16 This mattered far more to Australia than many of the other attributes of national independence. And having achieved the chain of legislation instituting the White Australia Policy, the pressing need was to be certain that Britain would supply the power to protect it. This need for imperial support grew much greater with the sudden rise of Japan and virtually became an obsession after the Asian powers stunning victory over Russia in 1905. The paradox was exquisite. Having achieved federation, Australia put in place immigration policies to ensure racial unity. But this key aspect of local nationalism, rather than setting Australia free, made the country even more dependent on imperial power which alone seemed to be able to guarantee its continuity. Australia was willing to forgo independent statehood in order to bring its sense of race based nationalism to fruition. Border protection was the single most important manifestation of Australian nationalism even while perpetuating colonial dependence. Race unity was more compelling than full sovereignty. One might return to Bartons famous phrase and argue that what he was referring to was part of a continent for something less than a nation. Both the internal and external sovereignty were less than complete and the empty north had something to do with both situations. Aboriginal sovereignty survived because white settlement had faltered in the north in all but the narrow coastal belt in Queensland and the goldfields in the immediate hinterland. West of Charters Towers all the way to the Indian Ocean and the Arafura Sea there were only a few thousand Europeans, and, if anything, the white population was declining. In some districts there were as many Asians as there were Europeans. There was much contemporary evidence which suggested that white menand more particularly white womencould not settle permanently in the tropics. Not surprisingly much of the anxiety of federation Australia about demographic inundation was directed at the empty north and the already well-established Chinese, Japanese, Malay and Filipino communities, which Australian governments sought to limit by controlling the entry of new members, the drastic expedient of deportation not being seen as appropriate or likely to have been tolerated by the imperial government.
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Control of immigration became the central motivating factor in Australias behaviour in the wider world, as Sean Brawley illustrated so cogently in his 1995 book The White Peril.17 Commitment to the imperial tie was always shadowed by the calculated expectation of future defence against threats to White Australia. Although Japan and Britain were formally allied between 1902 and 1921, Australian leaders were always suspicious of the Asian powers intentions and were convinced, quite unnecessarily, that it was determined to break down the Commonwealths border controls and flood the north with immigrants. When, at the Versailles Conference in 1919, Australia received, for the first time, a significant measure of recognition as an independent power, the Prime Minister, W M Hughes used every means available to him to fend off largely imaginary threats to White Australia. He demanded and received greater control than was originally proposed over the former German New Guinea in order to enforce immigration controls and so prevent the free entry of non-Europeans. He also played the central role in defeating the Japanese attempt to have the principle of racial equality recognised in the Charter of the League of Nations. Even a statement of principle was seen to be a sign of future danger to Australias capacity to determine who would come to the country and the manner in which they came. Now, in the early years of the twenty-first century, so much seems the same. Australias relationship with the United States has many of the same characteristics of the earlier one with Britain. There is the same disparity in power; the same willingness to provide uncritical support; a similar readiness to become involved in an internationally unpopular and unnecessary warin South Africa for Britain, in Iraq for America. Australia continues to live contentedly with the symbols of the earlier dependencean English Head of State, a national flag which is the British blue ensign. And once again we have anxiety about non-European arrivals on the north coast, an assertion of the need for border protection which goes far beyond what might reasonably be expected. The government reacts as if refugees presented a threat to the nation itself and behaves with punitive harshness as though we still fear, as Deakin did long ago, that the aliens would seek out every crevice in our statutory armour.
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Part II
Sovereign Horizons
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Chapter Four
Sea Changes: Native Title, Sea Rights and Sharing the Sea
Maxine Chi
Firstly I need to say that I am not a lawyer and can only give you my perspective as an Aboriginal woman who has an interest in native title and the rights and interests of Aboriginal people over the sea, coast and intertidal zone. I have a lay persons limited understanding of native title and believe that despite the many years and large amount of evidence that Aboriginal people have had to provide as part of proving their native title rights and being involved in the process, the native title process has not delivered very much for Aboriginal people at all. In most cases in Western Australia, determinations have really only recognised native title over Aboriginal Lands Trust reserves set aside as living areas for Aboriginal people or unallocated Crown land. These have included the unallocated land adjacent to Rudall River National Park claimed by the Martu people and the Ngaanyatjarra lands and land occupied by Bardi/Jawi people on the Dampier Peninsula, who continue to live on their country under a 99-year Aboriginal Lands Trust lease. Recognition of native title over these areas has really only confirmed what Aboriginal people have been telling people since colonisationand during the Seaman Land Inquiry in the early 1980s. In some ways the native title process could be seen as continuing the process of collating extensive information on Aboriginal people and their genealogies as done by past anthropologists and native welfare officers, except that it is now being carried out in a different political climate.
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Like many Aboriginal people involved in some way in native title claims, and as a researcher conducting field research in Broome, Western Australia, in 1998 and 1999, I attempted to understand the Native Title Act and the changes that have occurred in native title since the early nineties, as well as the discussion and legal jargon and arguments put forward by lawyers, judges, anthropologists, the fishing, mining and pastoral industries and the state and federal governments. In attempting to articulate my position on the issue of native title and sovereignty, I am hampered by my limited understanding of the law. I do not have full understanding of the legal arguments and determinations that have been made regarding the rights and interests of Aboriginal people and of whether or not native title exists in cases relating to the sea. I am therefore likely to get terminology wrong. My positioning on the issue of native title is further complicated by my conflicting views on the question of sovereignty, and by the fact that I do not always agree with the legal arguments and determinations in native title cases. I can only give my perspective on what I have observed with the native title process and the issue of sovereignty and how this has affected Aboriginal people. In trying to find a definition of sovereignty I consulted the Macquarie Dictionary and discovered the following definitions:
Sovereignty: the quality or state dominion, power, or authority independent power or authority claimed by a state or community; political unit. of being sovereign; the status, of a sovereign; supreme and in government as possessed or a sovereign state, community, or
The opening paragraphs of native title decisions and determinations always refer to whether the claimants were a traditional society and had a connection to the area at the time sovereignty was asserted, or at the time of colonisation. As a person questioning why Aboriginal people have to go through the process of giving evidence and arguing for recognition of their native title and sovereignty, I believe it is important to ask: Whose sovereignty are they talking about? This is not the sovereignty of Aboriginal Australians but the asserted sovereignty of the colonisers. This raises questions about how the Australian government postures itself in terms of legal status over Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
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In exploring sovereignty, I conducted a computer find on the word sovereignty on an electronic version of the Native Title Act 1993 and the result came up blank. It is interesting to note that I cannot find a definition in the same Act as to what is meant by sovereignty. I can get a hit with the legal fiction term terra nullius in the preamble of the same Act. I am therefore wondering if the sovereignty claimed by the English and, obviously, successive Australian Governments is actually another legal fiction and that there needs to be clarification on the point. In fact, I question why Aboriginal Australians are putting themselves through a process of having to provide evidence of their claims of native title when the sovereignty that England and Australian governments claim seems to be only asserted. Perhaps Aboriginal Australians need to be asking the Federal Court or an international court for a clear ruling that they actually ceded sovereignty and sovereignty was rightfully acquired by England. It seems that no one wants to own up to the fact that the claiming of Australia for the British Crown by Captain James Cook and the colonising process was an illegal act performed on the original inhabitants of Australia. Realistically, how could a foreign country presume to acquire the sovereignty held by Aboriginal peoples across Australia by such a simple act as putting up a flag and declaring the country claimed by England. (The act of advising and communicating to Australias original inhabitants in 1770 that their sovereignty had been taken from them would have been an interesting exercise, given the need for language translators and a communication strategy to cover the entire eastern half of the continent.) Australian history does not advise us that treaties and land-use agreements were part of the colonisation process. Instead, we have been taught about soft versions of frontier warfare, poisonings, disease and alcohol being used to wipe out Aboriginal peoples. The preamble of the Commonwealth Native Title Act 1993 states the following:
The people whose descendants are now known as Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders were the inhabitants of Australia before European settlement. They have been progressively dispossessed of their lands. This dispossession occurred largely without compensation, and
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successive governments have failed to reach a lasting and equitable agreement with Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders concerning the use of their lands. As a consequence, Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders have become, as a group, the most disadvantaged in Australian society. The people of Australia voted overwhelmingly to amend the Constitution so that the Parliament of Australia would be able to make special laws for peoples of the Aboriginal race.1
The preamble goes on to talk about the Australian Government acting to protect the rights of all its citizens, in particular its Indigenous peoples by recognising international standards for the protection of universal human rights and fundamental freedoms through the ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act 1986. It also states that the High Court has rejected the doctrine that Australia was terra nullius (land belonging to no-one) at the time of European settlement (not British settlement), and that the common law of Australia recognises a form of native title that reflects the entitlement of the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia to their traditional lands. However, confusingly, the preamble then goes on to say that the High Court held that native title is extinguished by valid government acts that are inconsistent with the continued existence of native title rights and interests, such as the grant of freehold or leasehold estates.2 What if the sovereignty asserted by England is not a valid act and all subsequent acts are invalid? Is anyone willing to stand up and say this is so? Why, then, are Indigenous Australians going through this process of explaining their rights and interests, their traditional affiliations and genealogies to the people who have taken their lands and waters, only to be told that their rights and interests cannot conflict with what are considered acts of dispossession? Possession is obviously ninetenths of the law. Even though the preamble says noble things about reconciling and recognising Aboriginal rights and interests, in actual fact the process of recognising native title has not given much in return. In determinations native title rights give way to previous legislative acts and native title rights have to be recognised by the common law of
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Australia. In other words, no matter what Aboriginal people say their traditional rights are, these rights are not wholly recognised by Australian law. The National Native Title Tribunals website glossary explains Native Title as:
The rights and interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in land and waters according to their traditional laws and customs, that are recognised under Australian law.3
The last few words of this sentence, that are recognised under Australian law, explain why native title determinations never find that Aboriginal people have exclusive possession over land and sea and have to make way for certainty for Acts under Australian law. And if native title is found to exist, it is not found to be exclusive but has to be shared according to existing legislation. This means that commercial interests over the sea, land and waters have to be accommodated and usually Aboriginal interests can only mean subsistence hunting, gathering and use of resources. This is why I find the native title process to be an unjust exercise. This process is also unjust because determinations on native title seem to be based on an expectation that in order to be credible native title holders, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia must remain stuck in a time warp as twenty-first-century hunter-gatherers, not incorporate modern technology or lifestyle into their cultures and not assimilate into modern Australian societywhich conflicts with past policies of assimilation. The native title process allows non-Indigenous Australians to benefit commercially from Indigenous land that was acquired through various acts over time. This acquisition of Indigenous land has been further justified by the Native Title Act. Another issue is the constant use of the term the common law of Australia. This is another way of saying that Indigenous peoples rights and interests can only be recognised by the laws of Australia, despite what Aboriginal peoples say their rights and interests are.
Salt Water Identities
In preparing for this talk I revisited my Masters thesis, Salt Water People: Aboriginal Use of Sea Resources, Broome, Western Australia and my decision to research why fishing and the sea were important to my people and my positioning as an Aboriginal woman who is also a salt water person.4 My field research in 199899
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involved interviewing Aboriginal informants about why the sea was important to them, their relationship to the sea, their belief systems, their world view, traditional ecological knowledge of seasons, their place within these seasons and their traditional economy as huntergatherers. My informants articulated this information with pride and generosity. At this time (199899) native title was firmly imprinted in the minds of the majority of Aboriginal people in Broome. I found that I had returned home to a situation where Aboriginal people and families were redefining their identities now as native title claimants, and talking about where they came from originally and questioning each others identity as Aboriginal people and native title claimants. In some cases it caused rifts between families who had lived harmonious and friendly lifestyles prior to the era of native title. My own identity as a Broome Aboriginal person of Bardi descent was challenged by the fact that even though I had grown up with shared knowledge of fishing areas and seasons and members of my family were born and raised in Broome, certain people were referring to Bardi people as tourists living on Yawuru land. In some ways it was like a biblical census was being carried out: genealogies were being documented, people were talking about where they came from, where their mothers and fathers came from, and where their traditional countries were. Our identities were being redefined, challenged and strengthened because of the era of native title claims in the Kimberley and the need to identify in a certain way and according to the rules of the Native Title Act. In doing my research on fishing and the sea I went through a process of asking people about their relationship to the sea and naming what they considered to be their rights over the sea and its resources. My niece explained her relationship to the sea in the following way:
Its part of our lifestyle Ive grown up with fishing, ever since Ive been in my mothers stomach, I suppose. Even before I could walk or was born, its been part of my familys lifestyle. As far back as I can remember our outings were to the beach and fishing.5
Another participants response was:
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Fishing is important because we need our fish, I live off fish and I love fish.6
But probably the most clearly articulated statement came from Peter Yu, the former Executive Officer of the Kimberley Land Council. He presented a paper at the 3rd Australasian Fisheries Managers Conference where he eloquently outlined the position of many Aboriginal people in Broome.7 Mr Yu did not see himself as a recreational fisherman but as someone who fishes on his traditional country for a subsistence food source that has always formed a significant part of his diet, and that of his extended family. He was concerned that this food source was increasingly threatened by the escalation of tourism, residential, pastoral and other development pressures and that the community had watched its traditional fishing areas being polluted, fenced over, over-fished, widely publicised, and irrevocably changed.8 He emphasised:
We are not recreational fishers. We are traditional owners of the country and its waters. We have fundamental, inherent indigenous rights to manage, use and protect our traditional country, including marine and inland waters. These rights arise out of our particular relationship to our country, our Native Title to our lands and waters. We take seriously our responsibility to manage our country, including our waters and the resources within them. We do not view fish and other water dwelling creatures simply as resources. As with all living things, fish and the places where they live and breed, play an important part in the relationship we enjoy with the environment. This relationship affects our views of management of sea resourcesviews which do not always accord with non-Aboriginal resource managers who evaluate fish stocks in terms which they think are shared by all users of the resource. We are currently faced with a management model which allocates rights to use resources from the sea and waters in a way which takes no heed of the particular relationship Aboriginal people have with their country, and all the living things within it. We are not just another user group of a limited resource.9
Further to this, when Aboriginal research participants were asked whether they thought of themselves as recreational fishers, their immediate response was that they were not and that they took insult in the implication that they could be categorised in that way:
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Were not f recreational fishermen, we fish to catch a feed.10
And:
Were not like Rex Hunt, catch a fish, kiss it and chuck it back in the water. We catch a fish, we eat it.11
They considered themselves as having a traditional right to fish and catch a feed and the concept of recreational fishing (where fish is caught just for fun) was something that non-Indigenous people did, not themselves. They were aware of the recreational fishing tours and game fishing but it was not what they themselves did. They fished to catch a feed from a resource they considered was there to be utilised in a way that allowed their people to be fed and to survive. Aboriginal people in Broome have strong opinions on the exploitation of the fish resource in Roebuck Bay by commercial fishermen and tourists, outsiders or newcomers who treat the resource in a way they consider to be disrespectful. They worry about and have opinions on the barramundi and salmon netting that occurs in Roebuck Bay and the amount of fish commercial fishermen are taking from the bay. They feel that the sea resources that they consider their own, or that should be available for them, are being over-fished or are not available for them because of the netting across their fishing areas and the large numbers being taken. At that time (199899) the information regarding fish quotas to commercial fishermen for netting barramundi and threadfin salmon was not available and licensing information for the taking of hermit crabs was confidential. Aboriginal people in Broome felt that they were not adequately consulted and did not play a role in agreeing to or determining the resources and the amount of resources that can be taken for commercial gain by other parties. They felt that current regulations and developments inhibit their access to sea and coastal resources that they consider to be part of their traditional estates or country that they have grown up in. They expect these resources to be managed in a sustainable manner with them and for them and/or their future descendants.
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The Intertidal Zone
The issue of native title rights within the intertidal zone was in the consciousness of key Aboriginal negotiators in the late 1990s due to the proposed amendments to the Native Title Act at that time. The Howard Government had introduced the Ten Point Plan in regard to native title, and the issue of excluding the right to negotiate Aboriginal peoples native title rights and interests within the intertidal zone continued to be on the political agenda. The intertidal zone is the area of coast between the low water mark and the high water mark. Discussion also centred around whether it was low or high water mark at spring or neap tides. Losing a right to negotiate over native title rights and access within the intertidal zone was a ridiculous concept for coastal Aboriginal peoples. Their traditional economy was heavily based on coastal resources existing naturally within the ebb and flow of the tides within the intertidal zone where they hunted, gathered and fished and considered as part of their estates. Everyday conversations between Broome people involve their relationship and interaction with the sea, how it is central to their lifestyle and governed by the seasons, the moon and the tides. For people so in tune with these influences it is obvious that the sea forms the basis for coastal Aboriginal cultures and is part of their everyday existence:
People are always asking where the tide is, what moon is it, whats biting what bait and where the fish are biting and part of the make up of who we are as people and make up of our cultural, spiritual, psychological being and existence.12
Usually when people greet each other the second phrase coming from their mouths, after they have said hello and asked you how you are, is, You been fishing? and the conversation continues on about where people went fishing, who they went with, what they caught and what time they caught fish. It was once said to me, You mob talk as if fishing is the most important thing is the world. During salmon season the most topical conversation going around town is where the salmons biting. It is therefore extremely difficult for a coastal Aboriginal person to grasp the concept of not having native title rights over the sea, or not being able to have the rights to negotiate over an area so fundamental to their existence. Conflict arises in regard to access to
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the sea and its resources and Aboriginal management practices of the resource versus contemporary recreational fishing practices, commercial fishing and the taking of land for development and private housing on the coast and denying people access to the resources.
The Courts and Customary Rights to the Sea
The Fish Resources Management Act 1994 (WA) stipulates that Aboriginal people can only take fish to feed their families and not for resale or profit unless they acquire a commercial fishing licence. Aboriginal people are not required to hold a recreational fishing licence or licences for use of nets, including throw nets or drag nets. They are required to abide by regulations regarding the taking of fish, regulations regarding open and closed seasons and to adhere to bag limits for fish and recommended fish sizes under the Fish Resources Management Act 1994. Aboriginal people in Broome have come under the scrutiny of Fisheries WA for all of the above. A case involving illegal netting of fish, Fisheries v Underwood and Others,13 was important in providing evidence on Aboriginal peoples continued relationship to the sea and the adaptation of fishing practices in contemporary settings (from stone fish-traps to use of modern-day nets). This case involved a complaint made by Fisheries WA that a group of Aboriginal men were illegally netting for fish during a closed season. Fisheries WA argued that the defendants, the Aboriginal men, did not have a native title right to fish (net) within the area and that the area belonged to Djugan people and not Yawuru. This was based on the work of Norman B Tindale, who had done field research in the area in the 1920s and 1950s.14 Tindales map distinguished Djugan as a separate people, distinct from Yawuru. Aboriginal witnesses from Broome discounted Tindales documentary evidence, stating that their forefathers passed information down to them that Djugan was a sub-set or clan of Yawuru. As well, Dr Patrick Sullivan cited linguistic research conducted by Mr Hosakawa around 1983, which also referred to Djugan as a dialect of Yawuru.15 The Magistrate in Broome found that:
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none of the defendants were the biological descendants of the Djugan group who exercised the fishing rights at Willie Creek and Fishermans Bend.16
The case was appealed to the Supreme Court of Western Australia by the defendants. In the appeal, evidence was provided that Djugan and Yawaru were sub-groups of the same people or social group. The matter was dropped and not pursued by the Director of Public Prosecutions. Another case regarding customary rights to fishing and hunting which came in conflict with state imposed regulations on wildlife is the case of Yanner v Eaton.17 Murrandoo Yanner is said to have used a traditional form of harpoon to catch two juvenile estuarine crocodiles in 1994 contrary to the Fauna Conservation Act 1974 (Qld). He and other members of his clan ate some of the meat, froze the rest of the meat and skins, and kept them at his home. He was not the holder of any licence, permit, certificate or other authority granted or issued under the Fauna Conservation Act. The case was heard and dismissed as Yanners clan was found to have a connection with the area of land from which the crocodiles were taken and this connection existed before the common law came into being in the colony of Queensland in 1823 and thereafter continued.18 Yanner v Eaton is seen as an important case because it provides arguments on concepts of property rights over fauna by the Crown. Yanners argument was that the charge under the Fauna Conservation Act was irrelevant and that section 211 of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) applied in this case.19 The rights or lack of exclusive rights of Aboriginal people over sea and the sea-bed has been highlighted in the determination of native title handed down in the Croker Island Case.20 This native title claim by Mary Yarmirr and Others versus the Northern Territory of Australia and Others was heard in the Federal Court in 1998. In this case it was determined that communal native title exists in relation to the sea and sea-bed within the claimed area and that the claimants were common law native title holders, but these native title rights and interests did not confer exclusive possession, occupation, use and enjoyment of the sea and sea-bed within the claimed area to the exclusion of all others. Prior to this decision there was much uncertainty over how native title claims over sea would affect the economy and profits of
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non-Indigenous people involved in the fishing industry. For John Christopherson, an Aboriginal man from Gurig in the Northern Territory attending the Indigenous Sea Rights Conference in Hobart in 1999, this decision was interpreted as the government saying to his people: Well you can have the sea but the Government owns the fish. He said: What they did was give us an empty plate without the fish on it.21
The Bardi-Jawi Native Title Claim
My interest in sea claims is also driven by the fact that my family are claimants in the Bardi-Jawi native title claim in Western Australia.22 Closer to home, and affecting me personally, was this claim by my own people. The original application was lodged on 1 September 1995 and the claim area includes 5,500 sq km of land, islands, reefs and waters in the northern tip of Dampier Peninsula and the King Sound regions of Western Australia. Bardi-Jawi (No 2) was filed over Brue Reef. I also sat and listened to some of the first days of hearings in Broome and at One Arm Point and Lombadina. In the decision handed down on 10 June 2005 on the Bardi-Jawi native title claim, the Honourable Justice French found that exclusive native title existed on the mainland and he acknowledged shared rights to the surrounding sea, but did not find any rights over the offshore islands.23 Bardi-Jawi presented evidence in documents and face-to-face evidence on country about their claims and mythology regarding the islands and connection to the mainland and sea currents. If exclusive native title was not recognised on the mainland there would have been many questions raised, as this land is Aboriginal Lands Trust reserve land set aside for the use and benefit of Aborigines, and is where Bardi-Jawi continue to reside. The Kimberley Land Councils Wayne Bergmann expressed the following sentiments:
Theres excitement on the mainland where the predominant Bardi interests traditional owners reside but on the face of it there is a major concern that people have strong connections to those islands and that interest hasnt been recognised.24
The finding in the Bardi-Jawi native title case demonstrates how little native title has given to Aboriginal people in reality. As in the Croker Island decision,25 the Court found that shared rights existed
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over sea, however, what occurred in practice was that Aboriginal people had to give way to competing commercial interests in fishing and passage of vessels. The WA Fishing Industry Council is quoted as finding the determination reasonable, but expressed some concerns about the Bardi and Jawi peoples rights to gather pearl shell for cultural purposes.26 During the case the fishing industry had argued that successive pearling legislation had extinguished any native title right to take shell, but that stance was dismissed.27 The WA Fishing Industry Council is currently party to approximately fifty native title claims in Western Australia. The WA Fishing Industry Council acts as an industry representative for Western Australian fishing, pearling and Crown land aquaculture interests and is an active respondent to native title claims and is funded through legal aid to represent all fishing, pearling and aquaculture interests in marine and tidal water claims below the high water mark, and those aquaculture interests on Crown lands.28 The preamble to the Native Title Act acknowledges dispossession and claims to recognise native title rights and what these rights should deliver. Despite this, Aboriginal people still have to give way to the dominance of Australian law and have their native title rights determined by the dominant law-makers. In fact, we are required to coexist with the dominant society and compromise to allow for industry and commercial gain from which we gain very little except the right to be subsistence hunter-gatherers. I have yet to see a determination that says differently. As I have previously noted, the preamble of the Native Title Act recognises that Aboriginal people have been progressively dispossessed of their lands,29 and:
This dispossession occurred largely without compensation [while] successive governments have failed to reach a lasting and equitable agreement with Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders concerning the use of their lands. As a consequence, Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders have become, as a group, the most disadvantaged in Australian society.30
Aboriginal people have not been compensated. Providing welfare payments for Aboriginal people under the social security system is not an adequate system of compensation. Aboriginal people are still being judged by a British legal system on whether they have native
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title over lands and seas, and an appropriate definition of sovereignty is something that seems to be elusive. Maybe Aboriginal people need to reverse their role and ask whether the act of claiming British sovereignty over their lands and waters was a legal act.
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Chapter Five
M a r e N u l l i u s and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Ruth Balint
In the year 2000, at a time when all eyes were focused on what Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock was describing as a national emergency, when thousands of asylum seekers were caught on camera limping their battered way to Ashmore Reef, a covert operation was taking place on Ashmores neighbouring reef, Cartier Island. In March of that year, Australian naval officers on board the HMAS Geraldton discovered, in the course of a patrol of the region, the existence of a fresh grave on the island. The officers were informed by an Indonesian fishing crew nearby that the grave belonged to another fisherman who had died while diving for trepang. What followed was an astonishing act of desecration, the details of which illustrate a much broader history of Australias practice of sovereignty in the Timor Sea. Three days after the new discovery, on 1 April 2000, a special team, including police detectives from Darwins Tactical Response Group and the Northern Territory deputy coroner, flew to Broome, boarded a Customs vessel and travelled the several hundred nautical miles to Cartier Island. A rusted metal pole together with sand, rock and a wooden plank, marked the gravesite. The team set to work digging up the grave. They exhumed the body, boarded their boat and transported the remains back with them straight to Darwin. The body was autopsied, and over a year and a half later, a coronial inquest was held into the death. Not much was ascertained during the inquest, except that the deceased died sometime between 22 and 24 March 2000, that it was an adult male of small stature aged
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somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, and was of Asian origin. The body was buried in an unmarked grave in Darwins Thorak Cemetery. It seems difficult at first to comprehend why Australia engaged in such an expensive exercise. The presence of a grave on a small sandbank in the middle of the sea was not, of itself, unusual. Indonesian fishermen have been burying their dead whose lives were lost at sea on these islands for centuries. What could have motivated this state-sanctioned grave robbery? Once we begin to examine the politics of maritime sovereignty, it starts to make more sense. Under international law, sovereignty can only be maintained by effective occupation or proven and continuous administration of a territory. Uninhabited islands present a special problem in light of this, and uninhabited islands closer to Indonesia than Australia and with significantly stronger ties to foreigners, particularly so. Ashmore and Cartier Islands sit right on the rim of Australias maritime boundary with Indonesia. Inherited from the British in 1931, they now mark the outermost limits of Australias northern maritime territories. This boundary is far closer to south-east Indonesia than it is to Australia. Ashmore, for example, is roughly 78 nautical miles from the Indonesian island of Rote, yet three times that distance from the Australian mainland. Cartier Island is approximately 46 kilometres to the south-east of Ashmore. For traditional Indonesian fishermen, these Timor Sea islands hold a special significance, not least because they contain burial sites. This is especially the case with Ashmore Reef. Named Pulau Pasir, meaning Sand Islands, the reef has been a favoured destination of Rotenese fishermen for centuries in their search for marine products to trade on the Asian market to China. In song and story, the reef is referred to as the fishermens garden or fields. But Pulau Pasir became a special place not only for its fishing potential. There are many fishermen whose families died and are buried there, a young Rotenese fisherman told me. Before fishing we go to the island to visit their graves. We bring flowers and pray for them. He then told me: So we dont go to Pulau Pasir only to fish. Some of our sad stories are kept there.1 The sad stories of which the young fisherman speaks are part of the catalogue of memory and history that embodies a collective
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attachment to place. In the minds of the Rotenese, and also of indigenous peoples elsewhere, the presence of their ancestral remains and the fact of their ongoing presence here speaks of an attachment that is also one of ownership. We are convinced and believe that from our ancestors time they earned a living there, a Rotenese elder told me. Even though they forbid us well still go there because we truly know that historically Pulau Pasir belongs to Indonesia, not someone else we cant not go. We must go. The proximity of the island to their own was also cited as a reason for their sense of ownership: Besides feeling angry, we also feel that it is unfair, because Pulau Pasir is very close to Rote Island. Fishermen from Rote think that the island belongs to Indonesia Pulau Pasir is our backyard.2 Traditional Indonesian fishermen who lose their lives at sea are often transported long distances in order for them to be buried on the reefs, rather than the more common western maritime tradition of giving them a water burial. Many are Muslim, and their religion dictates that bodies must be buried within 24 hours of time of death. Moreover, for traditional fishermen in small, motorless, wooden perahu, without refrigeration, the logistics of trying to keep a dead body in hygienic conditions long enough to sail it home to be buried are often impossible. Instead, Ashmore Reef, and to a lesser extent Cartier, have become over the decades and centuries, special burial sites. Families who have relatives who have died at sea have been known to make special pilgrimages to visit their graves. I myself saw some graves of people from Sulawesi, Gani Pello, another young Rotenese fisherman told me. Their families went to the graves to pray for them. They poured some perfume and left some cigarettes and other things.3
The Politics of Maritime Sovereignty
In 1985, Henry Burmester, a specialist in maritime law at the Australian National University, noted that Australia was taking more interest in its island territories, in recognition of the considerable maritime rights that small islands can bring. Ashmore Reef was particularly significant. As Burmester outlined, Australia already had a number of far-flung islands in its jurisdiction, located in the Pacific, Indian and Southern Oceans. But unlike Australias other external territories, Commonwealth laws applied to Ashmore Reef
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as if it was an internal territory. The decision to assume this kind of direct control was based on two factors: the significance of the island for Australias maritime jurisdiction and the considerable petroleum exploration activity going on adjacent to the reef.4 By the time Burmester was writing, it had been twenty years since the initial discoveries of the massive oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea, a discovery which was to have momentous implications for the future of regional politics and the shaping of maritime relations. These highly lucrative resources became the subject of unresolved boundary negotiations for over three decades. Their desirability underwrote the Realpolitik response of successive Australian governments in relation to Indonesias occupation of East Timor. It is a history of betrayal that is still being acted out in the Timor Sea. A major development in international maritime law in the postsecond world war period concerned what became known as the continental shelf principle, or principle of natural prolongation. This principle gave nation-states the ability to exercise jurisdiction over an adjacent continental shelf, defined as an extension of the land mass of a coastal nation. Maritime boundaries could henceforth be delineated according to the existence of undersea continental shelves, even if the continental shelf of a coastal state extended beyond the normal exclusive economic zone of 200 nautical miles. In Australias case, the continental shelf under the Timor Sea is approximately 11.9 million square kilometres, of which 4.6 million square kilometres lie outside the 200 nautical mile limit. Yet this issue of the delimitation of the continental shelf has proven to be one of the most contentious in international maritime law. Discussions over seabed rights, first with Indonesia since the early 1970s and then with the new nation of East Timor since 1999, have been ongoing for thirty years. Because no one could agree on the final boundary, a temporary gap gave the region its historic name: the Timor Gap. Australia has continued to cling to the principle of natural prolongation to support its rights to exploit seabed resources and retain its extensive borders, yet in the past ten years the continental shelf principle has fallen out of favour in the international courts, and no longer holds much legal value. Instead, it is the principle of equidistance, a median line between two coastal countries, that now holds favour in international law. In which case, Australia would lose everything.
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Australia has managed to keep its extensive borders. Ashmore Reef and its neighbouring island, Cartier Reef mark the outermost limits of the controversial boundary bordering East Timor and south-east Indonesia. Henry Burmester outlined the problems for Australian sovereignty on these strategic islands:
Australian sovereignty could be increasingly questioned if Indonesian fishermen in large numbers were allowed regularly to occupy, build graves, and interfere with the island wildlife Unlike other Island possessions, Ashmore and Cartier are located in an area where another country has a particular interest and concern. If Australia seriously wishes to retain this island territory considerable resources will have to be made available to enable a continual assertion and display of its sovereignty to be made.5
This assertion and display of sovereignty takes many forms. Exhuming the newly dug grave of the unknown fisherman on Cartier, without knowledge of the family or community from which the fisherman came, would appear to be a particularly blunt example. The act was not only a disturbing act of desecration of one mans resting place, it was a desecration of a site of memory and history for traditional Indonesian fishermen. The exercise to remove the body in 2000 coincided with the establishment of Cartier Island as a protected marine reserve that year by the Commonwealth government. The fact that this was a recent grave may have been a major contributing factor to the decision to remove it. It was a brutally clear statement of proprietorship on the part of the Australian authorities, and a message of intent. Any ongoing connection that Indonesian fishermen had with these islands would be eradicated. As Burmester reminded his readers of a statement made by a politician, Mr Hawker MP, in 1938, it is our duty to see that Australian possession is effective and not merely latent, lest it be later disputed by foreigners who might claim to have established some sort of rights to the island.6 Ashmore Reef had already been designated a protected nature reserve in 1984. In a sense, Burmesters article, appearing only a year later, can be read as an explicit description of the strategic function of conservation in the assertion and display of sovereignty. The creation of Ashmore and Cartier Islands as national nature reserves, strictly closed to all visitors, not only severely restricted the rights of
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Indonesian fishermen to access the area, it has also ensured a strong administrative presence of park wardens, scientists and patrol officers. Moreover, the act of conserving these islands for Nature has sanctified Australian ownership, morally anchoring them to the nation-state where previously they held only a fragile political status as territorial acquisitions. They have been reclaimed, reinvented as sacred Australian, not Indonesian, places. There are a number of Indonesian gravesites on Ashmore Reef. At least six of them are clearly marked and laid out on Ashmores western island, grouped together under a coconut palm, two outlined with a coral perimeter. Painted wooden posts with names and dates mark the sites. Recently a number of much older, unmarked graves were exposed by the weather, the skeletal remains eventually washed out to sea.7 These graves, along with the numerous other manifestations of the Indonesian historical presence at the reef such as trepang cooking sites, ceramics and fish traps have all been carefully listed in the Environment Australia management plan for the islands as part of the cultural heritage of the reef.8 It is a heritage that is slowly, visibly, decaying over time. It appears that the Indonesian fishers presence has been transformed into a series of archaeological relics, their history of visitation to the islands allowed to rot and wither away as objects of a distant, deadand-buried past, rather than an integral part of an ongoing connectivity. The fact that these graves have been left alone is, I argue, an integral part of Australias assertion and display of sovereignty. John B Jackson has written of the rebirth of the landscape in the practice of wilderness conservation: The old has to die before there can be a born-again landscape.9 The eviction of a modern Indonesian presence at Ashmore and Cartier Islands is part of this rebirthing process. It is more than the physical act of exclusion and criminalisation, an attempt to sever any contemporary connection to their traditional fishing grounds and to break the line of historical continuity. Australia has succeeded in killing off its Indonesian history so that out of the ashes of a mythical, mare nullius seascape, an Australian history can be forged. It was an exercise in the eradication of their history in these waters, the story of which tells the lie of Australias empty sea.
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Mare Nullius
Mare nullius describes a myth of the sea as empty and unoccupied and a process of maritime expansion that occurred without opposition, in which there was no dispossession and no significant loss. It describes a sea without a past, a sea in which Indonesian fishermen are historically imagined as itinerant wanderers and accidental visitors, and who today are represented as invaders and trespassers. Bruce Campbell and Bu Wilson pioneered the concept of mare nullius in their study of Indonesian fishing in Australian waters in 1993, drawing a comparison to the legal fiction of terra nullius, that legitimised occupation of the land by the British and its parallel at sea.10 Like terra nullius, which assumed that the interior of the Australian continent was uninhabited but which was proven false early on in the course of the white settler occupation, the idea of the empty ocean became a fiction of convenience well before the process of maritime expansion was complete.11 Prior to the 1970s, the official Australian attitude to Indonesian activity in the Timor Sea was one of deliberate ignorance. When evidence of an Indonesian presence was reported on a number of occasions, authorities showed no interest. A comprehensive survey by a government research team detailed extensive Indonesian fishing operations at Ashmore and Cartier Reefs as early as 1952.12 The leader of the expedition, Dr Dominic Serventy, concluded in his report that the islets showed well established signs of occupancy, and that the fishing ventures he witnessed were clearly nothing new. There were also occasional sightings of Indonesian fishermen by surveyors doing bouts of work on outlying reefs, or by lighthouse keepers. But the authorities never showed any indication of wanting to take action. In the words of a West Australian Minister for Fisheries, these were rather inaccessible waters and the Indonesian fishing operations so well off the beaten track there seemed little reason to apprehend them.13 For over three decades the borders of the nation-state had been creeping steadily seawards in tune with new developments in international maritime law. But to the Indonesian fishermen, the instruments of law that governed jurisdiction of these waters were as foreign as the seats of power where they were designed. As bureaucrats drew maps and politicians signed away territories, they
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continued their seasonal fishing expeditions, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s they did so relatively undisturbed. The authorities of the day seemed quite content with an out of sight, out of mind approach to the Indonesian presence in Australian waters. The 1970s heralded the sea change in official attitudes to the Timor Sea. The discovery of fossil fuel reserves catapulted this neglected backwater into political consciousness. The shift in status of these waters, once inaccessible, now immensely lucrative, meant a whole new approach to the region and a sudden awareness of the substantial numbers of Indonesian fishermen. Australian officers were sent out on surveillance flights and were suddenly stumbling on Indonesian fishermen in their hundreds. The official interpretation of the strength of this presence was that it was a new phenomenon. There was no problem off the WA coast about seven years ago, a Fisheries officer wrote in 1980. Till then the only known intruders had been the occasional apologetic fishing party swept off course by wind and currents.14 The year 1973, when Australia started surveillance and policing operations in the Timor Sea, marked a new line in the sea, a temporal line in the official imagination that signified the moment traditional Indonesian fishermen crossed from being accidental visitors in empty seas to commercial invaders in fertile waters. From a myth of emptiness to the myth of invasion, from an image of the fishermen as harmless visitors to one of competitors for Australian resources, the moral and political justification for, firstly, their eviction and secondly, their criminalisation, was established. The occupancy by Indonesian fishermen of these waters dates back centuries. Where there has been an acknowledgment of this history, it has been to assume that any ongoing contact with Australias northern waters stopped prior to the first world war, when laws were passed in South Australia in 1907 banning the famous Macassan fleets from their trepanging activities on the northern Australian coast. Historians have also tended to draw a distinction between the Macassan fleets whose visits ended in the early 1900s and the Indonesian fishermen who continued to journey to the north Australian coast in small single boats, known as perahu.15 The distinction has been misleading. Contrary to popular opinion, it was not necessarily the Macassans that disappeared but their fleets. This probably had nothing to do with Australian laws
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passed thousands of miles away from the remote Arnhem Land coast and impossible to enforce, and everything to do with changes in the fishing and sailing economy in south-east Indonesia. What is critical is that Indonesian fishermen, often the same men who had worked the Macassan fleets, continued to make these journeys as they had done for centuries, searching for marine produce to trade on the Asian market through the port city of Macassar. As Campbell and Wilson demonstrate, the historical construction of Indonesian fishermen as wanderers, few in number, accidentally blowing into Australian waters, resonates strongly with images of Aboriginal people as traditionally nomadic, itinerant and lacking in attachment to any region. The editor of the Sydney Morning Herald used this image to great effect in 1838 to justify European colonisation. What is the difference, he wrote, between taking possession of a desert country without inhabitants, and taking possession of a country of which comparatively few wandering inhabitants make use. Such a country is desert for every purpose, and may be justly occupied by civilised man.16 The line in the sea that signified an imaginary moment when the fishermen crossed from being accidental visitors in empty seas to deliberate trespassers in fertile waters was also the moment of their transformation from subsistence to commercial fishermen in the official imagination. This is the other part of the mare nullius myth of Indonesian fishermen. Indonesian fishermen have always been commercial operators, their fishing activities geared towards the collection of sea products for trade on the Asian market.17 Whereas once it was trochus shell and trepang, nowadays it has shifted to shark fin. In all of these cases, the focus of their fishing operations has been driven by the Chinese demand for exotic marine species, as it has been for centuries. Australian policy-makers have consistently founded ill-conceived policies on the mistaken assumption that indigenous, traditional technology automatically equates with primitive, non-commercial practices. In this type of thinking, a fisherman cannot be traditional and commercial. In reality this is what they all were. The sole identification and classification of fishermen according to their boats and fishing technology denies their identity as people of place. It erases, once again, their prior occupancy and historical connection to these waters, further reinforcing their visitor status.
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Indonesian Fishermen and Australias Northern Waters
During the early 1970s, the first major military sweep of Australias northern Arafura and Timor Seas was conducted to evict Indonesian fishermen from the region. It came hard on the heels of negotiations between Indonesias President Suharto and Australias Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who had met in tense circumstances to negotiate, among other things, the new maritime boundaries in the Timor Sea. Maritime borders were subsequently redrawn, memoranda of understanding between Indonesia and Australia signed, policies devised and Australia began its assertion of control over the region. East Timors independence was one of the major casualties in this brutal chapter of Timor Sea relations. The traditional fishermen of south-east Indonesia were another. The same year that Portugal departed East Timor and Indonesia invaded, Australia was busy with an invasion of its own. In 1975, Operation Trochus was the first major military intervention in the Timor Sea aimed at evicting the Indonesian fishermen from the region. The traditional fishermen no doubt got the shock of their lives. Worlds away from Jakarta and Canberra, there is little doubt that they had no inkling of the new lines being drawn in the sea. This was the beginning of an aggressive border protection regime in Australias northern waters. Indonesian fishermen had their boats shot at, sunk or torched at sea. They were assaulted. Batons were used. Towed to Australia they were detained for weeks or sometimes months without trial, and when tried had little or, in the last ten years in Western Australia, no legal assistance. Even the legality of their prison sentences is dubiousarrested for illegal fishing, they are fined and sent straight to jail to serve out their fines at a set rate per day. This has sometimes taken years. Their experiences of incarceration in Australian gaols, often in high security prisons, have been typically rough. Back home, their families have suffered, sometimes tragically. This history of punishment and incarceration has continued unremittingly over the past thirty years. In recent years there has been an acceleration in the number of Indonesian fishermen being arrested and incarcerated, with recent media reports putting the figure at around 1,000 for 2005 alone. Accompanying the increase in arrests has been a renewed media focus on the problem of illegal
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fishing in Australian waters. The tenor of media reports has been virulent, coloured by the sort of misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric that not so long ago informed the feverish news coverage of the asylum seeker voyages through the Timor and Arafura Seas. In terms of the representation of Indonesian fishing in Australian waters, however, this is hardly new. Like the refugee, the Indonesian fisherman transgresses the border and violates the national boundaries, but they do so not in order to seek a new life, but in order to maintain their old one. Their presence is in many ways more of a threat than that of the refugee, because it represents a prior claim to these waters that pre-dates the European. The panoply of fears that make up Australias historic invasion anxiety are easily identifiable in the way their presence is related to an Australian audience. The fact that they are located in the geographical heartland of the invasion imaginary, the fact that they are Asian, and more recently, the fact of their Indonesian origins, are all elements that have served to exacerbate their status as dangerous and demonic. Brazen crews of illegal fishermen are making a mockery of Australias border controls by camping on the nations northern coastline, fuelling fears about the threat of terrorism, drug-running and the spread of disease, opened one recent article, under the headline: Fear over invasion of foreign fishermen.18 Australian journalism is ever the sucker for the invasion narrative when it comes to reporting illegal Indonesian fishing, and this particular article was prizeworthy for its contribution to the trend. It proceeded to describe the alarming rise in foreign fishing vessels advancing on Australias coastline. This represented a crisis that could expose the nation to terrorist attacks on vital infrastructure. Along with the potential terrorist threat they posed was the possibility that they were bird flu, malaria and tuberculosis carriers. The Northern Territory Fisheries Minister, Kon Vatskalis was quoted making the highly dubious and suspect accusation that Indonesian fishermen bring with them cats, birds and other animals, even monkeys. Or if they werent carrying a disease or diseased animals, then they might be involved in drugs, weapons and explosives smuggling. Vatskalis wasnt the first to make this connection between Indonesian fishermen and disease, smuggling and criminal incursions. In 1968, fears of the north being wide open to
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smuggling, the drug traffic, the introduction of disease risks and to illegal landings, were expressed in the West Australian parliament.19 For much longer, the idea of invasion was practically synonymous with Asia, and fear of Asia was commonly imagined as fear of contamination. The first line to be drawn in the sea was the quarantine line, and as Alison Bashford notes, in the earliest discussions of quarantine little distinction was made between invasion by disease and actual invasion.20 Hygienists in Australia will look on the seaward frontiers as the places which must be fully manned and equipped with the most modern armamentaria, declared the Director-General of the Commonwealth Department of Health, in order that the possibility of invasion by disease shall be reduced to an absolute minimum.21 Sitting three miles out to sea around the entire periphery of Australia, this cordon sanitaire enabled particular racial geographic imaginings of nation. It created a sense of both unity and immunity, imagined as a protective maritime fence separating and safeguarding the clean, white space of the nation from the dirty, infectious spaces of Asia. This literal outline of Australian territory, described at the time as measures of defence at the frontier was, in my view, the first articulation of a technology and language of border protection as defensive. The oceans may have provided the island-nation with the apartheid that nature had designed, but at the northern extremities of the continent it was a precarious immunity. It has also been argued that the creation of leper colonies, for example, in the 1890s in Torres Strait, established as no-go zones, were part of this fortressing of Australias tip. As Rod Edmond writes, the geographical borders of the nation had to be secured, and the expulsion of contaminants that threatened the integrity of the mainland became part of this process.22 The call to arm and defend Australias maritime frontiers in the name of quarantine was prophetic, setting the stage for the role of the oceans in the strategic imagination and the creation of a white ocean policy that would sweep the seas clean and white. In response to the contemporary resurgence of invasion rhetoric in the press the then Commonwealth Fisheries Minister, Senator Ian MacDonald, found himself in the interesting position of having to water down some of these more ludicrous and outlandish claims even as he strove to maintain media support for his tougher approach for dealing with Indonesian fishermen arrested in
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Australian waters. I dont see any security risk at all, these are not inherently criminal people, MacDonald was elsewhere quoted as saying. They are fishermen who are brought here to Australia against their will.23 This rare moment of sympathy seemed somewhat disingenuous, given that the senator was simultaneously promoting his international campaign to change the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to allow for far more punitive sentencing laws. At present, the UNCLOS agreement, to which Australia is a signatory, prohibits the incarceration of people for committing offences within a countrys exclusive economic zone. Australia circumvents this by fining the fishermen and giving them no time to pay, which results in a de facto prison term. MacDonald was seeking to have this law amended to provide jail terms for illegal fishermen. The apparent rise in foreign fishing vessels coming to Australian waters, MacDonald also suggested, had more to do with increased surveillance of the region than an actual increase in numbers. This is certainly the case. During the invasion scares of 2001, the Howard Government installed an unprecedented amount of military hardware in Australias northern waters and despite the virtual disappearance of the people ferries from the seascape, the military have remained. More naval patrol vessels, Customs vessels and Coastwatch aircraft patrol this area than ever before, for which the Indonesian fishermen provide a useful justification. They are a concrete target. Their presence has assisted in maintaining a sense of emergency and crisis in the region.
Border Protection in Australias Northern Seas
In the heightened era of security politics at the turn of the twentyfirst century, the spectacle of thousands of non-white asylum seekers arriving via those waters that had already earned a place in the national psyche as Australias back door was harnessed by the political elite as a potent symbol of the forces which threatened to steal Australias sovereignty. Its just a question of making sure that these people dont land in Australia, an article in The Australian quoted foreign minister Alexander Downer as saying. Because at the heart of this is the protection of our territorial integrity.24 In late 2001, the Howard Government launched Operation Relex, a military operation confined to the waters between
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Christmas Island and Ashmore Reef. It was directed wholly at stopping unauthorised boat arrivals of asylum seekers from attempting to reach Australian waters, with the ultimate aim of deterring asylum seekers from using Australia as a destination. The amount of military armoury deployed was massive. Aside from 25 Royal Australian Navy vessels, there were three of what is known as Transit Security Elements with 52 soldiers attached to each; Coastwatch patrol craft including two RAAF P-3 Orions and Navy helicopters, all backed up by a vast bureaucratic army of agencies and intelligence teams representing John Howards whole of government approach to border protection in Australias north. Within the space of four months, Relex had left a devastating trail of human wreckage in its wake. Although a practice of border protection based on military tactics of intimidation and force was not something new, as Indonesian fishermen could and often did testify, the scale of Relex was. Relex installed a heightened, permanent state of aggression in Australias northern waters. It resembled a process of war. Basic Safety of Life at Sea principles, respected globally in peacetime, were abandoned in favour of gunboat diplomacy. The Australian Defence Force, previously a support agency for Customs and Coastwatch, was given unprecedented and far-reaching powers. Unauthorised boats that were once intercepted inside Australian waters, and towed to the nearest Australian port, were now turned around once they were simply suspected of attempting to enter Australian waters. Protecting the borders from within was no longer adequate. Australia now crossed the border in order to carry out Defence operations on the other side. It was, by the governments own admission, Fortress Australia and Forward Defence in one package. Impossible as it was to gauge a sense of the enemy, presented as a faceless mass of upturned faces to the helicopter cameras that flew over them, it was the boats, wooden, flaking hulks heaving desperately under the weight of their human cargo (the boat people) that became one of the most enduring symbols of Relex. The boats lost their names too, taking on the militaristic acronym of SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) as if to eradicate even this part of the journey as story, as history. This was a seascape so remote and foreign that it seemed to resemble more a part of the mythical Asia of the Australian imagination a hundred years before with its faceless hordes and
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leaking hulks, an alien place that was not only spatially but culturally at a remove from Australia. It reminded me of the way the northwest coast was once imagined, as a place that never seemed properly attached to the rest of the country. Senator Staniforth Smith, on a visit to Broome, the north-west pearling town dependent on an Asian indentured labour force, remarked in 1902 that one might be excused for thinking that a part of Asia had been detached and grafted on to the Australian continent. So struck was he by the foreignness of the place, with its majority Asian population and the chaotic jumble of shops, houses and crooked lanes, that to visit meant: Superficially, if not actually, one has left our very English Australia and has already crossed the small stretch of sea separating us from the rest of Asia.25 There was a sense that out there, on the far edge of the nation, Australia was in danger of fraying and unravelling. The northern seas became, by association, corrosive to the land. Words like floods, epidemic, rising tide, armada, streams, waves, even tsunami and tidal wave used to describe the asylum seekers voyages through these waters seemed to suggest that the ocean itself was part of the menace, propelling unwanted immigrants towards the embattled land with supernatural force. Such stormy vocabulary has a venerable place in the lexicon of the Australian invasion tradition. Australia came to nationhood on a wave of fears that it was about to be swamped by an awakening East, an East often imagined in terms of a rising tide that threatened to overwhelm and destroy the nation.26 Unpredictable waters, rotting ferries, human sardines. These became the familiar pictures of a besieged nation. Yet if there was one solid landmark that prevailed amongst the shifting fluidity of boats and sea, it was Ashmore Reef. The reef became etched in public memory in the late 1990s when regular news reports carried dramatic images of asylum seekers stranded there under headlines that broadcast Fortress Australia under attack. The Australian dubbed it the taxi rank in an article titled Our open-door borders. How guns, drugs and people are swamping the nations barely protected coastline.27 Ghassan Hage observes that the border is always a place somewhere between our society and the society of others, a zone where aggressive, non-democratic behaviour is permissible in order to protect the otherwise democratic interior within.28 Remote
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enough to ensure that the unsavoury practices of border protection, and the people Australia was protecting against, didnt contaminate the national home, Ashmore Reef became the symbolic outpost of the nation, the last gate on which hung the trespassers will not be admitted sign. It was here that the degradation and desperation endured by those seeking shelter was contained, so far away, in the words of one observer, that it barely seems part of home.29 In 2001, the reef was further cast adrift when its political status was rewritten, along with hundreds of other offshore islands, as an excised offshore place. The official terminology used for the expulsion was excision, evoking the idea of a quick surgical act, as if cutting out a cancerous sore from the healthy geo-body. The upshot of which was, anyone arriving at Ashmore from then on wishing to claim asylum was automatically denied the right to apply for a visa, even if found to be a genuine refugee. Ashmore Reef may have appeared as a liability that increased Australias exposure to invasion, but if anything, this legislative manoeuvre increased Ashmore Reef s status as a protected place, off-limits to all but select Australian citizens. Governed by both a security and an environmental agenda, Ashmore Reef is symbolic of how Australia manages and imagines its sovereignty. The discourses and practices of environmental protection and border protection are very similar. Both describe danger and exclusivity, fragility and threat. Both are designed to protect and safeguard precious spaces from unwanted, unwelcome peoples. This was reinforced recently when the Howard Government announced that the Australian mainland was now also to be excised from the migration zone, arguably in response to the arrival of 43 West Papuans who had managed to land on the Australian coast and thus claim asylum. As Hage notes, when the protective policies of the border become too aggressive and too vigilant, they can no longer be comfortably contained at a distance. The division between the interior and the border disappears. In the wake of 9/11 and more recently the London bombings, the idea that there are dangerous elements that have infiltrated the Australian home and are residing deep within the national heartland, even calling themselves Australian, has been relentlessly exploited by the government and certain sections of the media, as the arm of border politics extends further and more forcefully than ever before. Border politics is no longer contained in a strip of seaspace between
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the safe and civilised space of the mainland and the opposite shore. It is seeping in both directions. It is in here and it is also much further out. It is occurring in Australian suburbia, as potential terrorists are arrested and incarcerated and people are encouraged to act as the nations eyes and ears. And the measures of defence at the frontier once enacted three miles out to sea are now also being performed in regions far away from the Australian continent. Witness, for example, the creation of the Pacific Island detention centres on Nauru and Manus.30 Meanwhile, the arrival of the West Papuans must have created a shockwave in the governments border agency departments, who have been handed more funding and resources than ever before to patrol Australias northern borders. For the 200405 financial year, 1485 illegal fishermen were arrested, 60 per cent more than the 937 caught in 200304. In April 2005, the biggest crackdown on illegal fishing in Australias history wrapped up with an eleven-day blitz that netted 29 boats and over 240 Indonesian fishermen. It was followed up by a number of other major hauls, including in November of that year the arrest of another 187 off the coast of Western Australia alone. Operation Clearwater involved the joint cooperation of Fisheries, Defence, Coastwatch and Customs, and represented an impressive display of Australian firepower and assertion of sovereignty. News reports also began to appear about how Australian fishermen were being enlisted to fight the foreign invasion, as Indonesian boats were spotted close to the north Queensland coastline.31 Operation Clearwater culminated in the announcement by the Howard government in May 2005 of another $91.4 million allocated in the federal budget for combating illegal fishing in waters off northern Australia. The message is clear. The new era in border protection is about illegal fishing. The West Australian ran a report in October 2005 that alleged the Federal Government had harboured fears for at least two months about illegal fishing off Australias north coast and its possible links to terrorism, weapons and people smuggling.32 In a further example of how the two issues have become conflated in government policy, it is the Indonesian fishermen who are now being incarcerated in the nations immigration detention centres as the numbers of refugees have begun to decline.33 In November 2005, Indonesian fishermen
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accounted for more than 35 per cent of the immigration detainee population. The name Operation Clearwater was uncanny. In Troubled Waters, I wrote that as a White Australia Policy marked the political birth of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, so a white ocean policy marked the beginning of the next.34 The White Australia Policy, or Immigration Restriction Act as it was known in 1901, was an assertion of white sovereignty in a traditionally nonwhite region. Similarly, the white ocean policy of 2001 was an assertion of Australias occupation of waters that have long held only a tenuous link to the mainland, a statement of intent to clear the waters.
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Chapter Six
Fond Illusions: Some Reflections on Australian Dependence, Pacific Interventions and Indigenous Land
Tim Anderson
Since 1901 the development of an independent Australian voice and policy in international affairs seemed a possibility, and several suggested elements leave us with the fond illusion that one exists. However, crippling disabilities stand in the way. Independence might be recognised through the shared and clearly defined institutions of citizenship, mutual support and solidarity. Yet Australian independence has been compromised by imperial dependence and imperial emulation. With little clear idea of the rights and citizenship that must underlie sovereignty, Australian society struggles to understand the rights, citizenship and sovereignty of other peoples. A diverse, shared citizenship struggles to emerge from a society of privilege, assimilation and xenophobia. And the ideal of egalitarianism has been dealt sustained blows by market fetishism and the forces of privatisation. These obstacles together make for an incoherent and insecure national identity, a dangerous recipe in times of global conflict. This paper reflects on these problems of imperial dependence, the lack of a genuine national voice, and a weak notion of citizenship, before attempting an explanation of Australias recent interventions in the Pacific, and the conflict over Indigenous land. Attempts to reshape Pacific nations constitutions, electoral and land tenure systems can be much better understood, I suggest, through a
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parallel examination of the problems of Australian national identity and institutions.

Dependence, Privilege and Market Fetishism
An independent Australian voice and policy are compromised by imperial dependence, an incoherent citizenship and neoliberal economism. The first obstacle is imperial dependence. The practice of joining in imperial war as a form of insurance policy (supposedly securing the protection of the big power) dates from older conflicts and runs through expeditions from Vietnam to Iraq. Pretexts for such wars are thin, and preoccupy Australians more than they do our neighbours. One important consequence of this is that the educated classes in neighbouring countries do not regard Australian policy as coherent or independent. A former diplomat surveying Asian attitudes to Australians found that:
[Asian] stereotypes about Australians as people are contradictory but have a potent internal logic. The favourites are: little-known, distant and irrelevant; white, British and second-rate Western; stooges of the United States and lacking independence hypocritical and interfering, with prejudiced and inaccurate media; big, loud, exploitative, materialistic, domineering and condescending; generous, friendly, simple and uncultured; mean, unfriendly and devious; not Asians.1
Asians can do business with Australians, but are less likely to trust them. And the lesson of the Iraq invasion is that Australia, as a friendly trading partner, can return to bomb Iraqi civilians. A collapse of public debate in Australia in turn means that Australians are sheltered from public discussion of their own moral responsibility for these atrocities. A second consequence is that Australian policy adopts a modernising and civilising imperial ideology. Free and open markets are evangelised, in all circumstances, regardless of the various local forms of social and cultural systems. This mission has fed a greater Australian political consensus, in recent years, with the linking of trade liberalisation to the possibility of expanding agricultural exports.2 A third consequence of imperial dependence is that it has spawned imperial emulation, both in aid-based missions to the AsiaPacific region and in the crass statement of pretending
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to act as the regional deputy of the empire, in matters of regional intervention.3 The second major barrier to the development of an independent Australian policy is our incoherent notion of citizenship. A major obstacle to defining rights, and therefore also citizenship, was the maintenance of the White Australia Policy. Xenophobia acted to undermine the construction of domestic citizenship and a confident identity. Not having engaged in an independence struggle, and having defended overt racialism for most of the twentieth century, Australia failed, throughout the twentieth century, to develop a clear charter of citizens rights. There were short periods (such as in the late 1940s) when Australians participated in the international consensus-building process of rights. This was not devoid of chauvinism, often being accompanied by a strident and homogenising nationalism.4 Aboriginal and migrant communities campaigns against racist policiesin particular the policy of assimilationseemed to open up new spaces for discussion of an Australian identity which was diverse and supported the self-determination of communities. However, this debate did not reach deep into a discussion of citizenship. As Anthony Day et al. observed in the 1990s: Australias language of citizenship is muted and its vocabulary sparse. If there is often confusion over the implicit character of Australian citizenship, it is because its forms commonly go unremarked.5 By the end of the twentieth century Australia remained one of the few countries on earth without a bill of rights. Emerging nations such as South Africa, Thailand and Timor Leste all developed bills of rights (in 1996, 1997 and 2002), but not Australia. One consequence of this was that, in Australias failed republican referendum of 1999, there was virtually no discussion of citizenship. The public debate focused on the form of electing (or appointing) a President, leading Brian Martin to observe that the illusion that the head of state is really important appears to be deep-seated.6 Yet, while the current Australian federal constitution draws on monarchical prerogative, all republics and democracies are founded on citizens. How could a country, in the name of a democratic republic, cast off a monarchy and replace it with a President, ignoring citizenship? Citizenship in Australian law is identified but not defined. It is lumped together with immigration and travel documentation, and administered by the strangely combined Department of
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Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIAin 2006 this reverted to DIMA, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs), largely an agency for the control of others. This Department tells foreigners wanting Australian citizenship, As an Australian citizen, you will enjoy the same rights as all other Australian citizens. It then lists a right to vote, to apply for public office, to apply for a passport, to enlist in the defence forces and to register a child as an Australian citizen.7 However even the right to vote is not guaranteed by the Australian constitution. This institutional failure has cultural implications. A society not firmly based on equal citizenship must revert to a society of privileges, where there are worthy and unworthy, or first and second class, citizens. This, of course, was a prominent feature of Australias racialist past. Despite the feeble development of Australian citizenship, Australian governments in their current aid-based civilising missions have at their forefront good governance as a binding theme. This suggests democratic institutions, participation, citizenship, education and other elements consistent with democratic ideals. However, influenced by neoliberalism and the limited Australian experience of citizenship, these programs are mostly self-serving and, to the extent that they provide aid at all, favour elites. AID/Watch notes that the majority of AusAID contracts go to a small group of private-for-profit Australian companies, including $200 million in contracts to a company controlled by the late Kerry Packer, formerly Australias richest man.8 The third problem for Australia is the supplanting of an egalitarian tendency with a fetish for markets and privatisation. A constrained egalitarian element entered Australian colonial culture through poor and Irish immigrants. This influenced the republican and labour movements, and was in turn reinforced by Aboriginal and postwar migrant struggles. However this trend was halted and reversed by the rising force of corporate neoliberalism in the 1980s. Free market ideology generated substantial inequality and began to erode labour protection and social security achievements. Heavily subsidised private health insurance and private superannuation continue to erode shared institutions. As open markets historically favour the big powers, Australian administrations have been influenced in their neoliberalism by imperial ideology, then persuaded by the immediate interests of
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their own financial and ideological/media oligarchies. Both major parties have participated in the dismantling of shared institutions such as social security, banks and airlines. Many of these moves have been unpopular (e.g. the privatisation of telecommunications) and strongly resisted (e.g. attacks on Medicare, the national public health insurance system), but they proceed apace under the pressure of private investor demands. Little wonder, then, that the dismantling of shared institutions in the Pacific (such as customary land) is also high on the agenda of Australian aid missions.
Pacific Interventions
To understand the nature of Australian regional interventions, we can draw on these understandings of Australias own imperial dependence and emulation, weak citizenship and market fetishism. Though there have been several forms of intervention, their rationales are now cast in terms of good governance and poverty reduction, and are all influenced by a modernist, civilising neoliberalism, and conditioned by parochial interests. For example, food security in the region is presented as a function of trade liberalisation: broad based trade liberalisation is an important vehicle for economic growth and the alleviation of poverty. It thus makes an important contribution to food security.9 Australian aid policy is in turn strongly influenced by commercial interests. The Australian Government sees Papua New Guinea (its biggest aid recipient) as a major commercial opportunity. An apparently bipartisan plan for the Pacific is to double Australian private trade between 2001 and 2006.10 Forms of intervention have included parallel governance, where finance through large aid projects can act as a proxy for government coordination. This was the case with the restructuring of aid for Papua New Guinea, following Australian disenchantment with a succession of corrupt, Australian-dependent regimes. In this new model, for example, AusAIDs cryptically named Incentive Fund, which organised tenders for education and other infrastructure, for a time became PNGs de facto Ministry for Public Works.11 The PNG Education Department had to tender for funds, along with private schools and colleges, the countrys oil palm industry and the provincial governments. This approach was criticised even by a
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World Bank director, who saw it as corrosive of social capital (public trust and institution building) in PNG.12 The World Bank, however, favours more direct administrative intervention, through technical assistance within client states finance departments. The Australian administration seems to have become persuaded of this view, as it moved into more direct Pacific administration, such as the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI)13 and the now failed Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) for Papua New Guinea.14 Both programs involved more direct finance and police administration. The shift to an emphasis on good governance in aid missions was in many respects the product of sustained criticism of corrupt aid regimes, such as World Bank programs in Suhartos Indonesia. However, adoption of the (originally social democratic) concept of governance by development banks and aid agencies has served to widen the scope of political intervention. While such bodies still disavow political interference (and political activity is banned by the World Banks articles of association), AusAID and World Bank agendas of good governance now typically include demands for electoral reform, weakening of constitutional rights and the dismantling of popular shared institutions, such as customary land. For example, AusAID works with private contractors and the Australian Electoral Commission to develop policy on electoral reform in PNG.15 PNG electoral systems are reshaped in Australia. Some of the rationale for this has been to address corruption, which is often suggested as residing in indigenous cultural practices,16 rather than being fed by the incursions of international finance and business. For example, strong local community ties (wantokism) is periodically referred to as a source of corruption, rather than of social support and cohesion. In 2004 Australias Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) aimed to insert 210 Australian police and 64 bureaucrats into Papua New Guineas government administration. The program was said to help address PNGs development challenges in the areas of law and order, justice, economic management, public sector reform, border control and transport security and safety, and the headline figure of A$800 million was presented as aid to PNG.17 In practice, most of this money was earmarked for Australian salaries and city rents. Of the A$800 million, $339 million was marked for Australian Federal Police salaries and accommodation, along with $394 million
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for AFP logistics and operational costs. Only $55.7 million was budgeted for PNG police assistance.18 Further, two hundred foreign police, who travelled in groups of three or four and did not speak local languages, were hardly likely to have a significant impact on law and order in a country of five million. Most likely they would have been deployed around some major roads, airports, Australian missions and support facilities for Australian mining companies. When the immunity from prosecution offered to the foreign police was successfully challenged in PNGs courts, the program collapsed. The PNG Supreme Court, with an independence perhaps unexpected of a potential failed state, found that the enabling legislation for the ECP (which had been demanded by the Australian government) could not interfere with the independent function of the Public Prosecutor, nor could its immunity provisions prevent PNG citizens from bringing cases against ECP officials, based on breaches of their constitutional rights.19 The Australian administration seemed to assume that this court defeat was a simple technical problem which the PNG government could quickly repair with a constitutional amendment. This was not to be. The PNG systems commitment to citizens rights was more secure than that of Australia, and the ECP was transformed into a much smaller program, and with no immunities. Yet while this abortive police intervention attracted most attention, the most sustained Australian intervention in PNG has been the attempt to dismantle the countrys system of customary land rights. This in many ways is a more important intervention, because of the potential consequences for masses of PNG people.
The Attack on Customary Title
Customary title is entrenched in PNGs 1975 constitution, and around 97 per cent of PNG land is held by family groups, in land systems administered by tribal elders. Almost everyone has access to at least some land. This is a unique land tenure pattern in the postcolonial era, and represents possibly the most even distribution of land and natural resources in the world.20 Customary land in PNG is a popular and fundamental institution, guaranteeing food and social security to almost the entire population. However, AusAID and the World Bank have aggressively argued that customary land is an obstacle to development, and have spent many millions of
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dollars in advancing land registration (or land mobilisation) programs in an attempt to facilitate a process whereby a large amount of customary land is converted into an alienable commodity. To facilitate this agenda, a crisis is often suggested, at the root of which is the supposed failure of Melanesian institutions. Helen Hughes of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) even claims that the institution of customary land is the primary reason for deprivation in rural Pacific communities.21 While the system of customary land and clan ownership has food security benefits, this is said to be at the cost of agricultural productivity and output.22 The expansion of marketised land relations is strongly supported by the World Bank and AusAID.23 The imperial voice in these arguments is seen most clearly in organisations such as CIS, whose board members are mostly directors of Australian banks and mining companies. The CIS produces some of the most virulent attacks on systems of Indigenous land in PNG and Australia. These arguments against the social value of customary land reach out into the academic literature. For example, according to Steven Gosarevski, Helen Hughes and Susan Windybank, Communal ownership of land has not permitted any country to develop [I]ndividual property rights are necessary for individual savings and as collateral for credit that is essential for the development of banking.24 Such arguments no doubt encourage Australian aid programs that are firmly focused on the expansion of commercial opportunity. The attacks on customary title in PNG are mirrored by attacks on Aboriginal land rights in Australia,25 and parallel claims that dismantling community land ownership (to the extent that it existsmainly in Northern Australia) will somehow enhance Aboriginal home ownership. The former Indigenous Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone claimed that changes to the Northern Territory Land Rights Act (essentially, introducing greater possible commodification of land) could make the law more workable, and would provide greater choice for Aboriginal people.26 Australian governments of all stripes have been running this argument in the region. Over the past twenty years there have been more than fifty AusAID funded land titling, land registration or land administration projects across South-east Asia and the Pacific. Total expenditure on this form of aid has been over $130 million.27 All have been designed to facilitate commercialisation and foreign
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access to resources, under various forms of customary title. In PNG these projects have generally failed, creating conflict and resentment along the way. Both the World Bank and AusAID now prefer to back other agencies (PNG government agencies, law firms, corporate agencies and some cash-hungry NGOs) in selling the unpopular land registration argument. So such events as the Land and Development Symposium in Lae, in September 2005, often see privileged local faces putting up the foreign arguments.28 In the face of this, many PNG NGOs have pointed to widespread fraud, particularly by logging companies, under existing lease systems. (Customary land in PNG is inalienable, but can be leased through the state in lease-lease-back arrangements.) Almah Tararia, former senior lawyer at the Port Moresby-based Environmental Law Centre, had carriage of a major fraud case concerning land registration. She argues that land registration is land alienation, and that community land is being lost under the current system. In customary societies, low levels of literacy and general commercial acumen make fraud inevitable.29
Valuing Customary Land
Beneath the intense debate over land registration, driven by powerful foreign investor interests, is a practical consideration for villagers. How can they participate in the cash economy, as assetrich, cash-poor farmers? This concern is appealed to by the land registration campaigners, but it can be tested by political economic analysis. AusAID and the bankers suggest firstly the macroeconomic desirability of export-oriented resource industries and cash crops (such as oil palm), and secondly that ordinary poor communities can better make use of their land assets by registration, which would give them access to mortgage finance, as well as income from leases. PNGs NGO and community resistance to this view says that small farmers are best to hold on to their land and develop small business and marketing operations. To test this argument, from the small farmers perspective (most people in PNG have access to land, and are small farmers), we can set the expected benefits of land registration and commodification (lease rents and mortgage prospects) against the opportunity costs of land alienation (lost commercial and subsistence benefits).
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The initial problem in assessing the benefits of land registration is that rural land markets in PNG are completely dysfunctional. Lease values on rural land, relying on willingness to pay and prior transactions, have come up with values as low as 50 Kina per hectare per year, plus some uncertain royalties and labour preference understandings.30 Valuer-General schedules on rentals for residential, commercial and industrial land show much higher values31 but these are mostly urban based and reflect the highly restricted supply of urban property. Rural land markets are highly limited, the customary land owners are asset-rich, cash-poor and have very little information on the real opportunity cost value of their land. Important implications of the limited nature of rural land markets include the facts that value is assessed in terms of cash income, but typically excludes considerations of:
the land based non-cash values, e.g. food, housing and other benefits; the customary landowner vulnerability in markets, due to money being scarce and highly valued and land being abundant, and lowly valued; town rental housing being scarce and highly valued; food being abundant and relatively cheap, in areas where land is widely held; and customary landowners having little experience in establishing and managing leases or mortgages.
The effect of this is that customary landowners typically value their land at very low cash rates and are vulnerable to agreements for low value leases, and/or to being dispossessed of their major asset, through registered mortgages and an inability to meet mortgage commitments. A more appropriate way to understand land value in economic termsbut distinct from simple commercial valuesis to assess the value equivalence of subsistence production. This also serves as an opportunity cost approach to land alienation. We have to begin with household consumption. In 2004 and 2005 I surveyed small groups of villagers from Madang coastal, Madang inland, Oro Province and the Eastern and Western Highlands, to generate a
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preliminary idea of a households ordinary daily diet, and from this a value equivalence in local markets. Some items do not have simple market equivalence, but most staple foods do. Nineteen interviews (in late 2004) with small farmers in the Madang Region showed cash crop incomes ranging from 200 to 14,000 Kina per year, per family (averaged at seven people, two adults and five children). There are no large-scale export crops in Madang Province, and the major income earners for these families were peanuts, buai (betelnut), cocoa and fruit. Four interviews with coffee growers in the Highlands showed cash crop incomes (6585% from coffee) ranging between 1,000 and 2,200 Kina per year. Some focused interviews with the representatives of three families showed that family diets in Madang and the Highlands were rich and varied, and comprised market values ranging from 9.38 Kina per day (when purchased in regional markets) to 31.20 Kina per day (if purchased in Port Moresbys Gordons market). Further, as many as half the families surveyed had one or more family members gaining additional income from outside employment or small business. A parallel survey of small farmers in the Popondetta plains (mid 2005) showed a similar range of cash crop incomes, with less diversity (compared to Madang Province) of subsistence production and cash crops. The biggest cash earners were oil palm and betel nut. The annual cost of housing in Madang town can be as much as 1,500 to 2,000 per month for a decent house; however a basic house in town would rent for 500 Kina per month, or 6,000 Kina per year.32 This seems the closest substitute for secure, village housing. When a low-level regional town housing rent is added to the equivalent market value of subsistence food production, we arrive at an equivalent subsistence value which ranges from 9,400 to 17,400 Kina per family per year. Other benefits of family land, such as resources for medicine, tools, ornaments and cultural reproduction, have not been included. In the case of complete land alienation, this subsistence value amount would have to be recovered for a family to not be worse off, simply in terms of food and housing. Yet rents on land in PNG are nothing close to this subsistence value. These preliminary studies suggest that while cash income from family land production varied widely and was often very low, sometimes less than 1000 Kina per year, the income required to
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replace the total value of production on an ordinary hectare of farmland could be well over 10,000 Kina per year. This comparative model may help explain widespread dissatisfaction with and conflict over tokenistic land leases, including the conflict over church lease renewals.33 This finding is consistent with those approaches that give more weight to the multifunctionality of small farmingits combined social and community value.34 But even in simple economic terms, to suggest that land registration has benefits for poor landowning families in PNG would be a terrible lie.
Concluding Remarks
This paper has linked certain problems in the development of an independent Australian voice and policy with the form and rationale of Australian interventions in the Pacific. In particular, the attempts to undermine customary land tenure systemsindigenous land rightsby land registration programs can be seen to be driven by self-interest, but also to be consistent with the steady assault on shared institutions in Australia. Arguments that the registration and transaction of customary land in PNG would serve the interests of small farmers is, in ordinary circumstances, demonstrably false. A very similar argument has been raised over Indigenous land title in Australia. At the same time, recognition of Aboriginal rights has become tokenistic. As Irene Watson says in this volume, recognising prior owners is now often little more than a quaint tradition. This is small comfort for Indigenous custodians, in the face of an insecure and derivative national identity, coupled with strident economic liberalism. The development of an honest and original Australian voice in regional affairs presupposes significant Australian debate on the issues of independence, citizenship and egalitarianism. However the disabilities of imperial dependence and emulation, privilege and xenophobia, and a neoliberal market fetishism stand in the way.
Postscript, October 2006: The Regional Rebellion
As the Australian police and army presence reached its highest point in the region in early 2006, political rejection of Australias regional assistance missions has begun to harden in Solomon Islands, Timor Leste and Papua New Guinea. They are no longer compliant regimes. Solomon Islands has turned against the Howard
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government. Papua New Guinea under Michael Somare has become increasingly assertive and, after its partisan intervention in Timor Lestes 2006 crisis, Australia faces the likely re-election in 2007 of an independently-minded and Fretilin-led Government. All three neighbouring countries have made some moves to extract better value from their natural resources (oil, gas, mining, forests), to develop some policies in areas that Australia has failed to support (rice production, public health programs), and to diversify their development assistance partners (China, Malaysia, Japan, Cuba, Taiwan). These are the fruits of a regional reaction to the Australian demands for privileged access to natural resources, crippling of public institutions and human capacity building through the doctrine of open markets, and of its attempts at strategic denial of potential competitors. However, for all the reasons discussed in this chapter, Australians maintain a poor understanding of the roots of this regional rebellion.
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Chapter Seven
Our Patch: Domains of Whiteness, Geographies of Lack and Australias Racial Horizons in the War on Terror
Suvendrini Perera
She [Queensland] could not get New Guinea but managed to get as near as possible. We followed round as close as we could get between the islands and the coast of New Guinea, taking in practically everything. Samuel Griffith1
This quotation from Sir Samuel Griffith, Premier of Queensland, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia and one of the major participants in the story of Federation will serve to introduce the key concerns of this chapter: the making and consolidation of Australias horizons, racial, national, territorial, spatiotemporal.2 Griffiths description of the process that successfully annexed the Torres Strait Islands, though falling just short of acquiring Papua for Queensland, is terse and to the point. It lays bare the sweep of a colonial voracity. How does this appetite to take in the horizon shape our contemporary maps and the imaginative and affective borders of the national and regional in a period of renewed imperial aspiration, the global war on terror? What are the processes of spatialisation, the imaginative geographies and the territorial teleologies at work in a war that, through the active, racially marked, investment,
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emotional and material, of the state, remaps Australias horizons? How do these imaginative geographies enable the spatialising of raced relations and contour the distributions, dispositions and temporalities of power that enact and reproduce differential forms of sovereignty over nationalregional space? These are some of the questions I attempt to address in this chapter. Imaginative geographies, as Edward Said describes them, work to distinguish and differentiate their space from our space, marking their space as both irretrievably different from ours and as inscribed by lack and absence.3 This is a lack that colonial activity mightily strives to fill. It labours to turn the annexed space of the other into the same and to fold the time of the other into the teleology of the modern nationeven as it also reproduces the certainty that the other can only ever always fail to become part of the same.4 In the imaginative geography of the Australian nation, racially marked places, such as Palm Island and Redfern, at once shock us and confirm our worst expectations when they emerge, in various guises of abjection, regression and desperation, on the nightly news. Such places are immediately disowned, dispatched to the limits of the nation and labelled as looking like the Third World. They are places that cannot be part of Australia because they are racially at odds, unfitting, inappropriate, dissonant. Racially out of place in the Australian present, they dis-place our expectations of the nation, of what it looks like and what it is, even as we strive to encompass them within the purview of the modern nation. What effects do such spatial and temporal displacements have on how we in turn re-engage and renew our understandings of the racially marked spaces positioned along the edges and just at the horizon of our line of vision? The horizon is a term signifying that which is at the limits, the very end-point of the possibility of representation, or as the Oxford English Dictionary succinctly puts it, the boundary of mental outlook, as well as that which defines and gives meaning to all that falls within that boundary. The horizon is simultaneously a threshold and a border. It marks a divide and an illusory, ever-receding point of meeting. The horizon holds possibilities of both promise and threat. In writing about Australias racial horizons in December 2005, I also recall Frantz Fanons cautionary words about what is over the horizon in societies marked by race:
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A society has race prejudice or it has not One cannot say that a given society is racist but that lynchings or extermination camps are not to be found there. The truth is that all that and still other things exist on the horizon.5
This reminder seems particularly apt in the context of the 2005 antiterror and sedition laws, the carceral spaces for racialised punishment that have been introduced in the preceding years, and the ongoing litany of violence and death in our prisons and camps, as in spaces of exception like Redfern and Palm Island.6 All these things too form part of the horizon for my discussion of the new mappings, dispositions and distributions of sovereign power in Australia post-2001, a date that marks not only the beginning of the global war on terror but, in Australian politics, the centenary of the federation of White Australia, the turning away by force of the Tampa refugees and the initiation of the Pacific Solution.7 This is a significant point of convergence for beginning to understand the ways in which a reworked Australian sovereignty, secured by reaffirmed ontologies, ideologies and teleologies of whiteness, is enacted over differentiated spaces, populations and bodies both inside and outside state borders. Elsewhere I discuss in more detail the new topographies of inclusion and exclusion on land and sea created by this exercise of sovereignty over refugee bodies: the contraction and expansion of national borders as detention camps are placed outside the space of the nation and lines are drawn in the sea to deterritorialise and excise parts of Australia from the migration zone, while yet other parts are annexed under measures such as the Pacific Solution, and new cartographies of surveillance constituted through extensive militarisation and policing of the oceans. All these movements contribute to the making of a racialised borderscape that is continually mapped and remapped through a number of operations.8 This essay considers the role of certain security and aid discourses in the making of the contemporary racialised borderscape of Australias Pacific. In particular it examines the contouring of this racialised borderscape through what Sanford Schramm and Philip Neisser call the policy tales of the statethat is, the narrative practices and figurations that are embedded in and structure the production of the state.9 Policy tales are told in official
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speeches and media releases, as well as via the mediating documents that shape state policy and determine the terms in which these policies circulate in publicfor example, through the output of key think tanks like the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI). The latters report, Our Failing Neighbour, is widely acknowledged to have provided the impetus for the Australian governments initiation of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI).10 The cover of the report displays the idyllic scene of a postcard resort island, overshadowed by the sinister visage of a masked and helmeted terrorist. These polarised images of beauty and terror are emplaced and localised through the third figure, a map, that represents the spatial relationship of proximity, neighbourliness and failure set out in the title. What does this text reveal of our imaginative geographies and how they shape the conceptual, affective and symbolic borders and horizons of the nation and the region, the domestic and the foreign, the ground of home and not home?11 To attempt to answer these questions I first examine in some detail the policy tales that narrate the Solomon Islands expedition for Australian domestic consumption.
A Whiter Shade of Blue: Manoeuvres in Middle Power Masculinity
Recent shifts in Australian policy on the Pacific are best illustrated by an article that appeared in a Canadian, rather than an Australian publication, a specialist newsletter called Embassy, Canadas Foreign Policy Newsweekly:
August 17 2005 HONIARA, Solomon IslandsFederal agent Simone Kleehammer dons a helmet and flak jacket before linking up with an army escort for her nightly police patrols. This is where her police colleagues were shot late last yearone killed, one injured after local gunmen targeted Australian police on this anarchic South Pacific island nation 3,000 kilometres northeast of Sydney The deadly ambushes sent a chill through this dusty tropical town, demoralizing Australian police deployed here on a precedentsetting mission: to rebuild a failed state by reviving its faltering police force
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Relying on a smile and a nine-millimetre Glock handgun, she patrols with her local partnersfresh recruits from the discredited Royal Solomon Islands Police. Hunched in a rickety cruiser, they begin a bone-jarring sweep through Borderland, the deadliest district in this ramshackle capital. Despite the threats, most residents of this dirt-poor island chain look upon the strapping Australian men and women in blue as saviours. Two years ago, these outsiders rescued the islanders from themselvesfrom the chaos of a failed state riven by ethnic cleansing and gang violence In fact, Kleehammer is one of 300 foot soldiers in an Australian experiment that has redefined her governments approach to global trouble spots. The police deployment is the centrepiece of a massive, decade-long intervention launched in mid-2003 with an amphibious landing As they restored order, the $1 billion operation was bolstered by squads of elite civil servants reviving the moribund machinery of government, ranging from treasury economists to customs agents patrolling the airport. It is a virtual takeover of a sovereign countryalbeit by invitation The Solomon Islands rescue mission has served as the inspiration for an equally ambitious police deployment in Papua, New Guinea [sic]another crime-infested, corruption-ridden troublespot off Australias northern coast. Saving the day is becoming a habit for Australians.12
The title of Reg Cohns report, Australia, Americas deputy sheriff, punches above its weight and criticizes Canada for not doing the same, could not be more informative. It recounts a meeting with Alexander Downer in August 2005 at which the Foreign Minister pits Australias new fighting foreign policy against Canadas sclerotic multilateralism, also characterised by him as an internationalism of the lowest common denominator:
We pull our weight, Downer says pointedly. The contrast with Canada, which prides itself on being a middle-power that absented itself from Iraq, is inescapably unflattering Downer says Sometimes we can do it aloneat least lead the operation as we did in East Timor We did the heavy lifting. Same in the Solomon Islands. In Papua New Guinea we do it alone with the PNG government.13
The muscular persona assumed by Downer stakes a particular kind of claim at global, regional and national levels. Globally, in the
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racialised geopolitical hierarchies produced by the war on terror, the Australian state has come to position itself, both in its selffigurations and through the indulgent praises of its mighty ally, the United States, as the antipodean heavyweight and action hero of the Asia Pacific. Man of Steel was the fulsome title that President George Bush bestowed on Prime Minister John Howard after the latter had proudly claimed, then disavowed in the face of regional disgust, the role of neighbourhood deputy sheriff to the US. These personifications at once draw upon and rework longestablished continuities in the authorising racial, national and imperial narratives and performativities of the Australian state. In the undertaking of projects such as the expedition to Solomon Islands or the war on Iraq, the state draws on a repertoire of racial demeanours and behaviours to reconstitute itself as a nation of saviours in blue. Its army of supermen and women includes not only platoons of the military and police but, as Cohn writes, the ranks of elite civil servants ranging from treasury economists to customs agents all engaged in a mission to rescue the islanders from themselves.14 Unlike their Canadian counterparts and rivals in the middle power order of states, these saviours are emphatically not wearing UN blue, the discredited colour of a weak and effete multilateralism. UN-based multilateralism, implying as it does a heterogeneous collectivity of states, also figures as a code word for an equally suspect multiculturalism. In contrast, the true-blue of Australian policing missions in global troublespots references a fighting model of a very different hue: set pieces like the amphibious landing on the beaches of Solomon Islands recall (selectively) the national myth of Gallipoli and the Allied victories of D-Day. This history is also an appeal, regardless of the gender of individual personnel, to particular forms of raced masculinity as they are bodied forth in the figures of the heavy lifter, the deputy sheriff and the blue-caped Man of Steel. Downers pointed comparisons with Canada in the middle power heavy-lifting stakes need to be placed in the context of Sherene Razacks brilliant book, Dark Threats and White Knights, an examination of the national mythologies that underpinned Canadas peacekeeping engagement in Somalia in the early 1990s. Razack explores Canadians self-figurations as a nation of altruistic and innocent peacekeepers, Men from the Clean Snows of Petawawa, a
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racial personality very distinct from that of the militarism and selfaggrandisement that characterises its superpower neighbour.15
Canadians have often found colonial terrain occupied by Americans, leaving them only with Canadas Aboriginal people and people of colour as the less glamorous alien race within. In the Canadian national vocation of peacekeeping the glorious dream of being a kinder, gentler version of the U.S. can easily slide into the distinctly unheroic and less masculine role of younger brother playing second fiddle.16
By reimagining themselves as an unassuming, clean, white nation of mediators and peacekeepers, according to Razack, Canadians can erase or comfortably forget their complicity in colonising projects at home and abroad. The cost of maintaining this clean and wholesome self-image, however, is that it easily slides into the feminised role of the unremarkable younger brother. Forever in the shadow of the biggest boy on the block, Razack argues, Canadians are left with the unspectacular supporting role of the heros friend.17 This unheroic view of Canadas role in the global arena is underscored in a comment cited by Cohn that for a country of its weight [Canada] should be doing more than engaging in good works.18 This dismissive reference to Canadas good works from Owen Harries, a respected scholar and diplomat sometimes seen as a critic of the Australian governments expansionist policies, indicates the shifts and realignments taking place within global-racial geopolitics as a consequence of the war on terror. As Canada distances itself from current US policies of unabashed unilateralism and the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, Australia attempts to reposition itself as the heros new best friend: Prime Minister Howards assertion to the US Congress in 2002 that the US has no better friend than Australia, has been endorsed and echoed by an array of US dignitaries, including most recently Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.19 This newfound camaraderie with the US entails a more or less explicit dismissal of Canadas role as weak (not pulling its weight) and effeminate (indulging in good works) in the war on terror. Canada is thus found wanting on the scales of middle power white masculinity at what is produced as the moment of profound crisis for the west. In contrast, the Australian state embraces this
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crisis as an opportunity for asserting itself on multiple fronts, and for renewing and expanding a sense of racial mission at home and abroad. While, according to Razack, the dominating presence of the US disallows any Canadian attempt to assert itself as a colonising power outside its own borders except when it does so covertly through the surrogate colonial activity of peacekeeping, I propose that Australias geopolitical positioning pairs with shifting regional dynamics to allow for new attempts to claim greater sovereignty throughout the region. In turn, this expansion of regional hegemony reinforces and enables a renewed assertion of white patriarchal sovereignty at homei.e. within Australian borders.20 In this sense, in the context of the global war on terror inside and outside become intersecting domains for the staging and reaffirmation of Australian whiteness and a launching ground for renewed missions of white salvation. Whereas in Razacks reading, what enabled Canada to assume the role of peacekeeper in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war was its forgetting or erasure of its internal acts of colonisation, in the era of the 2003 Gulf war a distinctly different relationship underpins Australias approach to Indigenous sovereignty. State projects of maintaining security, peacekeeping, nationbuilding and aid in the region in turn reflect back on and reinforce an ongoing internal project of enacting or reasserting colonial sovereignty over Indigenous bodies, populations and lands. I use the word enactment here to reinforce the idea that sovereignty needs to be repeatedly performed to be actualised and is best understood, in the words of Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, as an aspiration, that is, as something never quite complete or achieved, and that seeks to create itself in the face of internally fragmented and unevenly distributed configurations of political authority.21 As such, sovereignty is best understood not as a unitary act but as a set of practices dispersed across and throughout societiesand, in this instance, regions.22 The terms in which debate over regional sovereignty in Australian foreign policy is articulated illustrate these dispersed and fragmented attempts to enact sovereignty.
Doing the Heavy Lifting
Australias expedition to Solomon Islands needs to be situated in the terms of wider debate over sovereignty in the context of the war on
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terror. Greg Fry identifies two consecutive strands in Australian regional policy post-2001: pre-emptive intervention and cooperative intervention.23 The doctrine of pre-emptive intervention was announced in the aftermath of the bombings on Kuta Beach in Bali in 2002 and made the case for Australias possible intervention as the USs deputy sheriff in an arc of crisis that stretched from South-east Asia to the Pacific. Following the outcry this provoked among ASEAN and other neighbouring states, a new policy, cooperative intervention, was unveiled. It focused on the Pacific rather than on South-east Asia (although careful to exclude West Papua from its agenda to placate Indonesian sensibilities). The doctrine of cooperative intervention was premised not on military action by the racially coded figure of a lone deputy sheriff, but on multilateral initiatives of security and nationbuilding to be undertaken with partners representative of the regions various ethnic and racial groups. Fry outlines its characteristics as follows:
Where the pre-emptive doctrine emphasised a move away from the principle of state sovereignty, cooperative intervention takes place with the permission, or at the request of, a legitimate government. The new doctrine is concerned with multi-layered and multi-faceted intervention over a long period. Military intervention is seen as preparing the ground for this main intervention ... Where the preemptive doctrine was developed against the conceptual backdrop of the US pre-emptive doctrine for Iraq, the new intervention policy was developed against the backdrop of US policy on failed states and its link to terrorism.24
The renunciation of the role of deputy sheriff in favour of the more modest one of partner in a gradual nationbuilding process can be read at one level as an acceptance that the nineteenth-century model of sovereignty premised on the dynamic between the unassailable sovereignty of the European nation-state and the weak or invisible sovereignty of lawless non-white hinterlands has passed. In its stead, the new model of cooperative intervention claims to recognise local differences and acknowledge the realities of a globalised and dispersed system of sovereignties. Operation Helpem Fren, the launch of the RAMSI operation, was heralded as an exemplar of the new policy of cooperative interventionalthough, significantly, UN approval was not sought for the mission. The rationale for the operation, articulated in the
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ASPI report, Our Failing Neighbour, cast the mission as a friendly hand across the Pacific. The report not only repeatedly disavowed colonial or neocolonial intentions but also emphasised the need to refute any appearance of a colonial takeover. Accordingly, briefings stressed support by prominent Solomon Islanders for the operation and made much of the fact that the name of the expedition was in Pidgin rather than Australian English, to signify the formers ownership of the initiative. For all this, however, the words in which Prime Minister Howard described the rationale for the new policy could not have been more resonant of a very different kind of mission: The rest of the world expects Australia to shoulder a lot of the burden because this is our part of the world, our patch, he said, announcing the expedition.25 This rationale, since reiterated on numerous occasions, can be said to have been elevated to the status of a Howard doctrine for the Pacific, one emphatically restated as military reinforcements were sent to Solomon Islands after renewed violence in early 2006.26 The Prime Ministers language firmly positions Australia within the lineage of imperial whiteness, taking up the regional burden at the beginning of the twenty-first century in the spirit of Kiplings exhortation for US intervention in the Philippines at the beginning of the twentieth.27 At the same time, his words must be read as resounding in a specific contemporary context. Michael Ignatieff has noted that in the history of US overseas interventions the Iraq operation most resembles the conquest of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902.28 Seizing on these resemblances, supporters of the US in the war on terror have breathed new life into Kiplings celebration of the White Mans Burden. Influential commentators who invoke the poem include Jean Bethke Elshtain in her book titled Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World and Max Boot, who even more directly references Kipling by choosing a line from The White Mans Burden as the title of his award-winning book, The Savage Wars of Peace. Niall Ferguson, one of the principal advocates of the US interventionism, writes in his book Empire that while Kiplings language may now be deemed politically incorrect:
The reality is nevertheless that the United States haswhether it admits it or nottaken up some kind of global burden, just as
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Kipling urged. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas.29
At the close of his book Ferguson elaborates even more explicitly on the racialised continuities that underpin the taking up of the global burden of spreading capitalism and democracy overseas:
[In the 19th Century] Americans talked of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilization and taking up the white mans burden; today they talk of spreading democracy and defending human rights. Whatever you call it, this represents an idealistic impulse that has always been a big part of Americas impetus for going to war.30
While the deputy sheriff may not have been much in evidence in the articulation of the doctrine of cooperative intervention, what is clearly resonant in Howards terminology is a claiming of the baton of racial authority. From Great Britain to the United States to Australia passes the responsibility to wage the savage wars of peace and to take up the ordained burden of spreading Anglo-Saxon civilisation in the form of capitalism, democracy and human rights in this region. In Howards formulation, The rest of the world expects Australia to shoulder a lot of the burden, the rest of the world reads as a euphemism for the two other states who themselves stand shoulder to shoulder in assuming the white mans burden, and who in turn expect Australia to do the heavy lifting in its own part of the world, its allocated patch. According to Ferguson, Anglo-Saxon civilisation, while needing to be rebranded as democracy and ... human rights because of the exigencies of twentieth-century political correctness, remains essentially an expression of the same idealistic impulse that underpinned the project of earlier US (and British) imperialism. Located on a continuum that seems to express the deepest impulses of Anglo-Saxon civilisation, democracy, capitalism and human rights are implicitly identified as racial attributes, transmitted among white settler states along the crimson thread of kinship (to cite the famous phrase by Henry Parkes, another central figure of Australian federation).31 Goldie Osuri and Subhabrata Banerjee have commented on the nature of this seemingly transcendent link among the members of the coalition in the war on terror and its occlusion of the materiality of white diasporas:
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ideoscapes of democracy and freedom are proclaimed as universal values, but at the same time particularised as the identity of white Western countries these terms provide a space, an identity for the imagined unity between countries considered western [which have become the protagonists of the war on terror].32
Taking up the burden of peacebuilding in the Pacific provides an opportunity for Australia to affirm a largely unspoken but allpervasive sense of kinship with Anglo-Saxon civilisation as it extends the particularised values of whiteness through the region. If the current exercise of cooperative intervention in the Pacific can be understood on one level as governed by the globalising logic of dispersal and regulation rather than the colonial logic of containment, its discursive and ideological modes hark back to an older form of, explicitly raced, imperial power. Although apologists like Ferguson may claim that this power is deployed to the unimpeachable and idealistic ends of spreading human rights, democracy and capitalism, Tarcisiu Tara Kabutaulaka points out in a perceptive essay locating the Solomon Islands expedition in relation to US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that their goal is hardly to turn these countries into Jeffersonian democracies.33 Rather, the aim is to produce quasi-functioning states[by] restoring order ending violent conflicts and ensuring that terrorists do not use them to attack the invading states.34 These actions can be characterised at best, Kabutaulaka argues, as a form of nationbuilding lite35 that focuses on the immediate need to create a:
quasi-functioning state that is able to restore order and serve the interests of the intervening forces, but without addressing the underlying causes of unrest or building long-term peace [F]or intervention to be successful it must cultivate a capacity for positive change within the country The role of the intervening force must, therefore, be that of facilitating positive development rather than dictating it.36
Kabutaulakas astute phrase, nationbuilding lite deftly identifies the reinflection of nineteenth-century imperial aims for the present. The interventions in Iraq or Solomon Islands are not cast in the terms of classic colonial tutelage, but are bluntly instrumentalist in their ends. As a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade policy White Paper, frankly titled Advancing the National Interest,
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acknowledged in 2003, Australias preoccupation with border protection and security is the motivating force for its recent interventionism in the Pacific.37 The preoccupation with security, critics such as Sinclair Dinnen point out, dictates the parameters and the priorities of aid projects,
privileg[ing] solutions aimed at enhancing security particularly in relation to the perceived threats of international crime, people smuggling, border and customs control, and, of course, terrorism. While these and other potential risks cannot be ruled out, the question is how real they are for countries that are simultaneously facing a range of profound development issues? The prospect of Islamic terrorists establishing themselves in either the Solomon Islands or PNG is, to say the least, remote. Superimposing an external security agenda on the island Pacific risks obscuring more pressing domestic challenges, such as growing levels of inequality, impoverishment and marginalisation There is the real prospect of a progressive securitisation of aid, with donor assistance being shaped progressively by an external, and questionable, security agenda.38
Harking back to the argot of regional salvage diverts attention from the questionable agenda of security and border protection. By affirming ideological and affective continuities with the nineteenthcentury civilising mission, Australian interventionism in the contemporary Pacific is recast as part of a grand racial project suffused in the glow of a relegitimised project of empire.
Sovereign Horizons
An interview between the ABCs Geraldine Doogue and ANU political scientist Ben Reilly exemplifies the ways in which the aura of the nineteenth-century civilising mission both mystifies and authorises Australias current project in the Pacific. The interview begins with Doogue, a highly respected and influential journalist, asking Reilly to account for the failure of the RAMSI operation to export democracy to the region in general in the context of postelection violence in 2006.39 Reilly offers a mild correction, pointing out that the expedition was an exercise to restore law and order rather than the more ambitious attempt to export democracy. This distinction is largely overlooked by Doogue who continues to pursue her opening line of questioning about the best way to produce an Australian-style political system in Solomon Islands. She
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muses, maybe we should go back to our founding fathers and others in other Western countries and find out how they created a nationalist ethos. Reillys caution that it is a mistake to assume Australia can simply change the prevalent culture of localism and require Solomon Islanders to become more like us is met with the question, Do we need more anthropologists on the job, or what? Finally, while conceding that it would not do to look like heavyhanded neocolonialists, Doogue breathlessly puts the question that underpins much of the discussion of Australias role in Solomon Islands and the Pacific:
Do you think that there are parts of the population of the Solomon Islands and PNG that would honestly rather we took back control, or is that too radical to think about, but should it be said so that it can be put back on the table?40
Reilly responds, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, that while the ordinary people of Solomon Islands might express the view that things were better in the good old days, this notion would not be supported by elites in Honiara, nor by most Australians who have no stomach for recolonising the Pacific. (Reillys view of Solomon Islander opinion is not supported by a recent finding that Solomon Islanders hold far more complex and ambivalent attitudes towards RAMSI than those presented in the media in Australia and New Zealand.41) Still, the interview ends with the question on the table, and Doogue pondering, undeterred, lessons for the future eventuality that We may have to recreate RAMSI in the Pacific.42 Doogues speculation regarding the possibility that We [take] back control of Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea is illuminating for a number of reasons. Unlike New Guinea, Solomon Islands were never under Australian control, but were a British possession from 1893 (or 1899 in the case of the western part of the islands previously controlled by Germany) till 1978. Yet Doogues use of the term we, a slip Reilly does not correct, reveals a deeper truth about Australias sense of ownership of the Pacific borderscape. It reinforces the pull of the crimson thread of kinship that binds Australia to Britain and remembers British and Australian colonialism as indistinguishable in the region. This blurring of historical distinctions has some important effects, as evidenced in more complicated ways in the brief history offered in Our Failing Neighbour:
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Solomon Islands were colonised, somewhat reluctantly by Britain in the late nineteenth century At Australias urging, London moved into Solomon Islands to curtail what we would now call transnational crime, especially blackbirding, and to ensure that no other imperial power established a presence there.43
The tale of Britains reluctant colonisation of Solomon Islands for its own protection corroborates Doogues appeal to the memory of a benevolent imperial past and demonstrates the ways in which that past is harnessed in a narrative that naturalises Australian hegemony over the region. Operative here is what Prem Kumar Rajaram describes as a telic tale that reveals the workings of a sovereign authority to reorder time as history is codified into meaningful images that fit the ends or goal of state-centric histories, geographies and politics.44 The ASPI report credits Australia, an entity that did not formally exist until 1901, with the agency for urging Britain to protect the islanders from transnational crime in the form of blackbirding. The clever phrase transnational crime taps into contemporary Australian fears about people smuggling, border protection and terrorism. By comparison, blackbirding is suspended in a historical vacuum. Recast in the context of current fears of transnational crime, blackbirding is severed from its historical referents of enforced labour and racial exploitation. The passage disallows the questions: Who were the agents and main beneficiaries of the transnational crime of blackbirding? If it was Australia who moved to protect the Islanders from being blackbirded, who was doing the blackbirding? Similarly, the reference to ensur[ing] that no other imperial power established a presence there, recasts a period of violent competition between the colonising powers of Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Queensland and the United States from the vantage point of contemporary Australia. It glosses over the ways in which the carve-up of territories between these powers created the now entrenched divisions between and within present-day Papua New Guinea, Bougainville and Solomon Islands by positioning Australia/Britain as above the fray and as local protectors of the region against predatory incursions of outsiders. The imperial past is both invoked (as good old times that grateful natives recall) and forgotten (as specific histories of blackbirding and exploitation), as regional histories are reordered to support the
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ends of Australian regional hegemony. The exchange between Doogue and Reilly demonstrates the deep, sedimented hold of the myth of Australias civilisational and racial burden in the region. I describe the interview in some detail not in order to single out Doogues views, but to suggest how fundamentally the colonising imperative continues to determine and reproduce the moral horizons of Anglo-Australia and to define the limits within which political possibilities and futures can be thought. Although the national broadcaster is generally considered, for good or ill, one of the last bastions of liberal, left-leaning opinion in Australia, the interview reveals that the imperative to turn the other into the same is not limited to the extreme right of the political spectrum. Cutting across (largely) superficial distinctions between right and left, Doogues remarks must be located within the foundational, structuring framework of whiteness on which the Australian state rests and which, as ideology, interest, institution and investment, is continually reproduced and reinforced.45 This bedrock of whiteness is what sustains Doogues conviction that Australian nationalism, coupled with the example of our founding fathers (as well as those of other Western countries) and the work of anthropologists and related experts, will deliver unambiguous benefits for the populations of the Pacific. Crucially, whiteness as the horizon, the boundary of mental outlook of Anglo-Australia guarantees that the values of these founding fathers, will remain unquestioned throughout the interview. To begin to offer a serious response to Doogues question about the origins of Australian nationalism and the strategies initiated by our founding fathers to unite disparate groups would require a return to the constitutive date, 1901, and to the processes that instantiated Australia as a state founded on the imagined unity of subjects racialised as white (see Reynolds this volume). This process in turn depended on the non-recognition or obliteration of the sovereignty of its Indigenous population, and the exclusion of Asian and Pacific populations through its two inaugural pieces of legislation, the Immigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Islander Act (the latter, it must be remembered, specifically designed to expel blackbirded labour and their descendants). Above all, to interrogate the formative forces of Australian nationalism would return us to the pivotal question of Indigenous sovereignty, the question that remains at the core of the assumption
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of moral/racial authority to export democracy and exercise sovereignty over the region.46 The unspoken limits of the interview, and the question that is finally unspeakable in any discussion of Australias present or past role in bringing the values of democracy, human rights and capitalism to the Pacific, is that of the ground on which the state established and continues to exercise its sovereign authority to impose these values at home. How is this crucial question of ground reposed as the imperial aspiration to turn the other into the same is exercised anew over the geographies and histories of the Pacific? Simultaneously, how are these foreign expanses of lack and error, as vacant or anonymous reaches of distance, continually returned home to be converted into meaning for us here in telic tales of nation?47
Retaking Injun Country
Robert Kaplans 2004 book, Imperial Grunts, reveals some key dynamics through which the sovereign authority of the conquered homeland animates current aspirations to empire as new imaginative geographies are mapped on to already known ones. Modelled on Kiplings 1892 collection, Barrack-room Ballads, Kaplans Imperial Grunts, like Kiplings volume, claims to speak in the vernacular of the troops themselves, reporting the views of the NCOs and enlisted soldiers Kaplan meets in an odyssey through the barracks and outposts of the American empire.48 The starting point of Kaplans odyssey is a map he views in the halls of the Pentagon:
The Pentagon divided the planet into five area commandssimilar to the way that the Indian country of the American West had been divided in the mid-nineteenth century ... Instead of the military departments of Texas, New Mexico, Utah, California, Oregon and the West, now there was Northern Command, or NORTHCOM; Southern Command or SOUTHCOM; European Command or EUCOM; Central Command or CENTCOM; and Pacific Command or PACCOM.49
Kaplan is awestruck by the revelation of this map that displays, from his vantage point at the epicentre of US military superpower, the entire planet spread out like a carpet at his feet:
this map left no point of the earths surface unaccounted for. Were I standing at the North Pole where all the lines of longitude meet, I might have one foot in NORTHCOM and the other in PACCOM;
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or in EUCOM if I shifted a leg I stared at it for days on and off, transfixed. How could the US not constitute a global military empire? I thought.50
As he sets out to traverse in person the length and breadth of an empire already made knowable by its mapping onto the conquered territory of the American west, Kaplan learns to name it in the voice of the foot soldiers of the US military:
Welcome to Injun Country was the refrain I heard from troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq. To be sure, the problem for the American military was less fundamentalism than anarchy. The War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier. But the fascination with Indian Country was never meant as a slight against Native North Americans. Rather, the reverse.51
Kaplan does not explain why, in this war of civilisation against anarchy, the labelling of enemy territory as Injun Country is never meant as a slight against Native North Americans but rather, the reverse. Instead, he develops a series of parallels between the United States current military actions across the globe and its nineteenth-century Indian wars on the mythic frontier of the west. Kaplan links the new frontier to the old in both racial and spatiotemporal terms. Racially, he claims, The North American Indians were a throwback to the nomadic horsepeople of the Eurasian steppeScythians, Turks and Mongols, and also invite comparisons with another imperial nemesis: the nineteenth century Pushtuns and Afridis of the Northwest Frontier of British India.52 It is significant that in this homogenising move, North American Indians are not only genetically linked with the present and past enemies of western/Anglo-Saxon civilisation, but are as a people dispatched to the realm of the past (a throwback) and to the status of historical relics. Precisely as historical relics, they can be subsequently incorporated into the enabling myths of a nation that continues to define itself by their conquest and be fondly, reverentially and even talismanically invoked in its current wars. The imaginative mapping of the old frontier of the USs internal war of conquest onto its current planetary one achieves specific spatiotemporal effects. Temporally, to map the USs current theatres of war as Injun Country is to project these conflicts as reenactments of a drama whose ending is already known and
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inevitable. Spatially, it serves to bring the yet-to-be conquered territory from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq within the purview of a previously vanquished and domesticated Injun Country, one whose original inhabitants already have been relegated to the past. The ongoing struggles of indigenous people within the US cannot figure in Kaplans understanding of Injun Country, or in that of the soldiers he quotes. Injun Country is rather a vanquished territory of the past over which the sovereign imagination of white America ranges, converting, cannibalising and commandeering what it needs to sustain its current wars. The operations evident in Kaplans text are both repeated and reinterpreted in the Australian context where to claim the Pacific as our patch is to invoke the same civilising imperative to cultivate the anarchic wilderness of Injun Country and improve the dark places of the earth. The term patch can be taken to signify as an unassuming, local and provisional claim to title, one that befits a loyal ally of a superpower, or a small-time landowner or bush farmer who might aspire to make do, improvise, patch up, something that needs repair. At the same time, the modest idea of attending to our patch references a specifically colonial lexicon of benevolent husbandry: the right to cultivate, regulate, order, correct, protect, secure, civilise and own.
Our Failing Neighbours
The seemingly modest and unassuming project of working ones patch recalls another term that has even greater political resonance in everyday Australian life: the backyard. Like the frontier and the patch, the backyard is a site that figures in Australias ongoing internal war to possess and take control of Indigenous country, extending into the oceanic hinterlands of the Pacific. The relationship between the Solomon Islands mission and the ongoing internal colonial project is revealed in a comment by Susan Windybank, head of foreign policy research at the influential think tank, the Centre for Independent Studies. Cohn approvingly cites Windybanks remark on the Solomons expedition, Were all very proud to be punching above our weight We dont want our backyard to become a junkyard.53
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Like our patch, the backyard stands for productive, domesticated and privatised space, the taming of frontier territory. In the Australian imaginary the backyard is, more than any other, the site that exemplifies the pleasures and rewards of the Anglo-Australian way of life, replete with its barbecues, swimming pools, Hills Hoists, trampolines, dunnies and cricket games. This packed white domain is symbolically counterposed against the racially charged wilderness of terra nullius on the one hand and the besieging ocean frontier on the other. As Joseph Pugliese and I have elaborated, the backyard is the space that realises the Anglo-Australian dream: homeownership on a quarter-acre block metonymically signifying that patch of turf which is the little Aussie battlers own kingdom and domain.54 This is the vision encapsulated in celebrated TV shows such as Burkes Backyard and its contemporary spin-off, Backyard Blitz. Both are products directed at the seemingly inexhaustible desire for home improvement and premised on the aspirational viewer also, uncoincidentally, the ideal addressee of government PR campaigns claiming to protect national space against the incursions of land rights or of boats carrying refugees. During the mid-1990s the seemingly secure and impregnable space of the Aussie backyard was continually figured as in imminent danger of invasion. Indigenous native title claims were misleadingly characterised as paving the way for the repossession of suburban backyards in a bid to mobilise public feeling against the Mabo and Wik legal judgments, despite the fact that these judgments offered no or minimal land rights to the vast majority of Indigenous people (see Watson and Chi, this volume). The backyard, beset by legislative threats and subject to constant challenge, figured as the new Australian frontier, a nightmare vision that paired with the prospect of productive pastoral land reverting to wilderness or serving as the battleground for warring tribes. As Irene Watson points out in this volume, the campaign to instil false fears over the safety of Anglo-Australian backyards has had serious long-term consequences for Indigenous people: The racist backlash encouraged by a fear of mythical Mabo or native title claims was to resurrect the ghosts of assimilation and the current policy shift that Aborigines are now expected to become fully absorbed into the one nation [causing] a shift further away from the possibility of social justice to policies that are steeped in economic rationalism.55 Measures to impose contractual
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agreements, mutual obligation and the scaling back of welfare entitlements are premised on the notion of lazy and wasteful Aboriginal communities who squander benefits accrued from native title royalties and government handouts. Fuelled by the backlash against what Watson calls the myth of recognition autonomous Aboriginal spaces face new threats as unproductive and unviable communities are targeted anew for extinction and subjected to coercive pressures to become more like us.56 Windybanks remark plays directly to fears of waste, disuse and a reversion to the unproductive and empty time before colonisation. The deterioration of the backyard into a junkyard conjures scenes of neglect, dereliction and the collapse of the cultivated suburban patch into wasteland, accompanied by the disintegration of artefacts that symbolise domesticity, prosperity and modernity. The image of the junkyard articulates with familiar news footage of breakdown in Aboriginal communities at home and, in the context of the ASPI reports emphasis on the failures of post-independence societies, of general third world decline and disorder abroad as our failing neighbours fail once again. The backyard as junkyard performs complex operations of spatialisation, moving back and forth between the cosy suburban backyard, derelict Indigenous communities and Pacific nations under threat, reflecting both inwards and outwards. It maps the Anglo-Australian backyard threatened by Aboriginal land rights onto the space of the Pacific and simultaneously sets in motion fears of a scenario of regional failure playing out within Aboriginal communities in Australia. Since 1996 the failed state, characterised by pathological degeneration, endemic corruption and chronic problems of poverty and degradation, is the optic through which Aboriginal communities are invariably represented, as evidenced by ongoing characterisations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commissioners and other Indigenous leaders as so many corrupt and nepotistic thugs and buffoons. The parallels between dysfunctional Aboriginal communities at home and failing Pacific states abroad ramify on a number of other levels. Small Pacific islands, like remote Aboriginal communities and town camps are increasingly characterised as unsustainable or unviable, with assimilation into urban, globalised societies seen as their only hopea solution to to be legally and militarily imposed where necessary for their own good.57
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A related aspect of this campaign is the growing attack on collective title. Helen Hughes, like Windybank a researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies, argues that collective title is one of the main causes of poverty and crime in Papua New Guinea even as Indigenous Australians are being urged to renounce collective title to land in favour of individual home ownership as a way of increasing productivity and developing pride in their environments.58 Following the post-election violence of 2006 this argument was extended to Solomon Islands by Windybank, who argued that current levels of intervention did not go far enough, and that the key task for RAMSI was to rescue the Solomons economy rather than fulfilling cargo cult expectations of financial aid: only if security provides the foundation for economic reformstarting with private property rights in land and going on to changes throughout the economy to create labour-intensive employment will there be lasting progress.59 As Australian sovereignty extends its reach, boundaries between here and there are effectively blurred. Remapped as a new frontier in the war against terror, as Australias backyard, and as our allocated patch in the burden shared among the most muscular of the white diaspora states, the Pacific is corralled within the space of the nation. Cast as an extension of domestic conflicts over sovereignty, self-determination and economic productivity, the expeditions to Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (though different from each other) continually take as their implied reference point the campaigns for renovation and reform of Aboriginal communities. Projecting the threatened space of the Anglo-Australian backyard onto the Pacific enables the Australian state to claim a similar mandate as at home to protect and rescue it from unworthy occupants. Mirroring moves to institute a regime that contracts Indigenous communities access to basic services in exchange for practices such as school attendance and face-washing, the trade-off required abroad is one of sovereignty for aid. In the case of Papua New Guinea, the Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) that proposed to deploy scores of Australian police and public servants to prop up civil society foundered precisely on this point when the PNG courts refused to grant blanket immunity to Australian forces for any potential crimes committed on PNG soil.60 However, the wider questions of sovereignty and selfdetermination at stake here become diminished by being cast as
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backyard disputes between neighbours. Those who object are either attacked as corrupt or dismissed for airing irrelevant and superseded concerns about neo-colonialism. Our backyard expands, unilaterally, into our surrounding oceans, even as our successes in the region authorise new assertions of sovereignty over Indigenous country at home. It is in this context that I understand the concerted attack from all quarters on Camp Sovereignty, a locus for Indigenous rights and resistance that are now disallowed within the limits of the nation. Claimed as an Aboriginal space where Indigenous Australians could represent themselves to visitors at the 2006 Stolen Wealth Games, Camp Sovereignty called attention to the regional and global histories of colonialism and dispossession occulted in the term Commonwealth, as it also staged a specific Indigenous agenda, the black GST.61 Staked out on the grounds of Kings Domain in the centre of Melbourne, Camp Sovereignty symbolically and literally held the ground, in Watsons terms, as a site that refused containment within the limits of the nation:
since 11 September 2001 there has been a further retreat from engaging with the question of the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws ... But we (Aboriginal peoples) should hold the ground, not only for Aboriginal peoples, but for all peoples who struggle to hold law against its displacement and extinguishment through fear and ignorance.62
Camp Sovereignty evokes other camp spaces of racialised punishment from Woomera to Nauru to Guantanamo while it holds the ground as a site that refuses to be disciplined by the coercive forces of nation and security brought to bear in the war on terror.63 In articulating these connections, it stands for an increasingly fraught and fragile space of dissent. The dangers, contradictions and fault lines that Camp Sovereignty has exposed among Indigenous groups as well as in the Australian mainstream underscore the critical concerns Watson addresses as the (im)possibilities of Aboriginal sovereignties:
How can I speak my truth as it falls apart before and under the pressure of a colonising violence? can this truth be read external to the truthful Aboriginal sovereign self/selves/mob? Aboriginal sovereignty is a difficult truth to speak, into the colonising space.64
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Into the Colonising Space
Everybody needs good neighbours, the venerable soap opera warns. A banner newspaper headline, Neighbour Trouble, suggests that in April 2006, despite our best efforts, Australias neighbours are a long way off from becoming the perfect friends.65 West Papuans, the latest in a throng of refugees besieging our shores for asylum, force us into new torsions of geographical unmaking as the Australian mainland is designated part of an ever-expanding not-Australia.66 Timor Leste is ungrateful enough to dispute Australias claims on the oilfields of the Timor Sea.67 Indonesian itinerant fishermen, wander into our patch carrying diseases and the threat of terrorism and reawakening old fears of competing sovereignties in a not-so-empty north.68 The rejection of the ECP by the High Court of Papua New Guinea in 2005 was followed by a debacle in Solomon Islands, where RAMSI had been till then Australias one shining exemplar of unqualified success in the region. Greg Sheridan lamented in The Australian:
After three years of the operation, with billions of dollars pumped into the country by the Australian taxpayer, with law and order guaranteed by Australian police and military, with the cleanest national election in many years, what are we left with? A city in flames, a Chinese business district burned to the ground ethnic looting the capital in chaos.69
Sheridan, a staunch supporter of the invasion of Iraq, fails to perceive any parallels with that other experiment in nationbuilding lite across the planet. Instead, he squarely faults Melanesian culture, a term that reflects the ethnographic categorisation and fragmenting of the region, for the present crisis in Solomon Islands:
The truth is Melanesian independence has been a disaster. This is not a recommendation for recolonisation, although it is clearly true that Australia decolonised PNG far too quickly and left it unprepared for the modern world. Melanesian culture is very poorly adapted for dealing with the modern world. Communal ideas of property ownership may appeal to Western romantics, but they make serious development almost impossible.70
Despite disowning any desire to recolonise the Pacific, Sheridan is blind to the colonial structures that have predicated Solomon Islands or PNG as always already failing states. As in Derek
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Gregorys argument in the context of the war on terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, the impossible territorial units carved out of imperial remnants, and the fractured state formations to which they gave rise, must remain invisible or irrelevant in the colonial present.71 In a caustically titled essay, The Trouble with Melanesia, Sinclair Dinnen identifies the enabling fallacy at the heart of diagnoses of Melanesian collapse: from an historical perspective, one could argue that the main problem with post-colonial Melanesian states is not so much that they are prone to falling apart, but that they have never been properly put together in the first place.72 But for Sheridan (as for Doogue) the trouble with Melanesia is that colonisation ended too soonor perhaps at all. Their scenarios of breakdown and failure cannot admit Dinnens questions about the long and painful processes of decolonisation:
Might it not be that the turbulence in the Melanesian states is symptomatic of an ongoing (or renewed) process of decolonisation rather than the last gasps of polities in terminal decline? Are we witnessing the turmoil of internal decolonisation that will lead to the birth of a genuinely post-colonial order?73
Inscribed by paternalism and naturalised as geographies of lack, displaced from the time of modernity and entombed in anthropological categories, racially othered territories of the Pacific cannot but fail again and again. Despite our best attempts, they frustrate our neighbourly efforts. They fail us, spurring us to new efforts of containment and control and new prescriptions of cultural remedy as we deplore the deterioration of our backyard. And the diminishing metaphor of the backyard/junkyard is only the latest in a succession of failing geographies imposed on the region. As Epeli Hauofa powerfully itemises, these geographies of failure range from the beautiful but savage South Seas to be pacified, Christianized, colonized, and civilized to the South Pacific region of much importance for the security of Western interests in Asia and the Pacific Islands Region of naked, neocolonial dependency.74 Against these mappings, Hauofa proposes a counter-geography, Oceania, as a decolonising identity for the region, one that can hold together under the pressure of the fracturing and failing gaze from without. A geography in the making, the animation of a regional spirit drawn from the linking
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and enfolding rhythms of the sea: Oceania, a call into the colonising space.
Coda: Clearing the Waters
Let me end by returning to the horizon. In the history of the Australian state the geocultural space of the horizon has always provoked racial anxiety, xenophobia and exclusionary violence. Current policies of border protection are part of a continuum of practices and discourses expressive of the sovereign desire to command the horizon, to tether it to a national teleology and to discipline it into a knowable geography.
What you have to ask is: do I turn my head and allow another country to exploit my resource? And do I just walk away from my territorial integrity of that claim? Or do I position myself in such a way as they cant exploit it? Or do I position myself in such a way as Im going to exploit it myself before I get there?75
Senator Barnaby Joyces reflections on mining the resources of the Antarctic, coming from a member of the Federal Parliaments External Territories Committee, constitute an extraordinary statement of claim on the horizon. Joyces comments express the voracious logic of Australias sovereign authority over a vast external territory where, because of its Pacific, Indian and southern Ocean holdings, Australia has been able to acquire one of the largest Exclusive Economic Holdings in the worldan area larger than the Australian land mass.76 Joyces seemingly awkward question, Do I position myself in such a way as Im going to exploit it myself before I get there? perfectly articulates the logic of a colonising teleology. The assertion of my territorial integrity of claim to the Antarctic projects an imaginative geography that has already taken in the horizon, that knows the territory to be exploited anterior to its arrival, and that has already arrived in anticipation of its own arrival. Joyces projection of the certainty of future exploitation of Antarctica (where international treaties prevent any mining until at least 2048) must be read in the light of other operations to clear Australias horizons. This clearing is not an activity for the present alone, but one that aspires to secure both the past and the future in a telic tale that reorders the entire region. Henry Reynolds has discussed elsewhere the crisis posed by the presence of Macassans
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on Australias northern shores for early British claims of sovereignty over the region.77 Bruce Campbell and Bu Wilson, who in their groundbreaking historical study located the evictions of Macassan fishermen from the oceans off Australias northern coast on a continuum of the colonial process which had earlier dispossessed northern Aborigines of their hunting and fishing grounds, name this clearing of the waters mare nullius, underlining its continuities with terra nullius and pointing out that both provide a moral rationale for expansionist policies.78 Clearing the waters of the past presence of Macassan boats and bodies secured the primacy of the British claim to sovereignty over the seemingly uninhabited and isolated mass of the great south land. Correspondingly, in 200305 a series of operations codenamed Clearwater enact Australian sovereignty over the oceans, extending the election slogan of 2001, We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come. In this volume Ruth Balint describes these operations as the making of a White Ocean Policy, drawing a neat parallel with the White Australia Policy at federation. Under Operation Clearwater Indonesians caught fishing illegally, or sometimes simply visiting ancestral graves in territory that was once on their side of a line in the sea, are subject to suspicions of terrorism, people smuggling and drug trafficking.79 Demonstrating the force of nationalist mythologies, Operation Clearwater harnesses old hostilities between Indigenous Australians and the fishermen within the framework of border protection, funding local communities in the Kimberley to patrol the waters. Prohibitive fines, imprisonment in substandard conditions and the burning of their boats are some of the disproportionately punitive measures imposed on those who are captured.80 Invoking a colonial logic of extermination and decontamination this alien presence must be cleared from our waters, the horizon swept clean of their ramshackle boats and disease-ridden, non-white bodies, the ocean cleared of their tracks and stories.81 And the imperative to extend our command of the horizon does not stop at the present clearing of our surrounding waters. These itinerant fishermen, wandering into our patch are positioned as interlopers encroaching on our futurity, with the potential to compromise anticipated future territorial claims to the Antarctic.82 In this statement, colonising teleologies and the sovereign aspirations of a presence that has already arrived prior to its own
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arrival are re-enacted. Our patch expands, seemingly without horizons, in time and space.
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Part III
Sovereign Terror
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Chapter Eight
A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare: Palm Island and Australian Sovereignty

Dinesh Wadiwel
The Queensland government uses its coastal islands for lepers, criminals, and inebriates, and also for Aborigines, the intention in every case being the samenamely to get rid of the pariahs by placing them far away from the sight of the general community. Australian Abo Call, 19381
Where does war end and civility begin? And have we ever known such a time? In answer to these questions, students of political theory will no doubt point to the seemingly fundamental relation between war and the civil political space: the former defines the latter, and vice versa. Thomas Hobbess theory of sovereign powerin many respects regarded as the solid foundation of modern political philosophy clearly gives notice to this relationship between war and the civil peace offered by the sovereign: During the time men live without a common power to keep them in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such war, as is of every man, against every man.2 Within the Hobbesian model, the justification for sovereign power stems from the a priori existence of war in the state of nature, something that can only be overcome by the organising force of sovereignty. In this sense, although war and political
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sovereignty are distinct practices, they share a fundamental relationship. It is no accident therefore that Carl von Clausewitzs famous phrase, war is policy pursued by other means, happens to confirm the inherent connectivity between the civil political space and war. In turn, Michel Foucaults statement, politics is war pursued by other means,3 a reversal of Clausewitzs aphorism, reiterates the same relationship of simultaneous connection and disconnection between politics and war. But it is important to note that Foucaults conception of the civil political space does contain a central critique of the Hobbesian model of power, since it offers a way to problematise the apparent peace of political civility. Foucault asks: Isnt power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldnt one therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of war? Isnt power a sort of generalised war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and the State? Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.4 For Foucaultcontra Hobbespeace is not the defence of the realm against war by the use of sovereign violence, but a continuation of war by means which are not formally recognised as constituting war. In an essay entitled Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe5 offers an extension of Foucaults analysis. Mbembe argues that contemporary political philosophy seeks to define the political space in opposition to war and hostility. Politics, Mbembe states, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are told, is what differentiates it from war.6 Mbembe counters this tradition by imagining politics as a form of war and defining political sovereignty as a project designed to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.7 It is from this power that Mbembe identifies necropolitics, the subjugation of life to the power of death, that enables a reconfiguration of relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror.8 Is it possible to suggest that Mbembe offers a new understanding of the relationship between politics and war? Where for Clausewitz war is in essence politics; and for Foucault politics is in essence war; we may argue that Mbembes rupture of any essential distinction between war and politics should lead to the conclusion that there is no politics in its own right, only war of which politics is an inseparable formation.
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Sovereignty, insofar as it concerns itself with life and death, is born within, and must continue, hostility: there is no complete civil political space, only an enduring war, fought in multiple theatres. This is not total war without spaces of reprieve, since, as shall be discussed below, the war operates through interconnected spaces of exception, hotspots within a protracted and violent engagement of bodies. Many enjoy a life of peaceful civility, but this is quite literally bordered upon by spaces of absolute war. Bodies continue to be maimed, and lives are extinguished in these spaces of exception; there is an unending war of attrition that occurs in basements and barracks, prisons and institutions, camps and frontier territories. With this context firmly in mind, I turn to an entry from the 1998 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, which declared the northern Queensland town of Palm Island as the most dangerous place on earth outside a combat zone.9 Leaving aside the immense disservice this particular record offered to residents of the island, it begs the question: in what sense does Palm Island belong outside a zone of combat? To ask this question is by no means intended to play with words, or cast doubt on the long efforts of the Palm Island community to live in peace: rather it is to suggest that if white sovereignty draws its sustenance from eternal warthat is war within and without its own territories, against both enemies at home and abroadthen Palm Island has remained a hotspot of violent frictionality, a site where the capacity of sovereignty to both foster life or disallow to the point of death10 is ruthlessly revealed. Consider the events of 19 November 2004, after an Aboriginal man died in a Palm Island police cell after sustaining a ruptured liver and portal vein and four broken ribs before death. After the release of the pathologists report confirming these facts, and confirming the community suspicion that the man was beaten to death, a series of riots occurred, during which the police station was destroyed. In response the Queensland Government announced a state of emergency. Paramilitary police were deployed, trained in counterterrorist tactics who arrested countless locals, including teenagers and grandmothers.11 Terror ensued as the police searched homes and detained, arrested and deported community members off the island. An open letter from the Palm Island Aboriginal Council to the Queensland Government detailed the extraordinary violence:
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The police have been more than heavy-handed in their dealings with the community and community people, including our children, are feeling terrorised Yesterday the police systematically raided the homes of those they believe to be suspect over yesterdays eventswe have had many reports of both children and old people being unnecessarily frightened and mistreated by the police while these raids have taken place Council has also had reports that Task Force officers are running the streets in full armoured uniform including balaclavas, and fully armed in some areas of our community.12
The events of late 2004 were by no means the first time that extraordinary measures have been taken by government to quell dissent on Palm Island; for example, a Royal Australian Air Force crash boat was deployed to put down striking workers on the island in June 1957: Seven men and their families were arrested at 3 am the next morning and shipped off in leg irons.13 Nor should these events be treated as merely periodic. Since the establishment of Palm Island as a penal settlement for Aboriginal people, through to the continued governmental neglect in relation to health and economic outcomes up until today, the Aboriginal inhabitants of the island have always been subject to extraordinary measures, whether or not through the formalised emergency powers of government. Although Palm Island most certainly does not exist within a zone of war in a conventional sense, it is not clear whether the island exists, or has ever existed, within the normative space of Australian juridical rule. This chapter aims to examine, with reference to the foundation of Palm Island, the functioning of exception within the logic of Australian sovereignty, and further to understand the role of government in managing sovereign violence in the mission and reserve system. This chapter argues that Australian sovereignty post2001 must be understood through the nexus of government, war and the zone of exception: arguably we find the legacy of this particular relationship in Palm Island.
Palm Island, Sovereignty and the Camp
Palm Island was established in 1918 after a failed attempt to confine Aboriginal people on a settlement at Hull River in Northern Queensland.14 The new camp on Palm Island, located some 65 kilometres north-west of Townsville, would prove more successful,
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with the surrounding shark-infested waters acting as a natural deterrent to desertion. The violence and alienation that would persevere on Palm Island would belie the magnificence of its physical surroundings. Marnie Kennedy, interned on Palm Island for much of her life, writes in Born a Half-Caste: There was an aura about this island. Something so beautiful it held you in awe. It is hard to believe that this beautiful island was a penal settlement.15 Palm Island operated as a camp until the late 1960s. The legal and administrative processes that led to removal to Palm Island were, by definition, exceptional. Palm Island earned a reputation as a penal or, as a former resident described it, concentration camp.16 Aboriginal people who failed to comply with exploitative work and living conditions in Australian mainland reserves were relocated to Palm Island.17 Others were sent to the island after raising complaints about their treatment or engaging in adverse political activity.18 There were no appeal procedures available to those who were removed to Palm Island by the Queensland Government and thus inmates were subject to an indefinite detention period.19 Given the lack of formal process for return, and the high mortality rate on the island, it is perhaps no accident that there are historical accounts of Aboriginal people drowning in the attempt to escape the island.20 Punishment within the penal reserve was arbitrary, harsh and lacking any attempt to establish a commensurability with the crime.21 The lines between law, trial and punishment were blurred. An account by Carl Wyles of life on Palm Island is illustrative of the seemingly arbitrary system of law and punishment:
They had this rule: at night-time theyd ring a bell at nine oclock. Say, for instance, you were down at the bottom end a couple of miles away and your home might be up the top end of Palm, theyd ring a bell at nine oclock and you had to hurry to get back. Them days, a few people had bikes, but no motor cars, no taxis, no bus, nothing. You never had anything like that. So you had to hurry and get back to your house. If you were caught half an hour late outside of your home youd get locked up for the night and youd have to go down to the office, or courthouse, whatever you like to call it, and front the big boss If he didnt like you might get a week down at the cooler.22
Severe punishment for children was also commonplace, with beatings, humiliation and imprisonment a feature of life for young
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people.23 For example, girls caught sneaking out of dormitories at night had their hair shaved, were put in jail for two weeks on bread and water, made to wear bag shirts and pants and parade the main street, white-wash the stones, and crack bags of beans at night in jail.24 In addition to the strict controls on movement and activity, controls were exerted in relation to nutrition, health and sexuality. Marriages were organised in order to promote monogamy, and as an intended side-effect, limit the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.25 Like most missions and reserves, there were limited rations available to internees: on a visit to Palm Island in 1923 the Governor of Queensland was besieged by hungry residents who protested they could barely survive on 1 lb of flour a day, and 1 lb of meat and one issue of sweet potatoes a week.26 Poor health care compounded the desperate situation for Aboriginal people, with a high death rate reported during this period, mostly from malnutrition and chest infections.27 Given these conditions on Palm Island, it should come as no surprise that its mere existence should have generated an immense disciplining fear for other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people interned in mainland settlements.28 In this sense it is appropriate for the history of the Palm Island Reserve to be treated within the context of the broader mission and reserve system that operated within Queensland and beyond. Not only was the Australian nation-state founded on the camp in the form of a British penal colony, but the camp would also feature prominently as a strategy within the history of white Australias relationship with Indigenous Australia. Beginning with settlements such as Flinders Island and Coranderrk, both established during the middle of the nineteenth century, formal segregation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people through a system of missions and reserves would become a key strategy over the next hundred years. These camps would operate with a comprehensive grip exercised over every function of life. As Suvendrini Perera observes: The characteristics of the Australian camp include unpaid labour by children and adults and control over domestic and sexual life (for example, the regulation of marriages according to degrees of caste and colour), as well as the genocidal forms of re-education aimed at eliminating the Aboriginality of their inmates.29 This was a systemor an archipelagoof institutions, mission stations and
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protected territories. Like Norfolk Island (which operated in the early nineteenth century), Palm Island could be described as a camp within a camp, a space of absolute exclusion that removed its inmates (who were previously interned in missions and reserves) even further from regular juridical norms. As Perera recognises, there are strong parallels between the mission and reserve camp system designed to intern and regulate the Aboriginal population in Australia, and the camp that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests belongs to the heart of western sovereignty.30 Agamben argues that western sovereignty contains within it the dual presence of the sovereign, both inside and outside the law.31 The sovereign exists as the body and voice of its own power, yet also maintains an existence outside of its own dominion as a power which finds exemption from its own legal decree: I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is nothing outside the law.32 The decision upon exception, of what is both inside and outside the law, Agamben describes, drawing from Carl Schmitts Political Theology as the constitution of exception, embodied in the sovereign power to ban.33 The ban involves a declaration of what both exists, yet is forbidden to exist, within the legal sphere: It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. The ban settles upon the life of the political subject that is suspended within this zone:
The statement The rule lives off the exception alone must therefore be taken to the letter. Law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. In this sense, the law truly has no existence in itself, but rather has its being in the very life of men. The sovereign decision traces and from time to time renews this threshold of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion, nomos and physis, in which life is originarily excepted in law.34
Agambens understanding of sovereign power as exception delineates its relation to the life of its subjects. This life is one which is given place and recognition within the domain of sovereignty, yet is only given this meaning by being placed in a position of vulnerability: that is, being situated in proximity to exception itself.
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Agamben identifies this point as mere life or bare life, which he identifies as the bearer of the link between life and law,35 and the recipient of the sovereigns power of exception. Bare life not only represents the life which is potentially subject to the constituting and constituted violence of the law, but also the site for the precise and exacting control upon this same life as a social and biological entity: a deployment of forces defined by Foucault as belonging to the sphere of biopolitics. In the final chapter of History of Sexuality (vol 1), Foucault argues that the more traditional association of sovereign power with the rule of the sword has been replaced by a biopolitical concern for populations, races, and life itself.36 Biopolitics does not issue solely from sovereignty; rather it is an organising rationality that is present throughout heterogeneous political formations, from local communities who launch campaigns encouraging particular nutritional habits in their children, to governmental policies offering support for people with disability, or free health screening to particular population groups, to whole wars that are waged on the basis of race. These shifts in the object of power represent a movement towards an increasingly developed concern for the biological life of the citizenry and population. For Agamben, these developments in techniques of power which concern themselves with life itself are intertwined with the exceptional character of sovereign power, and placed the question of life itself, particularly from the twentieth century onwards, more clearly as the focus of power.37 It is the camp that, according to Agamben, is the most potent symbol of this nexus between bio-power and sovereign exception: it is the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.38 Within the camp it is possible for sovereign power to enact what would otherwise, by its own juridical norms, be legally impossible, since in the camp the ordinary conventions of law may be suspended. According to Agamben, a sphere of indistinction is reached between fact and law: the juridical norms of the camp imply that law may be applied indiscriminately without reference to fact, with the reverse also holding true: the smallest fact may be enough to unleash the most disproportionate measure of the law.39 Within the camp every decision takes on a biopolitical character, as every decision impacts intimately upon the conditions of life held within. The camp is the site for an advanced practice of biopolitical
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management: it is within this zone that the most imperious maintenance of nutrition, movement, sleep and work can occur. The camp functions to produce bare life40 through a series of indistinctions between life and death, human and non-human.41 Biological life is regulated intimately, with strict limits placed upon its potentialities. Arbitrary violence operates with absolute legitimacy: Formation of a rule [normazione] and the execution of the rulethe production of law and its applicationare no longer distinguishable moments.42 In this sense the camp is a remarkable space within the juridical sphere: a space where ordinary processes of law are suspended in favour of a daily, instantaneous and seemingly arbitrary execution of violence; where life is held indefinitely without channels of recourse, absolutely caught within the regulatory scope of sovereign power. It should be clear how the camp described by Agamben relates to the mission and reserve system in Australia, including reserves such as Palm Island. The Australian camp system relied upon the capacity for sovereignty to declare zones of juridical exception, and annex territories, resources and labour. The protectorate legislation enabled the strict supervision of work, education, individual deportment and reproduction. As described above, the camps operated in a void within regular law: inmates were subject by law to forms of surveillance and regulation that were not applied to nonAboriginal people, while at the same time, the legal recourses available to non-Aboriginal people simply did not apply to those interned in the camps: I was thrown in jail for singing a song called Who said I was a bum?.43 In Australia economic slavery was historically always a feature of Indigenous peoples participation in paid employment; the camps merely reiterated this tradition, through the deduction of wages into trust funds that workers would never be able to access, the high price of basic clothing and food sold within the camps, and exploitative conditions of labour. Personal spending was tightly controlled on missions and reserves: No withdrawals could be effected without permission, and frequently head office intervened to monitor transactions.44 Further, the poor health and nutrition in the camps, and the intimate relationship that many of the living maintained with death, points to a correlation with Agambens concept of bare life, a life that is held literally at the threshold between living and dying. It is therefore not accidental that questions of how to manage the
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Aboriginal question were posed directly in relation to questions of life (and death). A medical doctor on Palm Island asks in relation to the high infant mortality rate: Should these infants be properly fed on peptonised milk? The expense would be considerable; is it worth trying to save them?45 While there are strong connections, arguably the Australian camps operated in a different context from the European camps to which Agamben devotes much of his analysis. One of the key differences is the role of colonisation in the history of the Australian camp. Imperialism brought differently coded forms of violence to the frontiers of the colony: Perera, for example, argues that in the Australian camp we find combined the functions of the colonial war camps or campos de concentraciones with the lethal ends of the classic European camp.46 Mbembe suggests that the colonial camp must be treated as the evolutionary forebear of the contemporary camp. As stated above, Mbembe identifies sovereignty with war, emphasising the sovereign right to kill or let die.47 Mbembe argues that the necropolitical capacity of sovereignty enables the creation of death-worlds, where populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.48 We find this relationship in the colony, where identification of the non-human (or less than human) savage enables an unfettered right to kill. According to Mbembe: The sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. In the colonies, the sovereign might kill at any time or in any manner. Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. It is not a legally codified activity.49 Mbembe reminds us that this same logic is present within the contemporary spaces of death, such as the modern colonial occupation of Palestine, or the contemporary African war zone.50 He offers a useful critique of Agambens analysis of the European camp here, in particular Agambens apparent de-emphasis of the structuring role that race and colonisation play in the biopolitics of the subject.51 While it is true that Agamben points to the significant role that the definition of the human plays within biopolitical violence,52 he does not explicitly recognise the role of the colony as a frontier for the human, and the relationship of the colony to western exception: in Mbembes words, The colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab
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legibus solutus), and where peace is more likely to take on the face of a war without end.53 In this sense, the exceptional power of contemporary biopolitical sovereignty must be understood through the racialised practices of colonisation, since as Mbembe argues, the dehumanisation that accompanies the modern camp is the evolved form of the racialised experiment that occurred in the colonies: In most instances, the selection of races, the prohibition of mixed marriages, forced sterilization, even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to find their first testing ground in the colonial world.54 If we accept Mbembes argument, then the genealogy of white Australian sovereignty is intimately linked to the processes that established the mission and reserve system. Todays praxis of sovereignty is built on the Aboriginal camp experiment: the Australian camp archipelago of the late 1800s and early 1900s does not sit at a distance from the contemporary camp, nor can it be said that it functions through a different logic; on the contrary, the modern camp relies on the colonial camp as its evolutionary point of origin.
Governing Violence
Another key factor that must be understood in the evolution of the Australian camp is the role played by governmental rationalities in facilitating the internment and regulation of Aboriginal people within reserves and settlements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The evolving science of government would provide the Australian camp archipelago with the necessary coordination of resources and abilities; a capacity to manage food, transport, departments, and welfare organisations with the aim of achieving a sophisticated regulation of biological populations. The camp system depended on an evolved management of the governance of violence to coordinate mechanisms of force both within and without the camp, and to maintain a heterogenous mix of strategies from the institution to the mission, all the way to the penal camp. Exactly how does one govern violence? And how does the art of government relate to the contemporary deployment of violence by Australian sovereignty? Governmentality, Foucault argues, is an art of government that develops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and places demands upon sovereignty to not only manage its power for its own
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sake, but turn its attention towards the conduct of populations within its domain.55 Foucault argues that where sovereignty traditionally demanded a concern for territory, security and the continuity of sovereign rule, government fosters a desire to manage resources, attend to populations, and deploy discreet interventions into the economic life of the citizenry. This represents quite a shift in the way in which state power is organised: Foucault remarks that Population now represents more the end of government than the power of the sovereign.56 Foucault describes a trinity that represents the extension of state power: sovereigntydisciplinegovernment.57 Each entity in this trinity acts with reference to the other: so, for example, sovereignty finds itself governmentalised (that is, obeying governmental imperatives) while the fostering of individual disciplinary practices becomes incorporated within the overarching principles of good governance. The shift from sovereignty to government represents a shift in the strategy of power. Sovereign power, following the Hobbesian model, deploys force in a directional manner to achieve particular effects that reinforce its own power. Military forces literally push back perceived invaders, and expand territories; resources are devoted to the pursuit and punishment of criminals within the sovereign domain; the sovereign manages territory by reinscribing relations of power through periodic bouts of violence. Governance, on the other hand, involves a set of strategies which Foucault suggests is economic58 in scope: rather than exerting force in singular directions, governance organises the field of power through discreet interventions, conducting the behaviour of humans and objects in a relational field. Foucault provides the example of a ship:
What does it mean to govern a ship? It means to take charge of the sailors, but also of the boat and its cargo; to take care of the ship means also to reckon with winds, rocks and storms; and it consists in that activity of establishing a relation between sailors who are to be taken care of and the ship which is to be taken care of, and the cargo which is to be brought to port, and all those eventualities like winds, rocks, storms and so on; this is what characterises the government of a ship.59
The fact that one owns a ship is secondary to the business of its governance: Property and territory are merely one of its
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variables.60 Government is a responsibility to ensure the smooth cohabitation of a range of diverse and autonomous agents, and not the maintenance of property for its own benefit. The conduct of individuals is also essential to modern governmental strategy, and thus disciplinary power plays an important role. Disciplines aim at directing behaviour through the provision of the normalising tools by which one may govern the self. The compulsion to govern oneself leads to the requirement that one bares ones soul: that is, allows ones self to be opened up for interrogation by rational expertise. Thus Foucault argues that the modern individual becomes compelled to confess to others, and opens to discourse an increasing number of aspects of the self.61 This creates the conditions by which the decisions one makes about ones life, ones inclinations and peculiarities result in the compulsion to vigilantly monitor ones self and strictly control behaviour, expression, appearance and deportment. Governance of the self may be understood as the means by which we correlate the self as a bundle of desires, dispositions, physical characteristics, intelligences and so on: the self as an entity which is to be managed constantly, as an economy of factors within which discreet interventions may be made. Governmentality offers a compelling way to think about the way in which sovereign violence is deployed in contemporary societies. There is some precedent for connecting the exercise of violence with an administrative or managerial apparatus: both Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman provide strong arguments around the instrumental role of bureaucracy in the exercise of State violence.62 Certainly today, the institutions of sovereign violencethe prison, the detention centre, the campalmost inevitably come attached to a bureaucratic apparatus, enabling the smooth functioning of these mechanisms. Yet although bureaucracy plays an indispensable role in the way in which contemporary sovereign violence is enacted, I would argue that it is governmental rationality, rather than bureaucratic rationality per se, which has most significantly affected the organisation of large-scale social assemblies, and hence the way in which violence is deployed in the contemporary era. Governmental rationalities enable not merely the exercise of coercive force, but liberate a range of strategies for managing problems of population, given finite resources, existing knowledges,
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relationships and dispositions. This complex mix of strategies requires expertise that exceeds the regular limits of bureaucratic management, belonging securely within the province of governmental management. Examining the Australian camp system once again, we find a similar mix of strategies controlling the conduct of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As stated above, governmental rationalities inculcate a focus on disciplining the individual subject and directing their conduct:
The savage, who forgets so easily and sees only his present need, or immediate pleasure, must learn to think ahead. The keener spirits are encouraged, he must be careful to develop esprit de corps, he can spur them to greater activity by others success.63
This disciplinary process occurred against a backdrop of violence, and forms of violent disciplinarity were also present as a means to direct conduct. We find here that corporal punishment played a significant role in disciplining the subject: for example, flogging which was always used as a punishment against Aboriginal people in colonial Australia64was formally reintroduced as a punishment explicitly for Aboriginal people in 1892 by the Western Australian Government, some 40 years after the penal measure had ceased to be used against non-Aboriginal people.65 Mbembes analysis of sovereignty also provides some useful connections to both Foucaults work on governmentality, and to Australias relationship with the camp. As Mbembe informs us, it is the limits of the humanthe lines between human, savage and animalthat informs sovereign exception. Governmental rationalities are involved in balancing the delicate formation of law along the racialised thresholds between human and savage. For example, if we look specifically at the question of the management of the half-caste, we find that juridical powers must be structured in a complex manner to allow for the problem to be attacked from every angle. A section from Reynoldss impressive Nowhere People which in many ways may be regarded as a genealogy of Australian governmentality in the management of questions of raceprovides a glimpse of the complex strategies that characterise the governance of violence:
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The Chief Protector was given authority to exercise care, custody or control of Aborigines and half-castes. He could take them into custody, control their movements, confine them to reserves or prohibit their entry into any defined prohibited area. The protector was the legal guardian of Aboriginal and half-caste children Aboriginal women required special permissions to marry a nonAboriginal man. It became an offence for a non-Aboriginal to engage in interracial sex. Power was extended to allow control of quadroons. Half-caste men were liberated from the protectors control on turning eighteen, but there were provisions to place any male under the Ordinances provisions if in the protectors opinion it was necessary or desirable in the interests of the Aboriginal or half-caste to do so. Women remained under the protectors authority indefinitely.66
The governmentalisation of sovereign violence enables a nuanced, exacting and intricately balanced application of force that conforms to the biopolitical (and necropolitical) objects of power. This play of forces is necessarily complex. The effects of power encircle every entity within a sociopolitical network, as well as the whole functioning of the network itself. In some respects, governmentality has led to an evolution in sovereign violence and its interrelationship with disciplinary power and biopolitics; for example, Pat OMalley describes a particular intervention that commenced in 1990, when the Department of Community Services in Western Australia approached representatives from the Ngaanyatjarra people to negotiate a cooperative strategy to address solvent use (petrol sniffing) within the Ngaanyatjarra community.67 This intervention supplements existing state powers to pursue petrol sniffers through the criminal justice system, and represents a shift from a more traditional tactic of the deployment of sovereign force, to an attempt to conduct the conduct of communities through diverse facilitative agencies. This move away from overt forms of sovereign violence and coercion does not mean less intervention: on the contrary, as Kidd emphasises, There has been an intensification of surveillance and interventions in Aboriginal communities.68 But arguably, governmentality produces a more subtle form of power; it is everyday rather than sporadic in nature; it is sustained within macro and micropolitical fields, and enables both non-violent and violent forces to be more precisely targeted with relational fields.
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It is possible that the contemporary governmental strategy may be able to provide positive outcomes for Aboriginal communities. This is true particularly where forms of facilitation and negotiation substitute for force and coercion, and where democracy and participation are able to guide outcomes. But we must be more wary of governmentality applied to the conduct of sovereign violence, since, as history has taught us, the violence of invasion, mass exterminations, protection and assimilation may also reflect the operation of the same rationalities. If, as Mbembe asserts, sovereignty must be considered in the context of both the capacity to make live and to kill, then we need not separate the biopolitical capacity of government to foster life from the old power of sovereignty to rule by the sword. The power to foster life must be read in conjunction with its counterpart, the ominous right to disallow to the point of death. We must interpret this statement in the same way as one reads the old power of sovereigntyto kill and let liveas involving the exercise of an interconnected right. Biopolitics is not merely the optimisation of life, but involves the simultaneous deployment of violence designed to disallow life. Uniting Agamben, Mbembe and Foucault enables us to arrive at a distinct understanding of the logic of violence that is peculiar to the functioning of Australian sovereignty. This logic must be understood through the lenses of the camp, necropolitics and government. The Australian camp has its origins firmly in the war apparatus of colonisation. Governmental rationalities were applied to the sustained war effort, enabling a complex mix of outcomes: capture, death, punishment, economic slavery and the civilising of subjects. This was a sophisticated war, requiring the massive coordination of resources towards questions of population and life, fought on many fronts. It was territorial, corporeal and metaphysical all at the same time. This required the co-functionality of government and war, a combination that ruptures the usual distinctions between civility and hostility: Fiona Nicoll argues, Terra nullius authorised a particularly governmental form of warfare.69 Formed in war, the colonial camp was the test bed for the contemporary camp. Throughout this evolution, the camp has functioned as the frontier for an ongoing deployment of forces that would otherwise be considered as belonging to the province of war: here we find a threshold between apparently peaceful civility and outright conflict. Accompanying this evolution of forces has been a
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growing complexity in the effects of these forces, with governmental rationalities enabling a sophisticated deployment of sovereign violence towards biopolitical objectives, and the conduct of individual behaviour through the seemingly unrelenting proliferation of disciplines. Although this war began overtly on the frontiers of white invasion and dispossession, the trace of this same governmental warfare is found in the continuing over-policing of Aboriginal communities, the neglect of health and wellbeing, and in the disproportionate number of Aboriginal people incarcerated in correctional facilities across the nation. Today it is not too difficult to locate a strong correlation between the sovereign violence that shaped the Australian camp system and the infamous zones of exception that now appear to define the post-2001 era: Baxter, Villawood, Nauru. Does this close historical connection between Australian sovereignty and the camp offer any insight into the functioning of sovereign violence today? Certainly the events after September 2001 appear, at least on the face of it, as evidence of a fundamental shift in Australian sovereignty. But the tightening of laws, the expansion of surveillance and regulatory powers, the annexation of territories from regular juridical rule to enable racialised internment, and the increased accumulation and deployment of military and paramilitary forces are not new features of Australian white sovereignty. Australias own history of the camp enables us to put forward an alternative view: rather than indicating a fundamental shift in sovereignty, the events of the last five years point to an evolution of the elements that have always underpinned sovereign power in Australia. For the attributes that appear to characterise contemporary sovereign violence in our post-2001 era happen to also be commonplace features of white Australias tactical engagement with its indigenous population since invasion.
Governmental Warfare
It is perhaps ominous that Palm Island should recently come under focus for a revitalised governmental strategy. Peter Herbert, a federal member of parliament, has recently commented: If the Indigenous leaders are not prepared to change the hopeless conditions that the community currently live in, then perhaps its time to move them all to the mainland and integrate into
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mainstream Australia.70 Herberts comments highlight what has been perhaps one the most disturbing aspects of the history of Australias governmental war against Aboriginal people: namely that we are repeatedly told that Indigenous Australia must bear the social and ethical responsibility for the effects of this protracted conflict. As Kidd deftly observes: Poverty, derelict housing, low education and employment levels, alcoholism and domestic violence, individual despair and community upheaval are still, conveniently, interpreted as aspects of an Aboriginal, rather than a governmental problem.71 Whatever the future holds, there is no question that Palm Island remains within a zone of exception from Australia. Housing is a significant concern, with the islands 3,500 residents living in 220 homes:72 it is not unusual, to have up to 20 people living in a threebedroom house.73 Today there is a lack of work on the island, with 95 per cent of participants in the labour market unemployed.74 Extraordinarily poor health conditions continue on Palm Island, with the life expectancy of residents said to be thirty years less than that of the broader Australian population. Indeed, death forthrightly frames existence on the island: Chloe Hooper observed, after a visit in 2005, that 16 people have killed themselves in eight months; half the men on the island will die before the age of 45. This place is like a black hole into which people have fallen.75 These statistics on Palm Island should be treated strictly as the effects of war. In spite of the enduring efforts of residents to make changes, Palm Island remains one of the many hotspots for a line of conflict that connects camps, prisons and offshore detention facilities. These sites of intense friction highlight the existence of ongoing hostilities that have always ruptured the apparent peace of the Australian civil space. This war has assumed a range of strategies from overtly violent sovereign interventions, to intimate and nuanced forms of government and surveillance. It also seems all too apparent that a necropolitical tendency towards disallowing life to the point of death has been a persistent strategy of power, which finds itself expressed in the form of political, social and economic neglect: Palm Islands records surely stand as a testament to this fact.
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Chapter Nine
Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death

Jon Stratton
On 15 June 2000, the then federal Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, released a triple video set commissioned for distribution to consulates and embassies in countries from which unwanted asylum seekers might be expected to arrive. The purpose of the videos was to portray the difficulties of the journey and to show Australia in as undesirable light as possible. The first video was called The Trip and explained that asylum seekers were lied to about the quality of the boats used for the voyage and are often left stranded on the Australian coast far away from help. The second video was titled The Reception and the third, Experiences and Expectations of Travellers. These included descriptions of detention centres, interviews with asylum seekers targeted by criminals and accounts of the dangerous fauna of Australia: sharks, crocodiles and snakes. All in all these videos amount to a kind of anti-tourism campaign. In publicity interviews about the videos Ruddock frequently described them as horrific. What is the discursive context for this narrative of danger and death awaiting new arrivals to Australia? In 1970 John Stonehouse was Postmaster General in Harold Wilsons Labour government in Great Britain. After Labour lost power Stonehouse set about making himself financially secure. However, by 1974 his companies began to fail. Stonehouse decided to disappear. Inspired by an episode in Frederick Forsyths The Day of the Jackal, Stonehouse created a new identity for himself based on
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that of a dead man, Joseph Arthur Markham. In November, Stonehouse flew to Miami. His plan was to make it appear as if he had gone swimming on a Miami beach and drowned. At the second attempt Stonehouse succeeded. He then flew to Melbourne by way of Hawaii. At Tullamarine airport Stonehouse entered Australia as Markham, an English migrant. Meanwhile the British bottomfeeding Sunday newspaper, the News of the World, announced Sharks ate John Stonehouse. Stonehouse began his new life with a new identityactually with two new identitiesbut was subsequently discovered, arrested on Christmas Eve, and finally deported back to Britain. It is the earlier part of the story that interests me here. Stonehouse transformed himself into a migrant by killing his old identity, and by taking that of a dead man. In his autobiography Stonehouse writes: To be Joe Markham for all day and every day and to destroy for ever the shell of John Stonehouse would be a rebirth.1 The autobiographys title echoes the pervasive importance of death in this process. It is called Death of an Idealist. But why Australia? Why did Stonehouse not simply kill off his Stonehouse identity and disappear into the United States? Stonehouse himself provides part of the answer:
[Australia] is a great country, created by migrants whoto a greater or less extenthad done exactly what I was doing. They had escaped from the frightening conditions of the old countries to be liberated in a continent where there is enough room to move and where there is a genuineness in human relations, born of a challenge in a new environment.2
In other words, Stonehouse thought that migrants to Australia went through an analogous process of death and rebirth, of transition to a new identity, as the one that he was acting out, literalising in his apparent drowning. That Stonehouse chose to kill off his old identity in the United States but not to stay there suggests a crucial difference in the way migration to that country is thought about as compared to Australia. To put it as an overgeneralised statement, migration to the United States is thought of in terms of opportunity. The migrant does not have to give up their old life, they can keep their culture, their customs, habits, even their language, while the United States offers them a new, enhanced future. We can think of Emma Lazaruss
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sonnet to the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus written in 1883. Lazarus describes the statue as the Mother of Exiles and in those now very well known words, has the statue exhorting the Old World: Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. America, then, is the land of opportunity where you can take what you already have and make of it something extraordinary. Australia has always been much more anxious about migrants, especially those from outside Britain and Ireland. Coming to Australia has always involved a kind of death. Often this has been linked to the sea. Australians are much more preoccupied with people who come to the country by boat rather than airplane. The concern with unregulated migration is fixated on boats and boat people. In the Australian national imaginary, the beach is the border of the country as well as being the fatal shore, the place of death. In their discussion of the Australian beach, John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner quote from a National Times article, adding their own emphasis, that: Australia means the beach.3 They argue that the myth of the beach in Australia is rooted in an ideal (that is, one not necessarily made material on any one beach) image of Australia classless, matey, basic, natural.4 Australians think of the beach as the site of pleasure. Fiske, Hodge and Turner describe it as our great natural playground.5 Unacknowledged in Fiske, Hodge and Turners analysis is the racialised foundation of the Australian beach. The qualities it bears are those of the old, white, Anglo-Celtic Australia. Meaghan Morris has remarked that, for her, the Australian beach has always been a deep-laid, and thus ambiguous, reality of life.6 Against those who think of the Australian beach solely in terms of pleasure, Morris reminds us of the sedimented histories of Indigenous and settler contact, of convicts, of the connections across the northern Australian coastline between Aborigines and Macassans, and of Nevil Shutes novel, On the Beach, which works over the sense of ominousness that Morris implies is always present in the Australian experience of the beach. Indeed, while Shutes novel is about global death as a consequence of nuclear war, the book ends with Moira Davidson, dying from radiation poisoning, parked looking out to sea, taking some tablets to hasten her death. Symbolically at least, she is the last person alive on earth and she is dying overlooking an Australian beach.
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Death and the Australian Border
If, in the nineteenth century, the coastlines of the individual colonies all carried the kinds of experience that Morris mentions, it was federation that enabled the beach to take on a more consummate role. With federation, ideologically, Australia, an island, became also Australia the country and it became possible to put in place a single law across all the states to protect Australia from unwanted, non-white migrants. This was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901. The coastline, localised in the beach, became the symbolic site of the differentiation between us, the white people within Australia, and them the non-white people to be kept out of Australia. It is no wonder, then, that in todays multi-racialised Australia the chosen site to assert white racial privilege should be the beach. As Suvendrini Perera writes about the race riots at Cronulla beach in Sydney in December 2005: The beach remains the rallying ground of Anglo-Australia, the preserve of decent, wholesome white bodies, policed in a variety of ways against any contaminating whiff of dirty wogand, by implication, even dirtier blackbodies.7 The beach, the border of white Australia, has become the site from which those who continue to be designated as non-white within Australia should be kept away. From the beginning of white settlement death was an important and very real aspect of the journey to the Australian colonies. On the Second Fleet, notoriously the worst for convict deaths, Out of 1,006 prisoners who sailed from Portsmouth, 267 died at sea and at least another 150 after landing.8 By 1815 the average death rate per voyage was 1 in 85 and by the end of transportation in 1868 this figure had declined to 1 in 180.9 Across the entire history of convict transportation to the Australian colonies there remained a not insignificant chance that any particular convict might die at sea during the journey. At least for the first twenty or thirty years large numbers of these convicts would have been sentenced to death in Britain. Robert Hughes writes that:
The ferocity and scope of eighteenth-century capital statutes created an extraordinary range of hanging crimes. The erratic mercy of the courts could, and did, transmute such sentences to exile in Australia.10
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Transportation itself, then, was a sentence shadowed by the earlier sentence of death. From the 1820s legal reforms meant a decline in capital offences, however as the number of capital crimes shrank, so the volume of transportable offences grew.11 In this change, transportation became a substitute for the death penalty. Moreover, from the time they were sentenced to death, a convict was treated under the law as if they were already dead. Hughes writes that: From the Crowns point of view, all convicts were legally dead under the civil law from their arrival in Australia to their emancipation.12 Bruce Kercher argues that the situation was actually more complex than this, that at the start of Australian transportation convicts were allowed legal rights they would not have had in England but that, by 1820, these had been severely curtailed.13 Hughess claim, if not completely historically accurate, reflects the general Australian thinking about the transported convicts: that they were, in a particular sense, dead. Death was a key topos in the early settlement of Australia. At this point I want to return to the border, to that which historically in Australia, separated white from non-white. Stonehouse, as we have seen, thought of the border as the site where he could be transformed from his old identity of Stonehouse, which would be destroyed, would die, to his new dead Australian identity of Markham. It would be, as he wrote, a rebirth. We can think here of Victor Turners reworking of Arnold van Genneps idea of the rite of passage, a process by which a person is transformed from one status to another. Turner writes that:
Liminal entities are neither here nor there, they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial Thus liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.14
Spatially, liminality is a limbo through which a person travels to their new status. In achieving this, the old self must die so that the new self can be born. The person undergoes a rebirth. Historically, this is how the Australian border functioned. That the beach is thought of as the border reinforces this. Fiske, Hodge and Turner suggest that the beach fits into the anomalous category, in the middle of
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the basic oppositions of the culture from which we construct our meanings.15 For the Australian national imaginary, though, the beach produces those basic oppositions. Those allowed across it, into Australia, had to be reborn as white. Those excluded remained in a symbolic, or sometimes all too literal, death. While, of course, all state borders function as liminal sites, not all demand the complete transformation, the death and rebirth, that typifies the Australian experience. A further aspect of this rebirth was the Australian emphasis on assimilation. Prior to the second world war the expectation that migrants would assimilate to Anglo-Australian culture was taken for granted. In the postsecond world war period, up to the late 1960s, it was government policy. In the era of multiculturalism, as the divisions manifested in the Cronulla riots illustrated only too well, the core and periphery structure of official multiculturalism where Anglo-Celtic whites continue to make up the Australian mainstream, to use a word that Howard has appropriated,16 and so-called ethnics make up the periphery, means that retention of cultural elements that do not form a part of Anglo-Celtic Australian culture relegates a person at best to the peripheral status of wog. Stonehouse was lucky. Coming from England it was relatively easy for him to assimilate into Australias white, Anglo-Celtic monoculture. However, for those migrants about whom he writes that, [t]hey had escaped from the frightening conditions of the old countries, by which I presume he means the second world war refugees from Europe, assimilation was much harder. This aspect of the liminal transformation involved the death of ones cultural identity for the rebirth into Anglo-Australian conformity. It is, though, the practice of assimilating Aborigines to AngloAustralian culture that is more often described in terms of death. Mick Dodson, on the commission of the Stolen Generation inquiry, is reputed to have said that assimilation is genocide. The far right in Australia have picked up on this idea. Andrew Patterson in Taking Back the Moral High Ground writes that: Whilst Whites are accused of genocide of the Aboriginal race, due to attempts to assimilate Aborigines into the White population, the Multiculturalists somehow forget to refer to their long-term aim to eliminate the White race, and all other races, via assimilation, as genocide.17 Patterson is thinking in racial rather than cultural terms. His fear is of a white race genocidally lost in a merging of all races
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allowed under the banner of multiculturalism. However, the idea of a genocidal cultural death, albeit figured in the first place in individuals, has always permeated the assimilatory process in Australia in the idea that a person has to lose, eradicate, the culture that they bring to Australia and take on the local culture.
Migration and Death
In the Australian national imaginary issues around migrants are often played out in relation to tourists. Indeed, if we think of the tourist as someone who has come from somewhere else, is visiting, and will return from whence they came, this is one way that those Australians who claim whiteness distinguish themselves from those they identify as non-white and as not properly Australian. White Australians understand themselves as always already here, in Australia. Of course, this raises a huge question about the status of Aborigines and marks the paradoxical anxietiesindeed paranoia as I shall describe it laterof settler Australians but this is not the place to pursue this argument. Describing the Cronulla riots, Perera writes:
Inscribed across a bare, bronzed back the ultimate claim to nativeised essence: We grew here, you flew here. The Australian flag, with its affirmation of enduring racial kinship with British stock, is inscribed on bodies in multiple forms: blazoned on bikinis and backpacks, tattooed on arms and torsos, painted on faces like war paint, wrapped around shoulders like a trophy; a performance of native-ised territoriality that echoes other enactments of territorial ownership.18
Aside from its use as a jingoistic rhyming device, why flew? In the overlapping binary between migrants and tourists, migrants have historically been thought of as coming by boat (the roots of this understanding run from the convicts and free settlers to the mass arrivals of European migrants in the postsecond world war period) while tourists fly here. The claim that these non-white wogs and Lebs flew here then not only identifies them as not authentically Australian but also signals that they can go back where they came from. In this conservative throwback to an assertion of White Australia, these people are migrants who have failed to assimilate and who should, therefore, be reclassified as tourists.
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From the 1980s onwards, as the Australian tourism industry geared up and started promoting Australia as a tourist destination, most successfully with Paul Hogans Ill slip an extra shrimp on the barbie television advertisement, first shown in 1984, this connection between non-white migrants and tourists has become more important and more problematic. After all, if certain types of migrant can be thought of as tourists then tourists can be thought of as (potential) migrants. At the same time, the desired tourist, in the first instance historically British and Americans, the ideal potential tourist to whom Australia makes its pitch, is white, while asylum seekers and refugees are thought of as non-white. One place to start thinking about the figuring of the tourist as migrant is Peter Weirs 1974 film, The Cars That Ate Paris. Morris describes the film as a macabre and very funny parable about a paranoid, exclusionary society with a cannibalistic immigration policy.19 Paris is a small town in outback New South Wales which feeds on strangers. Like the myth of the eighteenth century Cornish ship wreckers, the people of Paris deceive visiting drivers into crashing their cars. The cars are then taken to bits and the parts enter the car-based economy of the town. Any survivors of the wrecks are taken to the hospital where they are given lobotomies before being allowed into the community. Embedded in Morriss cannibalism metaphor is the sense of the cultural death that the survivors are forced to undergo in the crude operations performed with a power drill before these visiting strangers can be accepted as permanent residents of the town. According to Annie Rule, researcher on English migration to Australia, taking out Australian citizenship is often referred to as having the operation.20 Even after the lobotomies, though, with the memories of their earlier lives erased, these people cannot be complete members of the Parisian community. Their involuntary transformation into residents of the town means that they will always be seen as different. By 1974 white Australia had begun to accept that the attempt to impose total assimilation on the comparatively large numbers of Greeks, Italians, Maltese and Christian Lebanese who had been allowed to migrate to Australia in the postwar period had failed. As I have argued elsewhere, the installation of multiculturalism as a government policy was meant as a means to manage these diverse groups until, it was hoped, by the next generation they would indeed have finally assimilated.21 Nevertheless, for those white Australians,
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now categorised as Anglo-Celtic, who prized Australias Britishbased monoculture, the new cultural diversity was a threat. In Mad Max (1979), Max, with the Eastern European-sounding family name of Rockatansky, and played by the very Anglo-looking Mel Gibson, is a policeman. The combination of Maxs name and his job marked the European limits of who is acceptable as white in quotidian Australia by the late 1970s. The film presents a scenario of civilisation breaking down. There is still law but the police are finding it harder and harder to enforce, especially on the roads of the outback. Morris describes one of the films plotlines as Maxs struggle to not-become another crazy in a violently male, indivisibly anarchic world.22 Characteristically, in what is a common Australian distinction, the cities are feminised and the site of civilisation while the outback is a masculine, threatening and lawless place. We shall revisit this theme in both Crocodile Dundee, where it is inverted, and Wolf Creek. It is not Maxs struggle in itself that I am interested in here. It is the bad guys, the group led by the Toecutter who cruise the roads wreaking rapine, destruction and, of course, death. Many of this motley group, with their exotic post-punk look and their heavily customised vehicles, especially apparent in the second film, have Italianate names: Bubba Zanetti, Crawford Nightrider Montizano, Diabando. It seems, then, that as Malcolm Fraser was putting into place the structure of official multiculturalism, and in the process entrenching the distinction between Anglo-Celtic Australians and the ethnics, Max was patrolling the roads attempting to preserve the Australian culture being destroyed by Toecutters ethnic gang. It is worth noting that Toecutter, played by Hugh Keyes-Byrne, has an Irish accent. That the ethnic gang has an Irish leader suggests how uncertain is the place of the Irish in Australias so-called AngloCeltic core. Elsewhere I have argued that the Irish in Australia were only whitened around the time of federation.23 After that, Irish exclusion became more focused on their Catholicism. Mad Max signals the possible beginning of the ethnicisation of the Irish within the ideological context of multiculturalism. In this film, where the destruction of civilisation by the ethnics is already well advanced, what is left is embodied narrativally in Maxs family: Jess, his wife, and Sprog, their child. When the ethnic gang kill them at the end of the film, callously running them down as they flee along the road, we have not only what Morris describes
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as the symbolic extermination of the private sphere24 but also, in the destruction of the nuclear family, the death of the Australian culture that Max and the rest of the police are attempting to protect. This nightmare vision is of the depredations that follow the multicultural acceptance of cultural diversity. It is, if you like, a morality tale about what happens if the government allows into Australia people who are so culturally different that they cannot, or will not, assimilate. In Mad Max, it is clear how the moral order works. Max is good, the ethnics are bad and their badness is marked by their destruction of Maxs family. I want to pause here for a moment to compare these filmic deaths with some real deaths twenty-two years later. On 19 October 2001, a grossly overcrowded boat carrying 421 passengersasylum seekers on their way to Australiasank in international waters about one-third of the way to Christmas Island. As Tony Kevin writes: It sank well inside Australias declared and intensively patrolled Operation Relex military border-protection and surveillance zone, which covered almost all the sea/air gap between Java and Christmas Island.25 Three hundred and fifty-three people, 146 children, 142 women and 65 men, died in the disaster. This was the boat that came to be known by the acronym SIEV X (SIEV stands for Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel). Perera has written of the story of one of the survivors, Amal Basry:
Encircled by sharks, surrounded by the dying, she keeps alive, clinging to the body of an unknown dead woman. Little children, dead babies, desperate parents, families dying one by one, and I was alone believing all the while my own son was dead. Three women are reported to have given birth in the water as they drowned during those desperate hours.26
Basry talks of ships coming in the night but not rescuing survivors. Kevin suggests that the Australian government knew a great deal more about this boat, its voyage and the sinking than has ever been acknowledged. It is possible, Kevin deduces, that an agent working for Australia sabotaged the boat. In the Senate on 25 September 2002, John Faulkner, the Opposition Leader in the Senate, asked about Australian involvement in the disaster saying, finally:
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At no stage do I want to break, nor will I break, the protocols in relation to operational matters involving ASIS or the AFP. But those protocols were not meant as a direct or indirect licence to kill.27
Faulkner appears to have been suggesting that, directly or indirectly, the Australian government may well have been complicit in these deaths. Ten days after the sinking, at the Liberal Partys campaign launch for the 2001 federal election:
For Philip Ruddock, the protector of Australias borders, there was a tumult of whistling, stamping and clapping. The needle went right off the dial not once but twice.28
David Marr and Marian Wilkinson sum up the reception for Ruddock and Howards emphasis on protecting Australia from asylum seekers: In the centre of Sydney on a quiet Sunday morning, ringed by police, inside an elegant recital hall, a crowd of prosperous, white Australians were baying for border protection.29 This, as Perera rightly glosses it, when one thinks of hounds in the chase baying, is baying, in effect, for blood.30 Ruddocks and Howards Liberal supporters, more or less out of control with anxiety, bring us back to Max. Morris remarks that:
As [Tom] ORegan points out, the death of his wife and child makes Max; Mad, he can avoid the vegetable fate of his mate, survive the apocalypse and enter the new world.31
Maxs survival, his ability to overcome the predatory ethnic gang, is premised on the destruction of his family and the moral order they represent. Within the logic of the film this frees Max of moral constraints. Morris identifies two types of phobic narrative in Australian texts. In one:
the coast is a permeable barrier against waves of over-population rolling in from the future (often Asia). This figure operates most powerfully in a register of paranoid anticipation.32
This attitude was deeply embedded in the Australian national imaginary. Gwenda Tavan writes about the White Australia Policy in the era before the second world war that: Australians ... clearly
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believed that the threat they faced from Asiatics was a potential rather than an actual one.33 In the 2001 Liberal election campaign Howard and Ruddock brought this future into an anxious present. Marr and Wilkinson tell us that: Ruddocks knockout blow to his critics was always the apocalyptic vision of Australia overrun by 20 million refugees in the world looking for a home.34 Maxs apocalyptic future became a present in which the Australian government could behave without any moral imperative other than the claim to act in the interest of Australia.
Boat People and Tourists
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw two almost simultaneous developments. The first people to arrive by boat, the first to be designated by what was to become the highly evocative term boat people, arrived in Darwin harbour on 26 April 1978. They were fleeing Vietnam. As Peter Mares writes:
The Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, and his minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Michael Mackellar, displayed considerable generosity and good sense in responding to the first boat arrivals. They successfully undercut the attraction of sailing south in a leaky boat by holding out the prospect of organised resettlement to Indochinese refugees holed up in camps in Southeast Asia.35
At this time Australia had no system for making decisions about residency from applications made onshore, in Australia. In 1978 the government established the Determination of Refugee Status Committee and began to use the definition of a refugee as a criterion for making judgments on applications to stay in Australia made by this new type of migrant, boat people. By June 1979, Australia had admitted 11,872 Indochinese refugees of which 2,011 were designated as boat people.36 The last boats arrived during 1981. During these three years, at least partly because of the way Fraser and his government handled the issue, there was relatively little public anxiety over these onshore arrivals. The United States and its allies, including Australia, had lost the Vietnam war, Whitlams government had both formally ended the racialised entry restrictions which provided the basis for the White Australia Policy and put in place the policy of multiculturalism to manage the failure of the old policy of assimilation. As is indicated
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by Mad Max, Australian anxieties were focused internally on issues of race, cultural difference and the consequences of the lack of assimilation by new migrants, not on the method by which possible migrants arrived in the country. There was, however, one straw in the wind: Shortly before the 1977 election [Bob] Hawke (then ALP president) called for Australia to stop accepting refugees who simply landed on its doorstep.37 Australia, though, was repositioning itself in the global order. From a public awareness point of view the most important aspect of this was the development of Australia as a mass tourist destination, in particular for Americans. Two of the people involved in the 1980s campaign, Bill Baker and Peggy Bendel, write that up until this time:
Australia was regarded as a distant place with exotic wildlife where kangaroos deliver the mail. Americans thought of a visit to Australia as once in a lifetime; a trip you took when you retired and usually in combination with a visit to New Zealand, Fiji and Tahiti.38
The purpose of the campaign was to make Australia appear recognisable, desirable and accessible. As Baker and Bendel remark, Australia became a pioneer in what is now known as destination branding. At the heart of the campaign was the television advertisement generally known as Ill slip an extra shrimp on the barbie that I have already mentioned, more formally known as Come and say GDay. At the time that he was asked to feature in the advertisement, two years before the release of Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan had developed an Australian reputation as a television comedian in his own sketch show, The Paul Hogan Show, which had begun in 1973, with the persona of an easygoing, knockabout, working-class, ocker larrikin. As Tom ORegan writes:
A defining characteristic of ocker was its unabashed celebration of the Australian, particularly the vernacular whether in speech, content, or action. This celebration was couched in an aggressively Australian or strine accent.39
ORegan goes on to comment that by the mid-1970s ockerism had become a powerful advertising pitch on television and radio.40 Racially, ockerism was very conservative, very Anglo-Celtic white.
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One way of understanding the rise to prominence of ockerism is as an Anglo-Australian backlash against the breakdown of the drive for assimilation of the Mediterranean migrants and the putting into place of the policy of multiculturalism. Hogans success in television comedy and advertisementshe began by selling Winfield cigarettes from 1973 to 1980made him an obvious choice for the tourism advertising campaign. Using him was, though, not without its critics. As Baker and Bendel write: Many saw him as somewhat of a redneck, relating him to the everyday working class characters he portrayed in his television programs, and not Paul Hogan, the skilled communicator and actor. The advertisement ran for seven years, until 1990 when the campaign finished. It was incredibly successful. During that time:
Australia firmly established itself as a destination in its own right. Arrivals doubled over the first three years and for four years the growth rate was still in excess of 25% annually.41
By 1993 around 2.8 million international tourists were visiting Australia each year. At the same time, the language of the advertisement resonates with white Australian anxieties about people coming to the country. However, the author of the text, possibly Hogan himself, deftly reworks these to produce a positive, welcoming image. For example, Hogan says: Now theres a few things Ive got to warn you about. This sounds potentially worrying but, of course, it turns out well. The cautions include having to learn to say gday because every day is a good day in Australia. He also warns that, Youre going to get wet, because the place is surrounded by water. This was an opportunity for emphasising Australias beaches. The reference is disturbing though. Coming to Australia there is no need to get wet, especially if a person comes by plane. The image reminds people that mainland Australia, large as it is, is an island. At bottom, the image is rooted in the idea of coming to Australia in boats and, coming out of the Australian national imaginary, it carries the anxieties about the beach as a border and the sea as a place of death. All this is simultaneously acknowledged and repressed as Hogans friendly and relaxing larrikinism rolls on to his most direct invitation: Cmon and say gday. Ill slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you. As if in response, by 1990 more boat people had started to arrive. The first boat landed at Broome in November 1989
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with twenty-six people on board. Two more boats came in 1990 and eight in 1991.42 Released in 1986 Crocodile Dundee further develops the fantasy of a welcoming Australia promoted in the shrimp on the barbie advertisement. Like that advertisement the film is, to quote ORegan, all surface effect. It is made for display, for entertainment.43 The plot involves Sue Charlton, a journalist, coming to Australia from New York to write a story about a crocodile hunter, Mick Dundee. Dundee, played of course by Hogan, meets her at Walkabout Creek, in the outback, and proceeds to show her around. Subsequently, Dundee goes back to New York with Charlton where their romance blossoms. Morris describes the film as an export-drive allegory: the small, remote community of Walkabout Creek with its fumbling exotic industry (emblematic of Australias place in the global cinema economy) manages to export its crocodile-poacher and, with a little help from the American media, market him brilliantly in New York.44 Yet it is also a tourism promotion. Certainly Charlton is working but, for much of her time in the outback with Dundee, she behaves like a tourist. Moreover, to Anglo-Australian audiences Charlton is entirely unthreatening. She is youngish, attractive, white and English-speaking even though, as Hogan remarks in slip an extra shrimp, Americans do have a funny accent. Charltons Anglo quality is reinforced by her name. Charlton is a village now incorporated into the London borough of Greenwich. Elsewhere I have explained how, in setting almost all of the film in the Australian section in the outback, it was possible to show an Australia without non-Anglo-Celtic, unassimilated migrants and thus, with Dundees ocker persona, produce an anachronistic, but to many Anglo-Celtic Australians a reassuring, image of Australia as Anglo and white, without cultural diversity, except for the friendly Aborigines.45 We can now take this further. Charlton is the ideal tourist for Australiashe has, by the way, of course flown, not come by boatwho, with her romantic attachment to Dundee, could become the preferred migrant. Indeed, in real life Hogan divorced his wife, Noeline, and married Linda Kozlowski who played Charlton. Dundee, meanwhile, typifies the shift to a service economy that is characteristic of a burgeoning tourist industry. He stops being a crocodile hunter and gets paid to show Charlton around.
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Morris remarks that: Crocodile Dundee is a relatively passionless film Theres no heat
to the violence, no steam to the sex, no ice to Dundees cool. Human life is pure, rational, free sociability: no unconscious, no neurosis, no repression (gossip gets things out in the open)and no maniacs.46
These outback people are characters, always up for a laugh and a bit of larrikin horse-play. But they are safe and friendly, they are pleased to be able to help Charltonall just as the Australian government would like the tourist image of Australia to be.47 They live in an outback that is only dangerous if you dont know your way around. Nobody gets killed here. The local Aborigines are benign. The water may be threateningit contains crocodilesbut, if you treat them with respect and know what to do, you, like Charlton, will be all right, especially if you have someone like Dundee to help you. This is not the parched, threatening and increasingly lawless outback of Mad Max and, as Morris presciently remarks, there are no maniacs. Americans could, and did, identify with Charlton as a tourist. Baker and Bendel write that:
In 1986 Paramount released Crocodile Dundee starring Paul Hogan, which became a worldwide hit grossing over $328 million in the first year, making it one of the most successful comedies of all time. This reinvigorated the [tourism] campaign and took it to new heights by extending Australias fifteen minutes of fame.48
The film piggy-backed on the advertisement and, in turn, gave the tourism campaign a further lease of life. By the late 1980s Australia was successful in enticing large numbers of tourists while it was also beginning to receive, again, unwanted boat people. Hawke was now prime minister. As we have seen, he had already expressed his dislike of refugees arriving directly in Australia in 1977. Now he condemned the boat people, as he had done then, as queue-jumpers and economic refugees.49 As boats started arriving again, in June 1990 Hawke was quoted in The Australian saying, Let no one think that were just going to stand idly by and allow others, by their autonomous action which reflects perhaps some unhappiness with the circumstances in which they find themselves in their own country to determine our immigration policy.50 Hawkes success lay in his populism. He was
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a prime minister deeply connected to the concerns and anxieties of the Australian national imaginary. In this statement of his we find, most importantly, Australias anxiety over its border, over who should, and should not, be allowed to cross it into Australia. This anxiety is often discussed in relation to Australias fear of being overwhelmed by some mythical Asian horde. However, as I explained early in this piece, the anxiety is also about the affirmation of the existence of the border itself.
Border Security
Ghassan Hage has linked paranoia with colonialism. He suggests that, a form of White colonial paranoia has remained part of Australian culture long after the Indigenous population had been decimated.51 Alice Jardine has argued that: Male paranoia involves, fundamentally, the fear of the loss either of all boundaries or of those boundaries becoming too painfully constrictive.52 She exemplifies this using one of Freuds most well-known cases, that of President Schreber:
Schreber (also) believed that the world was coming to an end. Schreber became convinced of the imminence of a great catastrophe, of the end of the world. He alone could restore it to its lost state of bliss (Seligkeitboth jouissance and death).53
The Australian national imaginary, and at this point Hawke, and later Howard and Ruddock, as vehicles of it, operates in these terms. The tremendous fear is that, if the sea border is breached it will mean the end of the Australian world. Without the border, (white) Australia, and Australians, would die. The border must be defended at all costs from those who are not invited to cross it. This may involve their deathas we have already seen in the case of the SIEV X passengers. Ruddock started publicly talking about border security in a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra in March 1998, two years after the coalition gained power. The speech was called Immigration Reform: the Unfinished Agenda. He said that, We are determined to safeguard the integrity of the nations borders and to protect the Australian public from the entry of people who have serious criminal backgrounds.54 Ruddock conjured fear of those seeking to abuse the system of orderly immigration and stated that:
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We have introduced into Parliament measures to narrow the scope of judicial review by the courts of cases that have already been considered on their merits by departmental officers and independent review tribunals. Implicitly, Ruddock was addressing the issue of boat people. Where Hawke had only denigrated them as queue-jumpers and economic refugees, Ruddock raised the level of anxiety by suggesting they were serious criminals. Moreover, as Jardine explains, if, for the paranoid, the loss of the border leads to the end of the world, then, as the judiciary, regulating the law of that world, is preoccupied only with the world as it exists, measures to protect the existence of that world must be taken out of the role of the judicature. The protection of the border, and the regulation of those that enter, must be beyond the law and in the hands of government. There is no room here to do any more than refer to the increasing anxieties over the affirmation and protection of Australias sea border in the last years of the twentieth century. By 2001 this anxiety had reached fever-pitch. Others have tracked very well the Tampa affair in August and September of that year when the KV Palapa I with 460 mainly Afghan asylum seekers lost power about 140 kilometres north of Christmas Island, how the people were finally rescued by a Norwegian container ship, the MV Tampa and the Australian governments adamant refusal to allow the rescued to be put ashore on Christmas Island in violation of all established international sea law. Others have also detailed the claims, and misleading and wrong statements, issued by the government in the children overboard affair during October when it was asserted, and subsequently proved to be false, that asylum seekers on the boat designated as SIEV 4 had, in desperation, thrown their children overboard.55 This false claim was used by the government to demonstrate that they did not love their children and respect family values as we Australians do. We have already seen how, in Mad Max white Australian civilisation was symbolically destroyed by the ethnic gangs murder of Maxs wife and child. Others have detailed too the terrible loss of life when the boat that came to be known as SIEV X sank on the night of 18 October (as I discussed earlier). In addition there was the establishment of the so-called Pacific Solution, put in place in the context of the Tampa crisis, where boat people were to be processed in camps set up in other countries: Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. In
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September, also spurred by the Tampa crisis, the government militarised the border, ordering the navy to blockade the Indian Ocean in what was called Operation Relex. As Marr and Wilkinson describe it: Stripped of all military jargon, Relex was a show of force designed to frighten people smugglers and asylum seekerswhile impressing the Australian electorate.56 Finally, here, I want to discuss briefly something that Howard was unable to put in place, the Border Protection Bill 2001, which he wanted to get passed by Parliament on 29 August, during the Tampa crisis. The full title of this Bill is A Bill for an Act to provide for the removal of ships from the territorial sea of Australia, and for related purposes. Marr and Wilkinson usefully sum up its contents:
The Prime Minister would have the power to direct soldiers, police, customs officials and public servants to seize any vessel and use force if necessary to take the ship and everyone on board outside the territorial sea of Australia. This would happen out of sight of the courts. No matter what happeneddeaths, disasters and injuriesno civil or criminal proceedings could be taken against the Commonwealth or the officers carrying out these operations This new regime was to operate in spite of any other law.57
This law would have been as close as it is possible to get within the Australian Constitution to a law that would not be subject to judicial review. It would have been a paramount law, a law beyond the ordinary rule of law. In his discussion of the legal practice of the Weimar republic and Nazi Germany, Giorgio Agamben writes about the Ausnahmezustand, translated as state of exception which, when invoked, suspended the articles of the constitution concerning personal liberty, the freedom of expression and of assembly, the inviolability of the home, and postal and telephone privacy.58 The Border Protection Bill 2001 would have had a similar effect on Australias maritime border. Like Schreber, who happened to be a senior judge, Howard and his government felt they alone could save Australia from imminent destruction and this could only be achieved by putting in place a law beyond the reach of all other laws. The Bill was finally passed later in the year after the provision that it would override all other laws was excised. Kim Beazley, the Leader of the Opposition, refused to support the Bill and it failed to pass in the Senate. The extent to which the paranoid anxiety about the border inherent in the Australian
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national imaginary had been brought to the surface was evident in the reaction to Labors decision:
The phones were feral from this point right to the end of the election campaign. Labor members would go home to their electorates at the end of this first week and be spat on in the streets. Beazley said, It was unprecedented in my experience. Never had it in my career.59
Howard won the 2001 election with a campaign slogan that echoed what Hawke had said in 1990: We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come. Indeed, the views inherent here go back to Robert Menzies who, in his 1967 book, Afternoon Light: Some Memories of Men and Events, wrote that: It is one of the attributes of sovereignty that any nation may determine for itself how far and on what principles other people may enter or become citizens.60 Labor started detaining boat people as soon as they began arriving in 1989. In 1991 the first remote detention centre was established at Port Hedland, Western Australia.61 Legally, it was claimed this was made possible by Section 89 of the Migration Act 1958. Subsequently, the government passed through Parliament the Migration Amendment Act 1992 which required that a designated person who was a non-citizen should be kept in custody until he or she leaves Australia or is given an entry permit.62 This was the formal beginning of mandatory detention in Australia. As well as being a manifestation of border paranoia, the space of detention, this limbo, marked the non-citizens metaphoric death in their journey to cross the border and become an Australian.63 The idea of Australia as a utopian island which must protect its border has developed many permutations.64 An early version presaging the anxiety demonstrated, and reinforced, by Hawke and Howard can be found in Mike Gores promotional statement for the first gated community in Australia, which he called Sanctuary Cove, in 1987. Gore said:
The streets these days are full of cockroaches and most of them are human. Every man has a right to protect his family, himself and his possessions, to live in peace and safety. Sanctuary Cove is an island of civilisation in a violent world, and we have taken steps to ensure it remains so.65
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Gore did not identify who were the cockroaches. Are they the ethnic Other, the fearsome gang of Mad Max, the non-whites attempting to enter the new protected space of whiteness? Is there a reference here to Australia as a sanctuary which must keep out the threatening boat people? Or is it, as Gore would probably have explained his remarks, simply a recognition of the rising tide of crime in Australia and the need to provide a haven of safety for those who could afford it? It is all these things. The statement works off a deep and abiding structure in the Australian national imaginary. In 1987 it was a signal of the return of an old anxiety, and one that, through the 1980s, had been displaced by the rhetoric of tourism.
Backpackers, Death and W o l f C r e e k
Gore was right about it being a violent world. In 1989, outside Sydney, two backpackers, tourists from Victoria, went missing. In 1990 a British backpacker, Paul Onions, was threatened with a gun but managed to escape. 1991 saw three German backpackers disappear, two women and a man, and in 1992 two British female backpackers vanished, their bodies found later that year. The bodies of the other backpackers were found in 1993. Death had started stalking those tourists that Australia had been courting through the 1980s at the same time that Australian anxiety over boat people had begun to increase. In 1994 Ivan Milat, who became known as The Backpacker Killer, Australias most notorious serial killer, was convicted of seven of these murders though there remain suspicions that he was responsible for more. When Milat was sentenced the trial judge said he was certain that Milat had not committed these crimes on his own, but no-one else has ever been charged.66 How can we place serial killing in a societal context? Or, to put it differently, how can Milat be situated in the Australian national imaginary? In Compulsive Killers, Elliott Leyton argued that:
Our multiple murderers transcend mere catharsis and temporary gratification: their aim is a more ambitious one, a kind of sustained sub-political campaign directed toward the timelessness of oppression and the order of power.67
Further on Leyton suggests that the serial killer is in many senses an embodiment of the central themes in his civilization as well as a
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reflection of that civilizations critical tensions.68 There would seem to have been some increasing confusion among Australians about the treatment of boat people and tourists. As it happens many backpackers are in Australia on working visas. Many of these overstay when their visas run out. In 2005, there were around 5,500 British in this category and 5,200 Americans. As overstayers such people fall into the category of illegal migrants. As it happens, Milat was doing to white backpackers what increasingly anxious and paranoid Australians wanted for the boat peopleto have them erased from Australian territory. The backpackers deaths did not stop with Milats capture. In 2000 fifteen backpackers, seven from Britain, one Irish, one Japanese, one Korean, two Dutch, and three Australians were killed when Robert Long set fire to a hostel in the outback Queensland town of Childers. The news reports said that Long hated backpackers. He is reported to have vowed to drive the backpackers out of town.69 Long had limited horizons; town here can be read as a synecdoche for Australia. In 2001 two English backpackers, Joanne Lees and Peter Falconio were in Australia on a working holiday. In May they left Sydney in an old orange Kombi they had bought. On 14 July they set off from Alice Springs for Darwin. After they were flagged down near Barrow Creek, Falconio disappeared and is presumed murdered. Lees was attacked, bound and gagged, but managed to escape.70 In 2002 a man robbed nineteen-year-old English backpacker, Caroline Stuttle on the Burnett River Bridge in Bundaberg, Queensland, and then threw her over to her death. All these murders should be put in context. In 2001 around 600,000 British tourists alone visited Australia of whom around 115,000 were backpackers. However, that is not the point. Australia is beginning to get a reputation as a dangerous place to visit. The BBC News, for example, on 11 April 2002, remarked that recent much-publicised crimes against Britons in the country may well have raised concerns about the safety of young, often inexperienced, travellers going it alone.71 Commenting on the Falconio murder case, the article goes on:
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the Youth Hostels Association said the ambush could have a serious effect on the number of visitors to the Northern Territory And there were fears it might also affect tourism across the rest of Australia.72
Also in 2002, Channel 4 in Britain aired a documentary called The Trials of Joanne Lees which, lifting off from the Falconio and Lees case, said that: Like most backpackers, Joanne and Peter would be unaware that Australia is easily the worlds most dangerous country for serious assaults, and went on to claim that Adelaide is the murder capital of the world. In another example, Sarah Howden, writing in The Scotsman in January, 2006, connected Australia with Thailand as paradisal destinations for backpackers and went on to write:
But such paradisesespecially in South-East Asiahave a povertystricken population and a criminal underbelly that regards foreigners as fair game. And although Australia may seem a safe English-speaking destination, it has housed some of the most brutal backpacker murders.73
Howden goes on to reference the Childers hostel murders and the Stuttle murder.74 There are a number of obvious reasons why, in spite of the very large numbers of tourists who visit Australia in complete safety, these cases are highlighted and Australias image as a friendly and inviting destination is damaged. For example, precisely because Australia is so safe these exceptional cases appear all the more shocking and consequently get highlighted leading to a perception that Australia is, indeed, unsafe, murderous and deathly. However, the Channel 4 documentary claims, which are so extreme, suggest something else, suggest that Australians anxiety over the penetration of its border, as this has been ramped up constantly since the Hawke governments attitude to the boat people arrivals in the late 1980s, has spilled over not only into Australians own attitude to touristsremember that Long, who set fire to the Childers hostel is said to have hated backpackersbut into how Australia is perceived as a destination from Britain and, we can presume, elsewhere. Since that critical time in 2001 when Howard reconstructed what Morris describes as the future threat of alien invasion held in paranoid anticipation into a present actuality, there has been an increasing blurring in the Australian national imaginary
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of the distinction between unwelcome (non-white) boat people and welcome (white) tourists. The place where this conflation is most obviously played out is in the 2005 film Wolf Creek. Breaking the generic conventions of the serial killer and slasher genres, the film is indisputably the most financially successful Australian horror film ever made. On a budget of $1,100,000 it has grossed worldwide around $25,000,000. In Australia alone by February 2006 Wolf Creek had taken just under $6,000,000. The popularity revealed by this figure suggests the film speaks to something in Australians present-day world view. The plot is quite straightforward. Three young backpackers, two English women and a man from Sydney, buy an old car in Broome where they are staying and plan on driving to Darwin by way of a celebrated meteor crater in the outback at Wolf Creek. When they get to Wolf Creek they find that their car wont start. They are wondering anxiously what they should do when a four-wheel drive turns up. It is driven by a local called Mick Taylor. Taylor offers to fix their car. He finds he cant do this on the spot so he offers to tow them to where he lives where he has spare parts. The three agree. Once at Taylors home, a deserted mine site, Taylor drugs them. A slasher gore-fest follows with Ben as the only survivor of the backpackers. The films conservatism extends to misogyny which expresses the worst aspects of patriarchal Australian society. There is no retribution for Taylor. We last see him striding into the sunset with his gun. We, the audience, know he had done this before and will do it again. We realise that it was he who ensured the backpackers car would not start while they were at the crater. Taylors motivation for the brutal treatment and subsequent murder of all these tourists is left unknown. Here, on the other side of 2001, Milat and his murders served as an inspiration for the character of Taylor and his killings. At the end, Ben, the male backpacker is found collapsed in the outback by some Swedish-speaking tourists. He is tried in Adelaide for the two English girls murders and acquitted. The police do not appear to go after Taylor. If, in Mad Max the law in the outback is stretched increasingly beyond breaking point by the social fragmentation caused by cultural diversity, in Wolf Creek the law no longer seems to have a presence in this outback at all. Greg McLean, who wrote and directed Wolf Creek, has been clear that Mick Taylor deliberately echoes Mick Dundee. Taylor is played
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by John Jarrat, an established Australian actor but whom many Australians know best from his benign appearances in the longrunning lifestyle television show Better Homes and Gardens. This intertextual association makes Jarretts Taylor even more shocking. Does Taylors behaviour, or at least the moral propensity for it, exist in every (male) Australian? Here we should remember the crowd at the 2001 Liberal Party launch giving Ruddock and his announcements about border protection a tumultuous reception. When Taylor meets the backpackers he is as open and friendly as Hogans Dundee. Taylor becomes Dundees awful alterego. The tourists that Hogan and Dundee invite in such a welcoming fashion to Australia are assaulted and murdered in a dry, empty outback by Taylor. The resonances between the two permeate the film. They both, of course, share their forename. Dundee, though, with its Scottishthat is Celtic, but not as different as Irishconnotations suggests a not-quite-absolute Angloness which matches Hogans characters larrikin working-class insider/outsider status, whereas Taylors name identifies him as totally, English, Anglo. Both, though, are thoroughly white in Australian terms. If Taylor is Dundees amoral doppelgnger, the backpackers can be read as boat people. How does this neurotic subtext develop? The film utilises binaries that are well established in the national imaginary: the coast as civilised and populated versus the outback as uncivilised, indeed lawless and empty. In this film this binary is reinforced by the amount of water in the Broome scenes. Structurally, from onshore in Australia, water is associated with civilisation. We see the three backpackers mucking around in the hostels swimming pool. They sleep on the beach and in the dawn before they leave, Liz goes for a swim. In contrast the outback is completely dry. In Australian mythography the drier the outback the more lawless and threatening it is. Crocodile Dundees outback has plenty of watereven if that water does contain crocodiles. However, in Wolf Creek the dryness of the outback has a pathological quality. The three stop for petrol at Emu Creek but we dont see any water. Nor do we see water at Wolf Creek, except for the rain which lends atmosphere, reminding of water where there is none in the ground. One reference point here is the history of Australian explorers search for an inland sea and their misrecognition of the outback as an ocean. Roslynn Haynes writes this about the way Australians have thought about the desert:
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[Charles] Sturt set out into the desert and, predictably, saw reminders (to his mind, evidence) of a sea all around him. Certainly there are many features of the desert landscapes which invite such a comparison and Sturt was by no means the only traveller to mention them.75
If this is a part of the Australian national imaginary, when the friendly Taylor turns up offering to tow the backpackers brokendown car to a place that becomes his version of a detention camp, Taylors actions echo the navys practices in Operation Relex. One function of Relex was to move boats away from Australian territorial waters at first by boarding them and taking control of the steering, later by towing these boats into Indonesian waters.76 If Wolf Creeks outback suggests the ocean and if the backpackers, looking for help, for sanctuary, can be read as boat people, then Taylor becomes a version of Howard, Ruddock, indeed the Australian government and its maritime executive arm, the navy. Even more directly, Taylors deliberate disabling of the backpackers car echoes the inferred actions of a paid Australian agent in the disabling of the engine of the SIEV X and other boats used by asylum seekers. At this point we can think a bit more precisely about Taylor, this very Anglo, white man who is keeping Australia free of these foreigners. He is at least one whole generation away from the backpackers. McLean himself has said this about Taylor: Mick is the 1950s kind of Australian character, hes a very old-fashioned guy.77 Taylor is not as old as Hawke and Howard but he has similar values. Indeed, Howard is often described as attempting to return Australia to a mythic 1950s. In a speech to the Fabian Society in March 2006, for example, Labors Julia Gillard has suggested that: Howards 1950s is a two-dimensional vision, as simplistically coloured as a childs picture book, of the white knights of benevolent businessmen battling Howards childhood bogeymenunions and organised labour.78 Taylors conservative, 1950s, moral values are well exemplified when he and the backpackers are sitting round the campfire before the three fall into a drugged sleep. Taylor asks them where they are from. Ben says he comes from Sydney. Taylor replies that Sydney is the poofter capital of the world. He then breaks the shocked silence that follows by laughing and saying he has never been there.
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The film, then, sets up a generational conflict on top of the city/outback, civilised/uncivilised binary. Ben not only comes from the feminised, cosmopolitan city, he is of a generation that accepts those values and has turned away from the traditional masculine values such as mateship embodied in Mick Dundees ockerism. Bens generation accepts homosexuality and has made Sydneys annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras a highpoint of the citys cultural life. He associates with foreign visitors. Indeed, as the films audience knows, even if Taylor doesnt, he has started an affair with Liz. While it was alright for Mick Dundee to romance Sue Charlton, encouraging tourists, from the xenophobic ideological perspective of Taylor and Wolf Creek twenty years on, having an affair with any foreigner, even if they are English, and white, is disastrous. In Fortress Australia all foreigners, whether tourists or asylum seekers, white or coloured, can be perceived as a threat to national integrity. Liz, also the more self-possessed of the two girls and the one who most threatens Taylors control of the situation, is killed in a way much more horrible than Kristy. Ben is unable to take on the male role and protect the girls. He becomes an embodiment of an Australian cosmopolitanism that is willing to accept boat people. It is no wonder, from Taylors ideological position then, that Ben is literally crucified, his arms outstretched, nailed to a board. This is not the crucifixion of the redeemer, though. This is an image of what he and his generation of cosmopolitan thinkers are doing to Australia. Ben will not protect Australias maritime border. This job falls to the older generation. Taylor, a serial killer like Milat, has to, like the Australian governmentI am thinking here most obviously of the almost-rejected Border Protection Bill legislationprotect Australia from itself. In that same campfire conversation Ben asks Taylor what he used to do on this vast property he describes that straddles three states. Taylor replies: Clearing vermin: roos, horses, pigs, buffalo, you name it. He subsequently launches into an increasingly detailed description of how he killed these animals. The reference to vermin here should immediately remind us of Gores cockroaches, the ones he wanted to keep out of Sanctuary Cove. However the rhetoric of vermin has more profound echoes. The Nazis characterised the Jews as vermin that had to be destroyed, most obviously in the film Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) (1940) where an equivalence was made between rats as the vermin of the animal world and Jews as
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the vermin of the human world. Quoting Michel Foucault, Perera writes that, Racism is what enables the displaced power of sovereignty to take life, or let die, be once again inscribed as a basic mechanism of power as it is exercised in modern States: it is the precondition for exercising the right to kill.79 She comments on the Liberal Party campaign slogan for the 2001 election that I have already mentioned, We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come, that:
This declaration of sovereignty rang out as a call to arms and declaration of war on three levels: the first level is the war on our maritime borders, a call that resonates powerfully with deeply embedded fears of an alien invasion by sea; the second, the War on Terror, declared two weeks after the Tampa arrived in the waters off Christmas Island; and, third, the war at home, which mobilised an already primed and armed body politic against the figure of the unAustralian and outsider.80
Taylor can be read as a soldier in this war. For him, the backpackers are vermin. Wolf Creek is not the only text to express the new amoral conservatism. To take just one more example, in 2006 a new advertisement for VB, Victoria Bitter, was shown on television during sporting events. Like Hogans Ill slip another shrimp on the barbie advertisement, this one too involves a barbecue. This time around, though, the voice-over celebrates real Australians omnivorous appetite for meat. We see all sorts of meat being thrown on a barbie by a group of ockerish white men and the voiceover tells us that Australians eat anything: beef, chicken, pork, lambyou name it, well eat it. The advertisement goes on to tell viewers that: Well even throw our official coat of arms on the barbiethat is, Australians eat kangarooand the voice-over goes on to tell us that Australia is the only country that eats its own national emblem. Kangaroos are also one of the forms of vermin that Mick Taylor used to clear from the property he worked on before he started clearing tourists from Australia. Wolf Creek has no Indigenous characters. Taylors possession of the Australian land is at the price of a reassertion of terra nullius reminiscent of the white Australians on Cronulla Beach who claim they grew here. Clearing kangaroos, then, works as a substitution for the genocide of Aborigines. Eating
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kangaroo takes on a cannibalistic quality that metaphorises the serving up and consumption of Aboriginal culture that is produced for tourists. More, Irene Watson argues that:
[White Australians] anticipate coming into their own state of lawfulness through the consuming of our sovereign Aboriginality. In this colonising process of us becoming white and white becoming Indigenous, white settlement deems itself as coming into its own legitimacy, as whites come into the space of our freedom to roam as Aboriginal peoples over our Aboriginal places and spaces. We become cannibalised.81
If Morriss understanding of the filmic Paris is of a town that cannibalistically feeds on strangers, this VB advertisement gives us an image of a white Australia which, inward looking, amorally consumes with relish the foundation of its own national identity. Wolf Creek is simply a weathervane. The ethical and literal violence inflicted on asylum seekers has spread through the community. The uncritical heroising of a maniacal serial killer is now socially acceptable. Yes, we, the audience, know Taylor is bad, but the last time we see him, in that shot I have already mentioned, striding purposefully into the sunset, rifle in hand, is an image that could be straight out of a traditional Western where the hero, having saved the town, goes off on his own to look for other wrongs to right. Taylor is saving Australia and is licensed to use any means he can. At the same time, Ben, the survivor of Taylors victimisation, was prosecuted for the girls murders. Blaming the victims has become an accepted practice in Australia where, for example, the government tells us that asylum seekers have only themselves to blame for their woes if they are prepared to attempt to reach Australia in unseaworthy boats. Since Max lost his family and became mad, no longer working within legal means to destroy those that threaten what was left of Australian civilisation, the Australian moral order has become increasingly unsettled. Like Taylor, it would seem that the Australian government, regardless of its political persuasion, and the Australian people generally, believes that any action that saves Australia from the mythical impending apocalypse of being overrun by Ruddocks 20 million refugees looking for a home is acceptable, regardless of its morality.
* * *
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In early 2006 Tourism Australia launched a new tourist promotion campaign. The advertisement showed a sequence of iconic Australian images starting with an outback pub followed by a shot of camels on the beach. Each image is followed by a tag-line suggesting an invitation. In one, we see a group of young Indigenous people dancing and a young woman tells us: Weve been rehearsing for over 40,000 yearsa statement that cannibalistically rewrites Aboriginal genocide in the benign terms of a present-day cultural welcome for the consumption of visitors. In spite of this recuperation those Indigenous bodies haunt this colonial landscape. In another image, a young woman in a bikini swims out of the sea and says: Weve saved you a spot on the beach. The advertisement ends with the same woman standing on a deserted beach with the seashore at her side. She is white, blonde and blueeyed, an eighteen-year-old, soon-to-be-famous model named Lara Bingle. We know now the freight of connotations this border carries, especially since 2001. We know the anxious, paranoid undertones associated with boat people that complicate any invitation to cross this border. As Australians we know about the ghostly bodies piling up on this beach. Is the spot saved for our new visitors saved for them alive or dead? Ruddocks horror videos, described in my Prologue, mark the overlapping connections between this advertisement and Wolf Creek in the Australian national imaginary. This advertisement to tempt tourists begins to seem like a threat, as though something lurks beneath its enticements. It is no wonder, then, that what the young woman says sounds simultaneously ordinary and unremarkable and also quite aggressive even to Australians. Are all Australians now, implicitly, serial killers? The British Advertising Clearance Centre actually banned the advertisement, asking for her question to be cut before they would reinstate it. The ban was overturned on appeal. She asks: So where the bloody hell are you? The only possible answer, from boat people and tourists alike, would seem to be: Too fucking frightened to come!
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Chapter Ten
Security Politics and Us: Sovereignty, Violence and Power after 9/11
Anthony Burke
Jaded as I am, I rarely feel fear when a politician speaksunless its a declaration of war. However this time I felt a surge of dread. I knew what was coming; we had lived it before. An innocuous Prime Ministerial announcement, then an off-the-cuff remark by the Attorney-General, and that cultural and political space we have lived and fought since 11 September 2001, railed and marched against, denounced and deconstructed, puffed itself up, gathered new energy and threatened to seize our future once more. Those with vivid memories of the Tampa crisis of 2001, of its inauguration of a cascading politics of fear, xenophobia, insecurity and coercion, culminating in a western invasion of Iraq and terrorist bombings in Bali, Madrid, Jakarta and London, will recognise a familiar sense of dismay as the politicians speak. I recognised a sinister political technology humming once more into action: security.1 Again, as in September 2001, the stimulus was a major terrorist attack against the vulnerable heart of a world city, a centre of culture, capital and geopolitical power that is spatially remote from usvastly sobut culturally close; an ontological extension of home, a source and harbour for the Australian identity. The 7 July bombings in the London tubemore than the greater tragedies of Madrid, Bali, Riyadh or Sharm-el-Sheikhseemed disturbing because they occurred at a place that is represented as a part of us, a wider container for an idea of Australianness with strong historical roots. Hence the subsequent spate of headlines and government
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activism, only a part of which can be put down to sensible defensive activity and planning. I think, in particular, of Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, on the steps of an Adelaide hotel, casually warning Australians that they should fear and expect a major terrorist attack on their soil.2 He was followed by Prime Minister John Howard a few weeks later, announcing that he was calling a special meeting of the Council of Australian Governments and warning us that we need to rethink our understanding of liberty in a democracy. The most important civil liberty I have, and you have, he said, is to stay alive and be free from violence and death. That meeting of state premiers and Commonwealth ministers agreed on a series of counter-terrorist measures which included sweeping new legislation that overturned longstanding principles of criminal law and revived controversial laws abandoned in parliamentary negotiations in 2002, laws that would provide Australian federal security agencies with sweeping new powers of surveillance, detention, arrest and control.3 When the Bills were unveiled in late 2005, they included sweeping sedition provisions, the capacity to place individuals under control orders (which may include house arrest and the wearing of electronic tracking devices), and warrantless search and seizure powers for police.4 To his arguments for such coercive new powers, John Howard added a revealing statement about identity: We need each other and we need to work with each other, he said, to reassert the fundamental values of Australia.5 In this, he was echoing Tony Blair, who stated on 7 July that We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism that is not an attack on one nation, but all nations and on civilized people we will not allow violence to change our societies or our values.6 In a similar vein, Queen Elizabeth II stated that Those who perpetrate these brutal acts against innocent people should know that they will not change our way of life.7 These comments come in the wake of a dark series of achievements and programs over the past few years carried out in the name of security. After the debacle of the lead-up to Timor Lestes independence referendum (which momentarily overturned three decades of assumptions that the Suharto regime was an essential bulwark for Australias national security), came 9/11, the storming of the Tampa and the Pacific Solution, the deterrence of asylum seekers with draconian mandatory detention policies, and
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thence threats to make preemptive strikes into the region and our participation in the military operations against Afghanistan and Iraq. Alongside this came increased cooperation with the US and regional states, especially Indonesia, on counter-terrorism and peoplesmuggling issues. All these policies were explained and defended by government ministers as a defence of Australias territorial integrity, its way of life, its sovereignty, and its values. While Howard, Blair and the Queen were certainly right to condemn the London attacks in forthright terms, there was a larger cultural and political apparatus lurking behind their words, as this brief historical survey demonstrates. As our leaders spoke repetitively of the need to protect our way of life, they invoked three dangerous, self-regarding axioms: We are insecure. We are good. We must act. These axioms illuminate what sovereignty is today, in its most dominant and pervasive form. In this chapter I wish to ask some questions about these axiomsto show how they signify a particularly powerful and dangerous security politics and a fearful, exclusivist and repressive formation of sovereignty. In turn I wish to explore how, in the face of its social and psychic power, politics might be rethought or even overcome. After all, what do values have to do with security? Security with identity? Or security with freedom from violence and death? How is security about these things, and for whom? Is sovereignty an unproblematic way of thinking about them? Political leaderships speak as if the answers are self-evident, but this chapter makes no such assumption. Instead, behind such linkages it finds a disturbing and terribly effective form of politics that must be unpacked and resisted. However, the form and tactics of such a resistance are not self-evident. To find and enact such a resistance, in societies deeply penetrated by the authoritative forms of language and being marked by sovereignty and security, requires efforts to go beyond conventional liberal responses. A contemporary resurgence of racism, political opportunism, white anxiety or paranoid nationalismthe kind of analysis pursued by Ghassan Hage for exampleis certainly part of the explanation. However, it is by itself inadequate, and hence solutions based on such an analysis may also be wanting.8 We have a double task: to adequately theorise and understand the true complexity of the political formations that are in operation, and, on the basis of that understanding, begin to think through ways of countering them.
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Some might respond that terrorism does exist, that the 9/11 attacks and the Bali bombings occurred, that Australians have been named in Al-Qaeda propaganda, and that Government has a legitimate responsibility to provide us with security against such threatsthat this is a fundamental task with which it is entrusted. My analysis is not meant to belittle the seriousness of such threats, nor is it an argument against sensible and prudent counter-terrorist policies or security policy in general. However, it is important to understand that security threats are not self-evident, but are the product of elaborate systems of filtering, bias and representation; and they do not develop externally to us, suddenly erupting like some long-dead volcano, but occur in complex interplay with our actions and arguments. It is misleading and dangerous for policymakers to speak as if the conflicts represented by terrorism occur between worlds that are self-contained before and after the instant of violencebetween identities and social systems which otherwise do not touch or interweave. In this light, policy choices are far from obvious. They are fraught with hidden dangers and contradictions that need to be thought through carefully. Political leaders and security managers consistently speak from the standpoint of a stable and unchanging ontology, as if they can know and interpret who we are. But when security politics is in play, are we in fact us? Are we being secured or made by a power we can barely see or understand? Is there a larger cultural politics at work that could in fact be inimical to our security and our survival? Could the operation of a politics of security and sovereignty in fact be central to defining us, and our others, in ways that threaten the security of us all?
Security, Sovereignty and Power
We are insecure. Key to the questions I want to ask is the assumption that security is a fundamental expectation and priority that links government with citizens and licenses extraordinary measures in times of emergency. This is central to its power as a social and political technology: as I explained in In Fear of Security, security is less an end-state we can achieve than a network of practices and techniques which produce and manipulate bodies, identities, spaces and flows.9 I understand security as mobilising what Michel Foucault called the political double-bind: a system of power that
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combines totalising forms of governmental, economic and geopolitical power over states and populations with an individualising power (exercised also by governments, but also social institutions and both private and public forms of language) over bodies and minds. This form of power is all too often in play when security and sovereignty are mentioned. Security and sovereignty are both signifierssigns and systems of social meaningand structural apparatuses which link states, governments, institutions, cultures, corporations and people in sophisticated, and often quite diabolical, ways. How they are linked and arranged, and the forms and meanings they take, affect real flows of people, force, information and capital, and in turn affect the kind of lives it is possible for ourselves and others to live. What is especially striking and dangerous is the role that the body plays as a metaphor in these forms of power: the way in which the sovereign nation-state is imagined as the body-politic of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, an undivided body that contains us and expresses our collective will; as a body that suffers from all the fears and vulnerabilities of the flesh, yet also collects all the powers of its members into a greater whole (a Leviathan in Hobbess words); as a body that cannot bear what is alien and that it either must expel or assimilate and normalise. In short, the body-politic , the new formation that makes security, modernity and progress possible, is premised on a primal estrangement from the Other, who takes many forms: the criminal, the mad, and the native.10 To these we can now add the Muslim, the terrorist and the refugee. This is what I have called the architectonic of security: an overarching formation of politics and existence present in all states, one that not only underpins constitutions and systems of government authority and organisation, but forms a hidden bedrock of cultural common sense and social power. Foucault rightly identified a tight linkage between forms of totalising and individualising power, which means that we must understand how sovereignty can be not merely a juridical structure at the apex of a state11 but a form of power that reaches into our souls, that acts as a blackmail towards being. In this way it is easy for policymakers to represent threats to particular bodies or institutions (terrorist violence) or administrative challenges to state capacity (people movements) as threats to the entire political body of the nation. At the same time, this constitutes the insecure national self as an identity
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set off from others, as embodying values and traditions held by all its memberswhich are now doubly under threat. When combined with the enormous capacities of modern government, this ontology of permanent threat then generates often harsh and hubristic forms of instrumental action in the pursuit of security, of which militarism and repressive legal mechanisms are the most common examples. Given that political leaders can use authoritative existential claims to security to defend their policies, political consent from citizens is easy to obtain. After all, as John Howards comments after the London bombings assert, our very survival is at stake. Given that one of Foucaults most central claims is that power implies resistance, and cannot be possessed but only exercised in a perpetually restless and risky way, the ontology of security and sovereignty forms a powerful political tool for elites who otherwise may be supporting policies that are controversial, abusive or grossly unjust. This is why security is such a disturbingly effective political technology.
A New Cold War? The Neoliberal War on Terror
The operation of this politics, however, cannot be described as entirely cynicalbecause this security ontology shapes policymakers own convictions and ways of seeing. It provides them with ready-made explanations, with a prism through which to view past and future events. This presents us with two closely related dilemmas. One is to explain why governments which have so aggressively sought to undermine national economic sovereignty with a neoliberal economic agenda of dismantling barriers to trade, investment and capital have also turned to rigid and exclusivist defences of national sovereignty, borders and security which take the general form of racism at home and militarism abroad. The second is to explain why, after 9/11, so many western policymakers chose to see the conflict in terms of a clash of civilisations and valuesas a new Cold War. Even if some limited military action had been taken after 9/11, this need not have implied imagining the conflict as a stark metaphysical endgame. Yet as late as March 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told US forces aboard the USS Port Royal in Sydney during her visit to Australia: Were in this global war on terror not because we chose this fight, but because the United States of America was attacked with impunity on September 11th by those who desired to unravel our way of life.12 In the same
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month her colleague Donald Rumsfeld, in Senate testimony, drew a deliberate parallel between the current crisis and the Cold War. While this era is different and the enemy today is different the task is the same as before:
our national leaders understood that a Cold War had been declared on our countryon the free worldwhether we liked it or not. [They understood] that we had to steel ourselves against an expansionist enemy that was determined to destroy our way of life.13
In many ways this reflects the desire of many US policymakers, after the fall of the Soviet Union, to find a new enemy to make foreign policy meaningful. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is famous for his remark, after the Gulf war, that Im running out of demons Im down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.14 More deeply, it reflects their inability to think of the identity of the United States as a global actor in ways different from that offered by the ontology of security and sovereignty. This was set out at a crude metaphysical level by the pro-Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt, who in his Concept of the Political argued that politics can only be conceived in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy. The figure of the enemy helps to constitute the state as the specific entity of a people and [if the people fail to do so] it ceases to exist politically. In turn, he argues, war follows from enmity the friend, enemy and combat concepts receive real meaning precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing.15 This ontology was translated into US Cold War strategy in 1950 by a select committee of officials headed by the hawkish Paul H Nitze, who drafted the now infamous National Security Council memo (NSC68) as the Korean war began and McCarthyism developed momentum. The similarities between NSC68 and contemporary government representations of terrorism are striking in that both represent the conflict in terms of an urgent, fearsaturated metaphysics. NSC68 described the Soviet Union as animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, which seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world conflict therefore has become endemic.16 Indeed, the document argued, The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfilment or destruction not only of this republic but of civilization itself :
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Thus unwillingly our free society finds itself mortally challenged by the Soviet system. No other value system is so wholly irreconcilable with ours, so implacable in its purpose to destroy ours, so capable of turning to its own uses the most dangerous and divisive trends in our society, no other so skilfully and powerfully evokes the elements of irrationality in human nature everywhere.17
When Administration officials describe the Al-Qaeda terrorists as enemies of freedom and heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism, and declare that We cannot deal with terrorists the struggle can only end with their complete and permanent destruction, we are moving in the realm of Schmitt and NSC68. When the conflict is thought of in this way, we face not merely irresistible pressure for the militarisation of the struggle but the search inward for the traces of the enemy without. We witness the perpetual anxiety of the Body-Politic about its own integrity. As Schmitt argues, The requirement for internal peace compels [the state] in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy if a part of the population declares that it no longer recognises enemies, then, depending on the circumstances, it joins their side and aids them.18 During the Cold War this search took the form of McCarthyism, and had its Australian parallels in the attempt by the Menzies Government to ban the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and tar the Australian Labor Party with the communist brush. Menzies argued that the bill to ban the CPA derived from the Constitutions defence powers and was designed to give the Government power to deal with the Kings enemies in this country [It is] a self-defending attack on treason and fifth-columnism wherever they can be found.19 William Connolly offers a useful way of thinking about the psychological atmosphere created at such times. In his view, the various features of McCarthyismlegislative committees, judicial decisions, press campaigns, organised rumours, FBI investigations, employee blacklists, vigilante actions and morecreated a dark resonance machine much more ferocious than the sum of its parts.20 He argues that The Cold War generated McCarthyism as an extreme response to threats that the Soviet Union posed to Christian faith and capitalism together the McCarthyism of our day, if it arrives, will connect internal state security to an exclusionary version of the Judeo-Christian tradition.21 And so it
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has arrived, with the London bombings being followed by fears of the enemy within and the swift moves, within Australia, to connect the fear of home-grown terrorism with the threat allegedly posed by the religion of Islam and its associated cultural forms. In the last two years a number of senior Howard Government Ministers has held forth in this vein. In late 2005 former Education (now Defence) Minister Brendan Nelson lectured Australian Muslims on the need for them to teach their children Australian values and beliefs, and directed that if they refused to do so, they should clear off . MP Bronwyn Bishop argued that girls should not be able to wear their headscarves to school because they are an iconic item of defiance a challenge to our freedoms and way of life.22 And in February 2006, Treasurer and Deputy Liberal leader Peter Costello gave an address to the Sydney Institute disparaging mushy multiculturalism and insisting that even though Australia is an immigrant nation it has a predominant culture and a predominant language. Those who become citizens must change their identity, he argued, and they must observe the Australian values upheld in the citizenship oath: From this time forward under God I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey.23 The image of Australian Muslims as a potential fifth-column was introduced by Costellos citation of the views of the notorious fundamentalist cleric Ben Brika (who insists that Sharia law is equal to federal law, and was arrested and charged in late 2005 with being a member of a terrorist group) as if they represented the Islamic mainstream. To appreciate the truly sinister rhetorical strategy in Costellos speech we must consider that the mention of Brika immediately follows this statement:
Terrorists and those who support them do not acknowledge the rights and liberties of othersthe right to live without being maimed, the right to live without being bombedand as such they forfeit the right to join in Australian citizenship. The refusal to acknowledge the rule of law as laid down by democratic institutions stabs at the heart of the Australian compact. The radical Muslim cleric Ben Brika 24
A dark resonance machine is indeed at work in this speech, one aimed squarely at the fearful hearts of white Australians. The
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insidious juxtaposition of terrorism and Islamic religious law creates a powerful, implied message that states: Muslim values are a threat to us if they are not stamped out we may die. One could question Costellos assertions about the moral sanctity (and even the actuality) of Australian values such as secularism,25 democracy and the rule of law, given the deep involvement of sections of the Christian churches in party politics throughout Australian history, the Howard Governments disregard for fairness and the rule of law when dealing with asylum seekers, its disrespect for democratic transparency and accountability in its conduct of much government policy (especially security policy), and its neglect of the rights and liberties of those Iraqis bombed and maimed in the course of an imperialist war it joined without the legal imprimatur of the United Nations. But perhaps I am splitting hairs; as I have argued previously, the Howard Governments discourse about security has the quality of a hyperreal simulation divorced from any recognisable facts.26 The danger lies in the frightening utility of this discourse for the construction of nationalist subjectivities and for the operation of a security politicsone that finds fertile minds to work on, judging by a 2006 poll suggesting that few Australians know much about Islam and what knowledge they do have is dominated by critiques and stereotypes of Islam.27 Ironically, it was one of the Howard Governments most senior security officials, ASIO Director-General, Paul OSullivan, who in a recent speech that pondered the nature of the threat posed by the home-grown terrorist, cautioned strongly against stereotyping entire groups of people as threats. Utilising information gleaned from investigations of the London bombings, he argued that People can move from being apparently normal members of the community into being much more actively involved in terrorist activities in a very short period of time [and] the speed of this radicalising process means that categorising people is futile, and Arbitrary and ill-informed speculation about the number of would be terrorists in the community is unhelpful and ultimately pointless.28 If much of this resort to national security ontologies is based on the anxious reiteration of three centuries of common sense about sovereignty and the state, what are the more self-consciously cynicali.e. tacticalelements at work? Why denigrate multiculturalism, and insist on such a culturally exclusivist image of the
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nation as synonymous with security and sovereignty? My theory which in slightly different ways is echoed by thinkers such as Ghassan Hage and Zygmunt Baumanis that it is at least partly related to the phenomenon of economic globalisation and the militantly neoliberal character of the governments promoting it. Governments with a transparent agenda of dismantling the welfare state and promoting neoliberal economic reforms in labour law, corporate regulation and the environment have found rhetorics of security and patriotism a dangerously effective political and subjectifying tool. Such changes produce radical uncertainty into the lives of many, especially working peopleyet these very people now form a solid basis of voter support for the Howard Government, for example. Consider the uncanny parallels between Howards discourse of home and Baumans analysis of postmodern uncertainty.29 If Bauman diagnoses a problem that Howards policies exemplify, Howard offers ready-made psychological solutions to it. In Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Bauman outlines the socioeconomic features of what he calls postmodern uncertainty that produces an atmosphere of ambient fear. These features include a geopolitical new world disorder, economic deregulation, the weakening of neighbourhood and familial support networks, and new image industries.30 They undermine both economic and existential security, especially the natural human desire for stable and secure boundaries and life-chances:
the boundaries which tend to be most strongly desired and most acutely missed are those of a rightful and secure place in society, of a space unquestionably ones own, where one can plan ones life with a minimum of interference, play ones role in a game where the rules do not change overnight and without notice, act reasonably and hope for the better contemporary men and women live with the identity-problem unsolved. They suffer, one might say, from a chronic absence of resources with which they could build a truly solid and lasting identity, anchor it and stop it from drifting.31
Bauman speaks of a problem related to the stabilisation of individual subjectivity in a rapidly changing world populated by those who are different and strange. Strangers, he argues, run the risk of appearing slimy to such people, and xenophobic response is an ever-present potential. Howard pours oil on these flames and
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fans them higher, while offering citizens an illusory (yet comforting) structure of psychic reassurance based around patriotic symbols and an exclusivist discourse of national being. In a 1996 speech he stated that The task of modern government is to maintain the momentum for the changes which are necessarywhilst to the extent that it is possible, to cushion the personal and social consequences of that change.32 The cushion would be provided by the Menzian concept of home, which provides a sense of security:
I believe that the concept of home is a compelling notion in our psyche The loss of security challenges traditional notions of home and people feel the need to react to alienation. Part of the job of a Prime Minister in these contemporary times is, whilst enthusiastically embracing change and globalisation, he or she must embrace what is secure, what people see as home I want to provide Australians with this security as we embrace, as we must and will, a new and vastly different future.33
This speech was made many years prior to the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror, and the fourth wave of asylum seekers, but already Howard had set out an enabling template of governmentality that he could add to and utilise when necessary. As Fiona Allon remarks, while this may appear to be a contradictory packageintroducing economic reforms whose net effect is greater social change while simultaneously smoothing out the exigencies of the present in favour of an illusory pastthe result of the 1996 Federal election proves a winning combination. Howard had successfully tapped into the current of nostalgia running through a community apprehensive about the pace and nature of change.34 Hage critiques the psychological promises offered by such ideas of security and home, seeing in them an impoverished form of comfort that is socially divisive and damaging. Commenting on dominant ideas of security evoking base concepts of fixedness inside an enclosing space or container, he suggests that This is at best an incomplete definition of security and homeliness. Alone it provides an imaginary of claustrophobia rather than homeliness or security. What is needed is a supportive social and economic structure thatlike the parents cuddlemanages to embrace and protect and allow the child [or citizen] to contemplate the future and move toward what it has to offer. This, ideally, creates a reciprocal structure of carebeing cared for and caring-backthat, when
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transposed to the nation-state, ideally operates between two neverto-be-reached extremes: where openness becomes lack of protection and where protection becomes claustrophobia.35 However, The uncaring penal state of transcendental capitalism and its paranoid obsession with border controls is no longer allowing us to even think of [caring] as a mode of attachment to the nation. The dominant mode of subjectivity produced in such a societywhich, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, is eliminating the very idea of society, of commitment to some form of distribution of hopeis that of worrying. Worrying, Hage concludes, exerts a form of symbolic violence over the field of national belonging worriers cannot care for their nation because they have not been and are not being properly cared for by it.36
The Good Conscience of Sovereign Violence
We are good. The analyses of Bauman, Hage, Allon and others provide a very suggestive account of how and why there has been such a nasty convergence of neoliberal politics, exclusionary nationalism and repressive approaches to strangers at the turn of the twenty-first century. Yet there remains a need to re-emphasise and flesh out securitys combination of individualising and totalising power; to link the psychic structure of resentment, anxiety and negativity that these writers illuminate, with ongoing projects of national representation and action that connect sovereignty over the self with sovereignty exercised by the nation. I am thinking in particular of ways that an emotionally positive structure of narrative and affect works in tandem with negative projections of threat, illegitimacy and difference. These help us to better understand how the political double-bind of security works: how images of the (individual and national) self are given content and reinforced. If we know the other is bad, isnt that enough? Why must we insist we are good? Hage, for example, tends to place the burden of contemporary xenophobia upon the no-hopers produced by transcendental capitalism and the policies of neoliberal government urban dwellers paradoxically stuck in insecure jobs, farmers working day and night without getting anywhere, small business people struggling to keep their businesses goingthese groups are all suffering hope scarcity. These are todays paranoid nationalists
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who project the fear that is inherent in the fragility of their relationship with their nation onto everything classified as alien. While this is certainly incisive as to why the Howard Governments refugee policies were so popular, victimology provides only a partial explanation. Firstly, talk about security has its own power, because nested as it is in the exclusivist ontology of the security stateit has enormous authority as a demand addressed to being, as a statement of existential necessity. How can we object when we are consistently told that our survival, our values, our very selves, are at stake? Good subjects internalise their subordination to the nation-state and its security managers, within the deepest structures of their identity. In such a context, a return to social democracy, to an economically nurturing societywhile perhaps making some people less psychologically susceptible to xenophobic arguments and more open to the presence of others in their communitieswill do little as such to undermine the power of security politics, which is invisibly lodged deep in our political tradition and can seemingly be activated at will. Secondly, not all are losers from the globalising neoliberal system andnotwithstanding the ever-greater privatisation of risk and social welfarethey perceive themselves as benefiting from current social and economic arrangements. In such subjects, satisfaction coexists with a low-level anxiety. This form of subjectivity can perhaps be mapped ethically onto the status of advanced liberal democracies within the global political and economic system that enjoy standards of living, health, environmental integrity and access to spaces of international power far above the majority of the world populations (some of whom, by seeking to migrate, directly and uncomfortably raise the issue of such inequality). Resentment and the denial of empathy37or at least a defensive impulse to preserve what one has in a world imagined as limited in its hospitalitymay certainly be one set of emotions felt by more successful subjects, but there must be a richer positive content to them as well. My hunch is that we need to add an understanding of psychological structures of pride, satisfaction and hierarchy to those of resentment: those affective experiences which add a positive content to nationalist subjectivity and provide the sense of home Howard speaks of. In this sense, insecurity and xenophobia are complemented by narrations of the good selfindividual and national. This helps to build and support a form of successful middle-class
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and elite subjectivity (in which vulnerable members of the community can also participate, at least illusorily) that buttresses a generally selfish attitude to local and global ethical demands. Generosity is not precluded from this way of being, but it is never an unconditional form of generosity, ontologically prior to existence, in Emmanuel Levinass sense. Rather, it is one that is exercised with discretion by the state and ultimately reinforces the exclusionary and self-regarding prerogatives of sovereignty. Such discourses of the good self are operative when, in the wake of terrorist atrocities, leaders speak in terms of opposing values, of oppositions between barbarism and civilisation, but they also link in complex enabling ways with larger narratives of history, identity and progress. In Australia, this is where the history wars meet security politics. Howards notorious dislike for black armband history is by now well known; a sign of a systematic assault upon interpretations of Australian history which cast doubt on the moral integrity of the colonisation project and its narrative of progress. At stake here was both a particular, unbroken narrative of national sameness and identity (one rigidly intolerant of claims of difference and historical reparation) and a determination to thwart contemporary claims to power and agency on the part of the Stolen Generations, traditional Aboriginal landowners, the political left and migrant communities.38 Attacking the Keating government for an attempted heist of Australian nationalism, Howard disingenuously claimed that the national identity develops in an organic way over time.39 I would argue, with other writers like Carol Johnson, that Howard has been even more aggressive in his attempt to construct, mould and exploit a structure of Australian identity as guiltless, superior, fearful and separateone that hides within its facade of harmony and consensus (of common decency and the fair go) a subtle politics of division and threat. He lectured Indigenous people to see themselves as part and parcel of a harmonious Australian community, even when the price of harmony was a brazen rejection of any recognition of the crimes committed against their ancestors and communities in the very process of building the nation. There is something deeply misleading about Howards arguments hereas if it is other politicians who manufacture, manipulate and twist a pre-existing identity that he truly understands, and can nurture and defend. He asks us to believe that government is about
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tending a garden when it is really about making and remaking worlds. His words efface and obscure the very politics he is putting into play. In such a presentation of the good self it is important not only that ones history be unblemished, but that present actions can be explained by reference to a proud tradition. I recall my shock after the 1999 intervention in Timor at how Howard, in his speech to parliament, put Australias actions, and the insecurity and suffering of the Timorese, to use in a narrative of unbroken national military honour: Our soldiers go to East Timor as part of a great Australian military tradition, which has never sought to impose the will of this country on others, but only to defend what is right.40 This was extraordinary given Australias appalling record in relation to East Timor: twenty-five years of supporting Indonesias claim to the territory, a willing blind eye to routine human rights violations, and an expansive defence cooperation program (including exercises with the feared special forces command Kopassus), culminating in a year of diplomatic weakness and mismanagement. Prior to September 1999 the Howard government actually delayed international action in the hope of not offending Indonesia, even though many East Timorese were losing their lives and signs of the coming disaster were everywhere.41 The intervention was certainly admirable, but it was not occasion for national pridemore an expiation of shame, which Australias rigid stance towards post-independence oil negotiations with the new Timor Leste government has only revived. Most recently the tragedy of the 2004 tsunami, which took over 250,000 lives, was put to use for the same end. As Suvendrini Perera wrote about a radio interview in which Howard effused that The response of Australians to this disaster has just been so overwhelming and so generous and so decent and so good that it makes you very proud indeed to be an Australian:
Australians empathetic response to the tsunami is repeatedly reworked to solidify distance and restage difference. It serves as another opportunity for national self-definition and a new platform for the repetition of favourite slogans in the domestic culture wars. Decency and goodness acquire an almost ontological status as the focus shifts from the suffering of the dispossessed and bereaved to a celebration of Australianness. A sense of connectedness with the region is remade into an act of nationalist consolidation and self-
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congratulation In place of a sense of shared vulnerability in the face of disaster or an affirmation of human connection, a distinct Australian identity is asserted that lays claim to benevolence as its defining national characteristic.42
Sometimes such statements of goodness are strategically deployed to evade questions of responsibility for the past, or claims to justice in the present, as Irene Watsons chapter in this book so devastatingly demonstrates; and sometimes they are deployed to license systematic cruelty. Consider Howards argument at the time of the Tampa crisis that Whilst this is a humanitarian decent country we are not a soft touch and we are not a nation whose sovereign rights are going to be trampled on.43 This constitutes a brazen statement of good conscience that justifies the camps and detention centres, the brutality and perversion of legal process, and the construction of a terrifying moral and ontological border in which sovereignty is at once a power to define, contain, imprison and excludea sovereignty whose physical borders are endlessly remappable (inwards in the case of migration zones, outwards in the case of sea) but whose borders of community and being are bricked up ever higher and tighter. I think of Levinass denunciation of modern freedom for being based in the permanent self-reproduction of sovereignty and its powersa freedom unhindered by any memory or remorse, and whose ethic of action is fuelled by an unrestrained good conscience.44 In this light I have written of the Bush Administrations relentless invocation of freedom after 9/11 to name military operations, strategic objectives and vast campaigns of democratic and geopolitical changethe forward strategy of freedom in the Middle-East to which we have nailed our flag. This idealism plays out a belief in American universality and goodness, the conviction that, as Bush said after 9/11, It was as if our entire country looked into a mirror and saw our better selves. Likewise I think of the centrist pro-peace Israeli official I met last year who could not accept the principle of the right of return for Palestinian refugees because it demands that Israel admit it was born in sin.45 This is a pathology that is a distinctive feature of the modern sovereign state, especially those with imperial and settler-colonial historieshistories still continuing if Iraq and the occupation are any guidethat are enabled by a refusal of historical complexity,
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moral ambiguity, political constraint and ethical responsibility. This is revived in the war on terror by the language that opposes terrorist values to those of democracy (which we are to assume is, if nothing else, not terrorist), and insists on conceiving terrorist threats as opposed to a body-politic and a civilisation that is morally, politically and historically innocent.
The Instrumental Good Conscience of Sovereignty
We must act. With such a politics as a background, action is seen as a panacea for insecurity, even if more insecurity should issue from it. Political action in such circumstances contracts to the use of what Schmitt called the decision, made by the sovereign (all too often without regard for parliaments or the normal rule of law) to meet an existential emergency. This legal-ontological formation of sovereign action and power then combines with a confidence that decisions can be translated into actions that will have a predictable and manageable cause and effect; in short, that violence can be used to achieve the political end that is security. New technological developments such as the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs the convergence of communications, computer systems and weaponshave only added to the confidence of security managers that events can be placed under their control.46 This is not merely often immoral, but is deeply dysfunctional and counterproductive. Because dominant forms of modern political and strategic reason understand action in a very instrumental way, and masculinist imagery lauds toughness, decisiveness and aggression as political values, coercive and military solutions seem attractive. At least initially, they can also play well in the media and among voters, who have been conditioned by the political doublebind of security to look to their leaders for protection in times of crisis. When added to the sense of good conscience with which freedom operates, and the need to maintain postures of historical innocence and honour, it leads to the conclusion that we cannot allow a discourse that explains or empathises with the reasons for terrorist violence (or develop a policy based on such explanations) especially if part of that chain of events are actions such as our own. This generates a very dangerous structure of cultural delusion. We have to wonder at the paradoxical conclusion of a 2005 Sydney Morning Herald poll summarised thus: Two-thirds of
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Australians, including half of Coalition voters, believe Australia is more at risk of terrorist attack because of the Iraq war, and are willing to sacrifice privacy and civil liberties for protection from it. The poll revealed relatively strong support for giving police the authority to shoot to kill when pursuing terrorist suspects, although most survey respondents drew the line at detaining suspects indefinitely without charge. Although 28 per cent favoured such a strong measure, 68 per cent were against it. However, 56 per cent supported the detention of terrorist suspects for up to three months, without charge.47 Even if new laws allowing such detention are enacted, the Government will no doubt still maintain, as it did in its most recent foreign policy White Paper, that Australia is a liberal democracy with a proud commitment to political and economic freedom.48 The Herald poll revealed that only one per cent of voters thought the invasion of Iraq, ostensibly carried out to prevent the spread of terrorism, had actually made Australia safer from it. Nevertheless, 30 per cent [of Australians] supported the Governments position on Australias vulnerability to attack which is that the Iraq war made no difference because Australia was already a target for who we are, not what weve done.49 Against that view could be put the Indonesian police interview with one of the Jakarta embassy bombers, who stated that: The purpose in blowing up the embassy was because the Australian Government is one of the American allies that gives most support to the American policy of slaughtering Muslims in Iraq and our goal is for Australia to discontinue pressuring Muslims, especially in Iraq.50 Yet the Government and its supporters believe, against all the evidence, that cleaving closely to the side of the United States is essential for our security, as is defying international law in joining a western invasion and occupation of Iraq. They see armed force as a simple answer to security uncertainty; action alone is reassuring.51 It is my view that such powerful discourses of historical innocence not only compound and continue injustice, especially against Australias Indigenous societies; they are deeply misguided ways of understanding and ameliorating contemporary insecurities. Whereas Indigenous peoples have chosen to continue their struggles peacefully, some Arabs and Muslims have chosen to respond with a similar violence to that which they see being perpetrated on their communities daily. No talk of values, and no
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use of force, will reassure or disarm them (after all, their most potent and tragic weapons are often merely their bodies and their wills).52 Talk of values will only antagonise them, and hence the discourse of historical innocence both prolongs injustice and rebounds on us in insecurity. The philosopher Raimond Gaita understands the dangers involved in the double standards at work. He wrote in March 2006:
Some of Australias most influential political pundits now say that common sense and realism persuaded many ordinary Australians that we must sometimes be prepared to kill thousands of civilians in order to secure Americas protection in as yet unforeseen circumstances We must hope the pundits are wrong. If they are not, it will be very hard for Muslim leaders to convince young Muslim radicals that ordinary Australians do not hold Iraqi lives cheapso cheap that neither we nor our partners in the coalition of the willing bother to count how many we kill. Whenever we preach Australian values this must surely come to their minds. There are differences between the intentional killing of civilians and the unintentional but repeated and entirely foreseeable killing of them in the pursuit of an unjust cause. They are not sufficient to leave intact ones authority to preach aggressively and selfrighteously against the evils of terrorism Terrorists threaten our lives. They do not threaten the values that we hold dear. Only we do that.53
How bizarre and ironic then that Tony Blair, visiting Australia in the same week that Gaita wrote, seemed to have the same understanding. In his speech to the Australian Parliament he said:
Ranged against us are people who hate us; but ranged against them are many more who do not hate us but question our motives, our good faith, our even-handedness, who could support our values but believe we support them selectively These are the people we have to persuade. They have to know this struggle is about justice and fairness as well as security and prosperity. And in truth, there is no prosperity without security and no security without justice.54
Bravo, Mr Blair. But why, on a moments reflection, do his words seem so empty? Why, at the same time as he shows such insight, would he refuse to concede that his own policies towards Iraq, and those of his allies, George W Bush and John Howard, towards Palestine, international human rights law and global economic justice, will destroy the very effort at persuasion that he argues must
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occur? Instead we must wonder at the real meaning and function of narcissistic statements that We are open societies. We feel enriched by diversity. We welcome dynamism and are tolerant of difference. We are good. What is so frustrating about such a politics is its assumption that, even though our existence and security are utterly tied to the welfare, beliefs and actions of others, we have no connection with or responsibility to them. To relentlessly shine a mirror on ourselves, to maintain that it is our values which put us in danger, is to make the others disappear. Such a politics and way of being is neither ethical nor prudent. While an effective challenge to this kind of security politics based as it is in deeply entrenched systems of governmental action, sociopolitical truth and institutional identityis by no means easy, it can and must be done. We must refuse to play this game or speak its languages: instead, we must unmask it as a form of politics and explain its deeply perverse and counterproductive effects. We must also show how its simplistic, instrumental model of action is both unethicaltreating humans as tools and playthings for powerand dysfunctional, producing merely more hurt, more injustice and more violence, in a cycle of destruction and insecurity without end. Security politics claims, above all, to enact a care for us, but undermines and sacrifices both ourselves and our others. As I hinted earlier, the somewhat sobering diagnosis of the discursive and social system at the heart of our troubles demands an entirely new model of politics, whose form is yet unclear. It requires an understanding of the psychologies underpinning current forms of social power, and all kinds of efforts to address them with a new kind of language and image of national and transnational existenceone that will make us more, rather than less, secure. Providing hope in the form of economic opportunity or a more permanent relief from life uncertaintyobviously laudable and urgent imperativeswill not be enough if we cannot work in everyday ways to reshape the most basic forms and meanings of our polity that have stolen the name of security. I think of Martin Buber arguing that a fully spiritual and viable human existence occurs:
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not in the I but between I and You. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being.55
This, perhaps, is where the usefulness of theory reaches its end and social action and dialogue must take over. Obviously new forms of leadership are needed, but we cannot wait for them; leadership must come from below and exert a steady, unwavering pressure for deepseated transformation. The ultimate lesson, both ethical and pragmatic, is that in a world of globalised suffering, injustice, prosperity and violence, everything is connected. An obsessive politics of borders and barriers whether they be lines on maps, or acts of legislation, incarceration or forceis no longer viable or appropriate. We need a new politics that transforms our enclosed and coercive model of sovereignty into one that is based on both the fact and obligation of such interconnection. This would be a politics based in very practical and communicative ways on the ethics of Levinas or Buber, in which existence is not lived behind a wall of isolation but lived with and for othersand thus more genuinely and sustainably for us. We must challenge the empty claim of leadership to offer easy solutions, to pretend that violently and simplistically reinforcing divisions, values and borders will make us safe from a complex and unpredictable world. As much as is humanly possible, we must stop obsessively stating who we are now, and make who we are anew, with and not against others. One of the most dangerous illusions of our time is that we know who we are, we know who the others are, and who the enemy is. Noit is our very politics that is our enemy, a security politics in which Us is always the enemy of We.
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Endnotes
Introduction Acting Sovereign Suvendrini Perera

1 For more on the Tampa, see David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2003 and Perera, A line in the sea: the Tampa, boat stories and the border, Cultural Studies Review, vol 8, no 1, pp 1127. 2 Wadjularbinna, A Gungalidda grassroots perspective, Media Release, 25 September 2001. 3 Irene Watson, Aboriginal laws and the sovereignty of Terra Nullius, Borderlands, vol 2, no 2, 2002, pt 18, <http://www.borderlandsejournal. adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/watson_laws.html>. 4 Lisa Bellear, Federation Statement, accessed 21 July 2006, <http://rhapsodyinmotion.com/collaborators/lisa>. 5 Fiona Nicoll, De-facing Terra Nullius and facing the public secret of Indigenous sovereignty in Australia, Borderlands, vol 1, no 2, 2002, pt 7, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/nicoll_ defacing.html>. 6 Henry Reynolds, Aboriginal Sovereignty, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1996, p 15. 7 Gary Foley, Native title is not land rights: an alternative Indigenous perspective, September 1997, Gary Foleys Koori History Website, accessed 25 July 2006, <http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_2.html>; Reconciliation: fact or fiction?, July 1999, Gary Foleys Koori History Website, accessed 25 July 2006, <http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/ essay_6.html>. 8 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Politics of Race: A Possessive Investment in Patriarchal White Sovereignty, Plenary Keynote, The Body Politic, University of Queensland, 25 November 2004. 9 See for example, Joseph Pugliese, In silico race and the heteronomy of biometric proxies: biometrics in the context of civilian life, border security and counter-terrorism laws, Australian Feminist Law Journal, no 23, 2005, pp 133. 10 Angela Mitropoulos, Under the beach, the barbed wire, Mute, p 2, accessed February 2006, <http://www.metamute.org/en/Under-theBeach-the-Barbed-Wire>; See also Perera, Race terror, Sydney, 2005,
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Borderlands , vol 5, no 1, 2006, <http://www.borderlandsejournal. adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1_2006/perera_raceterror.html>. Watson, op. cit. The Howard history of Australia, Age, 20 August 2005. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p 1. ibid., p 2. ibid., p 1. On reracialisation and reorientalisation, see Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: race, gender, and citizenship after 9/11, Social Identities, vol 9, no 4, 2003, pp 5467. See Goldie Osuri and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, White diasporas: media representations of September 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia, Social Semiotics, vol 14, no 2, 2004, p 167. On the border protection act, see David Manne, speech at Boatloads of Extinguishment, Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, accessed 5 May 2005, <http://www.safecom.org.au/david-manne2006.htm>. See Commonwealth Ombudsman, Investigation of the removal of Ms Vivian Alvarez from Australia and other immigration detention matters referred to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Bulletin, vol 2, no 1, September 2005, and Commonwealth of Australia, Inquiry into the circumstances of the immigration detention of Cornelia Rau, July 2005. Ross Warneke, Rewind, Age, 1 September 2005. A dose of reality TV for customs, Australian Customs Service website, accessed 25 July 2006, <http://www.customs.gov.au/site/page.cfm?u= 5321>; Border Security, accessed 25 July 2006, <http://www.seven. com.au/seven/bordersecurity>. Perera, What is a camp?, Borderlands, vol 1, no 1, 2002, <http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. Amy Kaplan, Homeland insecurities: reflections on language and space, Radical History Review, no 85, 2003, p 87. ibid. Aileen Moreton Robinson, The house that Jack built: Britishness and white possession, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, vol 1, no 1, 2005, p 22. ibid. Watson, op. cit., pt 38. On the Tent Embassy see Nicoll, op. cit. Perera, What is a camp ?, op. cit. Uproot camp, PM urges, Age, 7 April 2006. See Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts, Random House, New York, 2004, p 5; Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Kipling, the White Mans Burden and U.S. imperialism, Monthly Review, vol 55, no 6, 2003, <www. monthlyreview.org/1103editors.htm>. See also discussion in Perera, this volume. Prem Kumar Rajaram, Locating political space: asylum and excision in Australia in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (eds), Borderscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Migration and Belonging, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, forthcoming. ibid. ibid.
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35 Perera, Futures imperfect in Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas (eds), Alter/Asians, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000, p 17. 36 Rajaram, op. cit. 37 Hansen and Stepputat, op. cit., p 3. 38 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage, New York, 1990, p 139. 39 ibid., p 147. 40 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, vol 15, no 1, 2004, p 39. 41 ibid., p 12. 42 ibid., p 27. 43 Mick Dodson, Nothing new in Tony Abbotts paternalism, Opinion piece, Reconciliation Australia, accessed 21 June 2006, <http://www.reconciliation.org.au/i-cms.isp?page=250>. 44 See Giorgio Agamben, The camp as nomos of the modern, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds), Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997, pp 10618, and Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998. 45 Mbembe, op. cit., p 12, my italics. 46 Perera, What is a camp?, op. cit. 47 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended Lectures at the College de France 19751976, trans. David Macey, Picador, New York, 2003, p 256. 48 See Perera, Chapter 7, this volume. 49 For example, Indonesian fishers visiting ancestors burial sites in NT: Rangers, ABC News Online, 4 November 2005, accessed 24 July 2006, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1497442.htm>; Residents may act as fishing rangers, ABC News Online, 20 November 2005, accessed 24 July 2006, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/ 200511/s1510725.htm>; Jail terms issued to Indonesians for trochus theft, Media Release, Department of Fisheries WA, 26 May 2006, accessed 24 July 2006, <http://www.fish.wa.gov.au/docs/media/index.php?0000& mr=347>. 50 Marcia Langton, Aboriginals: the phantoms of northern militarisation, in Graeme Cheeseman and St John Kettle (eds), The New Australian Militarism, Pluto Press, Leichhardt, 1990, p 171. 51 Bruce C Campbell and Bu V E Wilson, The Politics of Exclusion: Indonesian Fishing in the Australian Fishing Zone, Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, Perth, 1993, pp 556. 52 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, op. cit.
Chapter One Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities Irene Watson
This paper has grown from a workshop paper I first presented in Hamburg at the Altona Foundation for Philosophical Research, June 2005 on Law, Colonialism and Violence, and was further developed in August 2005, in a paper presented to the Curtin University Seminar, A New Backyard Blitz? Enactments of Australian Sovereignty Post 2001. I acknowledge Valerie Kerruish, Kathy Bowrey, Suvendrini Perera and Wendy Brady for
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your comments; thanks also to Debbie Bletsas for research assistance; any errors to be found are entirely mine. 1 Jacques Derrida, Time and memory, messianicity, the name of God in Paul Patton and Terry Smith (eds), Deconstruction Engaged: The Sydney Seminars, Power Publications, Sydney, 2001, p 63. 2 On the term colonialism, postcolonialism is in general used and preferred. In the universal context of globalisation, some postcolonial critics also suggest we should call it by its right name; capitalism. Calling the theft and exploitation of Aboriginal lands and their natural resources capitalism, does give a true description of the historical and current political and economic picture; deleting the term colonialism, which is also a true description, would be to wash away that aspect of our history, so that the colonised position is erased, before we as colonial subjects have even begun to settle the score of more than 200 hundred years of colonial violence. We should call situations by their right name but the term colonialism also belongs to the picture, and we the colonised are yet to gaze upon that which is known to the coloniser as the postcolonial space. 3 Globally other Aboriginal peoples have likewise asserted validity of their laws, and questioned their displacement. The UN is currently engaged in similarly wrestling the sovereignty of Aboriginal peoples into the domestic paradigm of colonising states; this is evidenced in their treatment of the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. For further discussion see Sharon Venne, Our Elders Understand Our Rights: Evolving International Law Regarding Indigenous Rights, Theytus Books, British Colombia, 1998, pp 13565. I explore the places of Aboriginal laws in my unpublished PhD thesis, Irene Watson, Raw Law, PhD Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1999, and also in my other writings; Indigenous peoples law ways: survival against the colonial state, Australian Feminist Law Journal, vol 8, 1997, pp 3958; KaldowinyeriMunaintya: in the beginning, Flinders Journal of Law Reform, vol 4, no 1, 2000, pp 317. 4 Derrida, op. cit., pp 645. 5 Mabo v The State of Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1, for a critical discussion on the Mabo decision, see Law and Critique, Special Issue, vol 13, no 3, p 231 onwards. 6 Moana Jackson, Justice and political power: reasserting Maori legal processes in Kayleen Hazlehurst (ed.), Legal Pluralism and the Colonial Legacy: Indigenous Experiences of Justice in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Aldershot, Brookfield, 1995, p 243. 7 Mabo, op. cit., pp 29, 30, 43, 45. 8 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, Routledge, New York, 2004, p 2. 9 Derrida, op. cit. 10 ibid. 11 Kooris, that is the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria, a diverse group of Aboriginal peoples coming from different areas of the state were responsible for the establishment of this camp. 12 The sacred fire was lit at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra during the 1990s and has burnt ever since. Ashes from that fire have lit similar sacred fires; in Adelaide at Genocide Corner, also a sovereign Aboriginal camp established to bring public attention to the impact of uranium mining upon Aboriginal peoples country. The fire was lit again at the Sydney Olympics Aboriginal sovereign camp in 2000, at Kurnell and also
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at that same time in Sydneys Victoria Park. The ashes from those fires have been used again to light the fire of the most recent sovereign camp at Kings Domain in Melbourne. This idea I heard eloquently spoken of by Kevin Buzzacott at a preAustralia day protest meeting held at La Perouse, NSW, 25 January 1988. For a discussion of the story of the frog relative to the power of state sovereignty see Irene Watson, Buried alive, Law and Critique, vol 13, no 2, 2002, pp 253, 269. For views which are in contrast to those of Sutton, who construes the contemporary violence in Aboriginal communities as being culturally inherent forms of violence, see Irene Watson, Illusionists and hunters: being Aboriginal in this occupied space, Australian Feminist Law Journal, no 22, 2005, pp 1528. For a fuller discussion on the question of sovereignty and native title laws see Law and Critique, Special Issue, vol 13, no 3, p 231 onwards. This term was first suggested to me by Valerie Kerruish. It has no authoritative definition. I understand it to mean the killing of one law by another; a further reference to the term was found in the work by Mary Linda Pearson, From Genocide to Juriscide, the last Five Hundred Years: A History of the Genocide of North American Indian Peoples, unpublished manuscript. Mabo, op. cit., pp 29, 30, 43, 45. Mabo, op. cit. See the decision in Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v State of Victoria (1999) 4(1) AILR 91, 126, 129 (Olney J) where Olney J held that the applicants rights, if they ever existed, had been washed away by a tide of history. For further discussion on recent developments and shifts to policies of assimilation, see Irene Watson, From a hard place to softer terrain, Flinders Journal of Law Reform, vol 7, no 2, 2004, pp 20523. Patricia Karvelas, Focus on indigenous issues, Australian, Sydney, 25 January 2006, p 6. See also Peter Roberts, Rereading Lyotard: knowledge, commodification and higher education, Electronic Journal of Sociology, vol 3, no 3, 1998, <http://www.sociology.org/content/vol003.003/roberts.html>. The colonial state has the power to act without having any dialogue with Aboriginal people, so when there is a dialogue between the state and Aboriginal peoples, what is going on, what is promoted by Aboriginal people when they are called upon to be representative? And if Aboriginal people dont come forward to fill this space, will it create further disadvantage for Aboriginal peoples by us having no representation? The Howard government recently dismantled the national Aboriginal representative body, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, indicating the governments lack of faith in ATSIC. So who might the government have faith in? Clearly they have no intention of listening to the Kooris who at the time I am writing are sitting without any shelter at Camp Sovereignty. But they do listen to the elders who support the Melbourne Council when they call upon the police to pull down the tents of the keepers of the sacred fire. Will the government then only listen to a dialogue that is determined by their own agendas, which support, for example, the Howard government policies as opposed to those speakers
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who resist and work to create a space for dialogue on the question of Aboriginal sovereignty? I have seen Aboriginal voices captured by the state and then constructed as the voice of Aboriginal peoples. In the past it was ATSIC, now there are new smaller bodies. There is also the Howard Governments strategy of going straight to the community and talking; this itself creates an illusion of the state speaking to the grass roots. But who does he talk to when he promises home ownership, whilst at the same time his government strategises to dismantle collective Aboriginal land ownership held by traditional owners under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1979 (Cwlth)? I guess he speaks to those who support these absorbing shifts. At what point is the collective voice allowed the space to regroup? Paul Kelly, Black leaders offer a new accord, Australian, 4 December 2005. Also known as shared responsibility agreements, this is a policy of the federal government where communities identify local priorities and enter an agreement with government to address those priorities. In return communities agree to certain behavioural changes in exchange for funding. For an overview see Ruth McCausland, Shared Responsibility Agreements: practical reconciliation or paternalistic rhetoric?, Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol 6, no 12, 2005, pp 911. I would argue Camp Sovereignty is an attempt to open up those spaces. This is a reference to the work of Valerie Kerruish, for further reference see: Altona Foundation for Philosophical Research, <http://www.asfpg.de/ english/1730314736.html>. That is as of the collective, although I have previously indicated the problems associated with the collective speaking into a colonised space. A description I first heard when used by Kevin Buzzacott, op. cit. Here there would be value given by a colonial framework and value given by an Aboriginal framework. I value an Aboriginal world view, the impossible space of the consensus of my own Aboriginal collective sourced from traditional connections to country, a different value to that of the dominant colonial culture. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, Continuum, London, 2003, p 54. I have used this text to assist me in unravelling the colonised voice even though, as suggested to me, this is not what the text had intended. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Verso, London, 2001. I am hoping to continue with these questions in future work on representation and identity. Such as cultural genocide, violent unsafe communities, poverty, high levels of incarceration. It is the list that afflicts colonised dispossessed communities and one that we should all by now be well familiar with; I will not elaborate further. For several years the Kungari Aboriginal Association, of Kingston South East in South Australia, spoke against the building of a yacht club on the Robe beach foreshore, which was commenced in 2000. The building followed an initial declaration of protection under the SA Aboriginal Heritage Act 1988. This was protection that was later removed to allow the building to go ahead. Similar developments have occurred at Cape Jervis, (also in South Australia) where development over-rode the desire to protect the cultural and burial sites of my people. Our relationship to
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country is sacrificed for the call for more marinas for the parking of yachts and fishing boats and other coastal developments. For more information regarding the work of Kevin Buzzacott, see Kevin Buzzacott and Irene Watson, Walking the land for our ancient rights, Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol 5, no 1, 2000, pp 1922. For further information regarding the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjutja, see Rebecca Bear Wingfield and Irene Watson, Kungkas and the struggle for the manta, Indigenous Law Bulletin, vol 5, no 1, 2000, pp 2225. For example, while the writings of Edward Said are well received, it is noted that nowhere has the writer found a critical comment made by Said about the colonising activities of the USA towards the Aboriginal peoples of North America; this is even though Said came to immigrate to the USA. Is there an ethical commitment on the part of postcolonial writers to critically engage with the global practices of colonial states? Another example was the visit by Mandela to Australia, where he made no comment regarding the Aboriginal struggle whilst taking funding from the Australian government. As an act of pragmatism it is understood why this is so, but what are the loyalties and where are they owed, and can we afford them? Are principles impossible to hold on to in the face of such critical times? Kevin Gilbert, Because a White Man Will Never Do It, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1994. Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us: Culture and Genocide in Native North America, Between the Lines, Ontario, 1994. Paulin Hountondji, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996. ibid., pp 172, 179. Peter Sutton, The politics of suffering: Indigenous policy in Australia since the 1970s, Anthropological Forum, vol 11, no 2, 2001, pp 125, 173. National Organisation of Women Students Association Conference, University of Adelaide, July 2005. Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP, A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006, Speech delivered at the National Press Club, Canberra, 25 January 2006, accessed 5 July 2006, <http://www.pm. gov.au/news/speeches/speech1754.html>. Outback House, Episode One, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 8 June 2005. Peter Broinowski, speaking at Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Adelaide, 6 August 2005.
Chapter Two M a b o , T a m p a and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty Maria Giannacopoulos

1 Suvendrini Perera, A line in the sea, Cultural Studies Review, vol 8, no 1, 2002, p 11. 2 Ruddock v Vardarlis (2001) FCA 1329. On 30 August 2001 when the Norwegian ambassador went on board the MV Tampa he was handed a letter signed Afghan refugees now off the coast of Christmas Island. Part of this letter was reproduced in the Federal Court judgment. 3 Jacques Derrida, Force of law: the mystical foundation of authority in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge, New York, 1992, p 11.
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4 Valerie Kerruish, At the court of the strange god, Law and Critique, vol 13, no 3, 2002, pp 27187. 5 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty: the High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision, Borderlands, vol 3, no 2, 2004, p 5, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/ vol3no2_2004/moreton_possessive.htm>. 6 ibid., p 4. 7 ibid., p 6. 8 Maria Giannacopoulos, Tampa: violence at the border, Social Semiotics, vol 15, no 1, 2005, pp 2942. 9 Derrida, op. cit., p 40. 10 ibid., p 12. 11 ibid., p 15. 12 Moreton-Robinson, op. cit., p 5. 13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p 15. 14 ibid. 15 Moreton-Robinson, op. cit., p 5. 16 Agamben, op. cit., p 32. 17 ibid., p 27. 18 Moreton-Robinson, op. cit., p 7. 19 Mabo and Others v Queensland (No 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1. 20 Bruce Buchan, Withstanding the tide of history: the Yorta Yorta case and Indigenous sovereignty, Borderlands, vol 1, no 2, 2002, <http://www borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no2_2002/buchan_yorta.html>. 21 ibid. 22 ibid. 23 Irene Watson, Buried alive, Law and Critique, vol 13, no 2, 2002, p 257. 24 ibid. 25 ibid. 26 Ruddock v Vardarlis (2001) FCA 1329. 27 Giannacopoulos, op. cit., p 40. 28 Suvendrini Perera, What is a camp?, Borderlands, vol 1, no 1, 2002, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera _camp.html>. 29 Giannacopoulos, op. cit., pp 3031. 30 Moreton-Robinson, op. cit. 31 John Howard, House of Representatives, Hansard, 305178, 29 August 2001. 32 Watson, op. cit., p 254. 33 ibid. 34 Tony Birch, The last refuge of the UnAustralian, The UTS Review, vol 7, no 1, 2001, pp 1722. 35 Watson, op. cit., p 257. 36 ibid., p 258. 37 ibid. 38 ibid. 39 ibid. 40 ibid., p 259. 41 ibid., p 263. 42 ibid. 43 ibid., p 264.
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44 ibid., p 265. 45 Bain Attwood, Bain Attwood and Terra Nullius, ABC Sunday Profile, 25 July 2004, accessed 19 June 2006, <http://www.abc.net.au/sundayprofile/ stories/s1160553.htm>. 46 Ruddock v Vardarlis (2001) FCA 1329. 47 Derrida, op. cit., p 46. 48 Ruddock v Vardarlis (2001) FCA 1329. 49 Suvendrini Perera, Who will I become? The multiple formations of Australian whiteness, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, no 1, 2005, <http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ACRAWSA13.pdf>. 50 ibid. 51 Derrida, op. cit., p 14. 52 Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Racism, foreigner communities and the onto-pathology of white Australian subjectivity, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Whitening Race, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2004, p 32. 53 ibid., p 45. 54 ibid., p 46. 55 ibid.
Chapter Three Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation? The Limits of Australian Sovereignty Henry Reynolds
1 See for instance W Blackstone, Commentary on the Laws of England, 2 vols, 18th edn, 1823, vol 1, p 9. 2 W E Hall, A Treatise on the Foreign Powers and Jurisdiction of the British Crown, London, 1894, pp 212, 218. 3 ibid. 4 ibid. 5 W K Hancock, Australia, 2nd edn, Jacaranda, Brisbane, 1966, p 11. 6 A H Adams, The Australians, 1920, pp 1045. 7 J B Moore (ed.), History and Digest of International Arbitrations, 6 vols, Washington, 1898, vol 5, pp 495466. 8 M F Lindley, The Acquisition and Government of Backward Territory in International Law, London, 1928, p 271. 9 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol IV, 1901, pp 48067. 10 South Australian Parliamentary Papers, vol II, no 45, 1899, p 3. 11 Carrodus to Administrator, 8 March 1940, Australian Archives A432/81, File 1938/758. 12 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol IV, 1901, p 4807. 13 ibid., p 4806. 14 J Quick and R Garran, The Annotated Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1901, p 612. 15 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol IV, 1901, p 4806. 16 ibid. 17 Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australasia and North America 19191978, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1995.
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Chapter Four Sea Changes: Native Title, Sea Rights and Sharing the Sea Maxine Chi
1 Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) preamble, accessed 13 June 2006, <http:// wwwaustlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/nta1993147/notes.html>. 2 ibid. 3 Glossary, National Native Title Tribunal, Commonwealth of Australia, 2006, <http://www.nntt.gov.au/about/glossary.html>. 4 Maxine Chi, Salt Water People: Aboriginal Uses of Sea Resources, Broome Western Australia, MA Thesis, Curtin University of Technology, 2002. 5 Lynette Masuda, 1999, cited in ibid., p 61. 6 Gordon Lee, 1999, ibid., p 60. 7 Peter Yu, Native Title and Its Potential Impacts on Fisheries Management, paper presented at the 3rd Australasian Fisheries Managers Conference in August 1995. 8 ibid. 9 Peter Yu, 3rd Australian Fisheries Managers Conference, 1995, quoted in J Sutherland, Fisheries, Aquaculture and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, Department of the Environment, Sport and Territories, Canberra, 1996, p 8. 10 Anonymous participant, 1998, cited in Chi, op. cit., p 59. 11 Anonymous participant, 1998, ibid., p 63. 12 Peter Yu, 1999, ibid., p 23. 13 Fisheries v Underwood and Others, unreported; Broome Court of Petty Sessions of WA, 10 March 1998. 14 Norman B Tindale, Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits, and Proper Names, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974. 15 Fisheries v Underwood (1998). 16 ibid. 17 Yanner v Eaton, unreported; HCA, BC9906413, B52 of 1998, 7 October 1999. 18 ibid. 19 ibid. 20 Mary Yarmirr and Others v The Northern Territory of Australia and Others (1998) 156 ALR 370. 21 John Christopherson, personal communication, Hobart, 1999. 22 Sampi v State of Western Australia (2005) FCA 777. 23 ibid. 24 Land Council may appeal against BardiJawi Native Title ruling, Message Stick: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Online, 14 June 2005, accessed 16 June 2006, <http://abc.net.au/message/news/stories/ms_news_1391509.htm>. 25 Yarmirr v The Northern Territory of Australia (1998). 26 Land Council may appeal against BardiJawi Native Title ruling, op. cit. 27 ibid. 28 WAFIC Native Title, accessed 16 June 2006, <http://nt.wafic.com.au/ wafic_native_title/wafic_native_title.phtml>. 29 Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth) preamble. 30 ibid.
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Chapter Five M a r e N u l l i u s and the Making of a White Ocean Policy Ruth Balint
I wish to thank Associate Professor Rae Frances and Dr Anthony Burke for their assistance with this chapter. 1 Interview (Balint) with Agung Prasata, Pepela, Rote, Indonesia, May 2001. 2 Interview (Balint) with a group of fishermen, Tablolong, Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, May 2001. 3 Interview (Balint) with Abdul Gani Pello, Pepela, Rote, Indonesia, May 2001. 4 Henry Burmester, Island outposts of Australia, Australias Offshore Maritime Interests, Occasional Papers in Maritime Affairs, no 3, Australian Centre for Maritime Studies, Canberra, 1985. 5 ibid., p 54. 6 ibid., pp 5960. 7 Paul Clarke, Ashmore Reef: archaeological evidence of past visitation, unpublished paper presented at the One Day Workshop on Indonesian Fishing in Australian Waters: Questions of Utilisation and Access, Northern Territory University, Darwin, 9 March 2001, p 5. 8 Ashmore Reef National Nature Reserve and Cartier Island Marine Reserve, Draft Management Plan, Environment Australia, Canberra, 2001. 9 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics, Massachusetts University Press, Amherst, 1980, p 100. 10 Bruce C Campbell and Bu V E Wilson, The Politics of Exclusion: Indonesian Fishing in the Australian Fishing Zone, Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, Perth, 1993. 11 See Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land, Penguin Books, Ringwood, 1987, p 32. 12 D L Serventy, Indonesian fishing activity in Australian waters, Australian Geographer, vol 1, no 1, 1952. 13 Cited in Campbell and Wilson, op. cit., p 26. 14 ibid., p 36. 15 ibid., p 1. 16 Cited in Henry Reynolds, Dispossession, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989, p 72. 17 ibid., p 74. 18 Fear over invasion of foreign fishermen, Australian, 28 September 2005. 19 Cited in Campbell and Wilson, op. cit., p 45. 20 Alison Bashford, Quarantine and the imagining of the Australian nation, Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, vol 2, no 4, 1998. See also, Alison Bashford, At the border: contagion, immigration, nation, Australian Historical Studies, vol 33, no 120, 2002. 21 ibid. (1998), p 394. 22 Rod Edmond, Abject bodies/abject sites: leper islands in the high imperial era, in Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation, Routledge, London, 2003, p 143. 23 Govt criticised over treatment of Indonesian fishermen, ABC News Online , accessed 11 October 2005, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/ newsitems/200510/s1479201.htm>. 24 Refugee crisis, Australian, 30 August 2001.
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25 Cited in Mary Albertus Bain, Full Fathom Five, Artlook Books, Perth, 1982, p 242. 26 David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia, 18501939, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1999, p 4. 27 Our open-door borders, Weekend Australian, 2526 August 2001. 28 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2003, pp 312. 29 Andrew Stafford, So far from humanity, so close to Australia, Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 2002. 30 See Perera, this volume. Also, Ruth Balint, Troubled Waters: Australian Maritime Expansion in the Timor Sea, PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2003, Chapter 7 and p 248. 31 Fishermen report stream of illegal fishing boats, PM, ABC Radio National, 29 September 2005, accessed 22 June 2006, <http://www.abc. net.au/pm/content/2005/s1471432.htm>. 32 Cited in Illegal shark hunters use hit-and-run tactics, Sydney Morning Herald, 2930 October 2005. 33 In August 2003 I highlighted a death in Australian custody of an Indonesian fisherman in my report for SBS Television, The Death of Mansur, 21 August 2003. This brought attention to the conditions of detention for illegal Indonesian fishermen. 34 Ruth Balint, Troubled Waters; Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2005.
Chapter Six Fond Illusions: Some Reflections on Australian Dependence, Pacific Interventions and Indigenous Land Tim Anderson
1 Alison Broinowski, About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2003, pp 1011. 2 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Fact Sheets: Australia and the Doha Development Agenda, 2003, accessed 28 June 2006, <http://www. dfat.gov.au/trade/fs_doha/2.pdf>. 3 Fred Brenchley, The Howard defence doctrine, Bulletin, 28 September 1999, pp 224. 4 Janis Wilton and Richard Bosworth, Old Worlds and New Australia, Penguin, Melbourne, 1984, p 188. 5 Anthony Day et al., Citizenship in Anthony Milner and Mary Quilty (eds), Comparing Cultures, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p 250. 6 Brian Martin, Australian republic: so what?, Freedom, vol 60, no 24, 1999. 7 Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Why Australian citizenship?, 2006, accessed 27 June 2006, <http://www.citizenship.gov. au/why.htm>. Note: in November 2001 the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs (DIMIA) was created. In January 2006 the Indigenous Affairs responsibility moved to the now Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and DIMIA became DIMA. 8 AID/Watch, Australian Aid: the Boomerang Effect, February 2005, accessed 28 June 2006, <http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current= 39&display=aw00681&display_item=1>.
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9 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Food Security and Trade: A Future Perspective, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canberra, 1996, p x. 10 See Pat Stortz, Evidence to Senate Committee inquiry into Australias relationship with Papua New Guinea and Pacific Island nations, 2003, p 48. Pat Stortz is Austrade Manager, SE Asia and Pacific Markets office. 11 PNG Incentive Fund, Approved Programs Summary Report, Port Moresby, 12 February 2003, p 4. 12 Klaus Rohland, Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, Speech at the University of Sydney, Radio Australia AsiaPacific Lecture Series, December 2002. 13 AusAID, Regional Mission to Solomon Islands: facts and figures, 2005, accessed 27 June 2006, <http://www.ausaid.gov.au/hottopics/solomon/ solomons_ramsi_details.cfm>. 14 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Papua New Guinea: Enhanced Cooperation Program, 2004, accessed 27 June 2006, <http://www.dfat. gov.au/geo/png/ecp2004.html>. 15 AusAID, Output 1.1policy, Annual Report 20042005, 2005, p 110, accessed 27 June 2006, <http://www.ausaid.gov.au/anrep05/s2d.html>. 16 See Isabel Blackett, Corruption: whose problem is it?, Harambee, vol 11, no 3, 2002, <http://www.tear.org.au/resources/harambee/023/02 corruption-iblackett.htm>. 17 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Papua New Guinea: Enhanced Cooperation Program, op. cit. 18 AID/Watch, op. cit. 19 Jon Nonggorr, ECPs legal fallout on immunity, Post Courier, 19 May 2005. 20 Bernard Narokobi, Concept of Ownership in Melanesia, Occasional Paper No 6, The Melanesian Institute, Goroka, (1988) 1999, p 8. 21 Helen Hughes, The Pacific is viable!, Centre for Independent Studies, Issue Analysis, no 53, p 4, accessed 2 December 2004, <http://www.cis. org.au/IssueAnalysis/ia53/IA53.pdf>. 22 ibid. 23 See Klaus Deininger, Land policies for growth and policy reduction, World Bank Policy Research Report, Oxford University Press and the World Bank, Washington, 2003. 24 Steven Gosarevski, Helen Hughes and Susan Windybank, Is Papua New Guinea viable?, Pacific Economic Bulletin, vol 19, no 1, November 2004, p 137. 25 For example, Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, A new deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote communities, Centre for Independent Studies, Issue Analysis, no 54, 2005, <http://www.cis.org.au/ IssueAnalysis/ia54/IA54.pdf>. 26 Fed Gov seeks to change composition of Aboriginal Land Councils, PM, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, accessed 23 February 2005, <http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2005/s1309541.htm>. 27 Liisa Rusanen, In whose interests? The politics of land titling, AID/Watch Background Paper, May 2005, p 2, accessed 28 June 2006, <http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current=39&display=aw00724 &display_item=1>. 28 For example, Charles Yala, Rethinking land tenure issues, Post Courier, 3 August 2005, p 11. 29 Almah Tararia, Land registration is alienation, Post Courier, 12 April 2005.
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30 Gou and Higaturu, Agricultural Lease between Gou Development Corporation (Oro Province) and Higaturu Oil Palms, Port Moresby, September 1999; Heropa Enterprise, Heropa Mini Oilpalm Estate: Terms and Conditions, [agreement between the Heropa clans and Higaturu Oil Palm PL] 20 October 1999. 31 Department of Trade and Industry, Papua New Guinea, Statistical Digest 2000, Port Moresby, July 2001. 32 John Chitoa, Interview with the author, Madang, 14 December 2004. 33 For example, Michael Rynkiewich (ed.), Land and Churches in Melanesia: Issues and Contexts, Melanesian Institute, Goroka, PNG, 2001, point no 25. 34 See Marcel Mazoyer, Protecting Small Farmers and the Rural Poor in the Context of Globalization, Report for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Rome, 2001.
Chapter Seven Our Patch: Domains of Whiteness, Geographies of Lack and Australias Racial Horizons in the War on Terror Suvendrini Perera
A version of this chapter was presented as a keynote address at the conference Whiteness and the Horizons of Race in Brisbane in December 2005. I am grateful to Aileen Moreton-Robinson for that opportunity, and to all the conference participants for their interest, encouragement and suggestions. Special thanks to Jennifer Clarke for information on race and the law of territories and to Irene Watson and Jon Stratton for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 Quoted in W E Holder, The Queensland border: the legal position in E K Fisk, Maree Tait, W E Holder and M E Threadgold (eds), The Border and Associated Problems: The Torres Strait Islanders, vol 5, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1974, p 38. 2 Geraldine Mackenzie, An enduring influence: Sir Samuel Griffith and his contribution to criminal justice in Queensland, QUT Law and Justice Journal, vol 2, no 1, 2002, <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ QUTLJJ/2002/3.html>. 3 Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage, New York, 1978, pp 545. 4 On teleologies of nation see Perera, Futures imperfect in Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law and Mandy Thomas (eds), Alter/Asians, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000, pp 324; for a discussion of telic tales of Australian sovereignty in the context of refugee arrivals, see Prem Kumar Rajaram, Locating political space: asylum and excision in Australia in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (eds), Borderscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Migration and Belonging , Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, forthcoming. 5 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier, Grove Press, New York, 1988, p 41. 6 On racialised punishment and spaces of exception in relation to Australian refugees see Suvendrini Perera, What is a camp ?, Borderlands, vol 1, no 1, 2002, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_ 2002/perera_camp.html>. 7 See Perera, A line in the sea: the Tampa, boat stories and the border, Cultural Studies Review, vol 8, no 1, 2002, pp 1127.
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8 On the borderscape, see Perera, A Pacific zone? Sovereignty, (in)security and stories of the Pacific borderscape, in Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (eds), Borderscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Migration and Belonging, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, forthcoming. 9 Sanford E Schram and Philip T Neisser, Tales of the State: Narrative in Contemporary US Politics and Public Policy, Rowman and Littlefield, London, 1997. 10 Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of Solomon Islands, ASPI, Sydney, 2001. 11 See Amy Kaplan, Homeland insecurities: reflections on language and space, Radical History Review, no 85, 2003, pp 8293. 12 Martin Regg Cohn, Australia, Americas deputy sheriff, punches above its weight and criticizes Canada for not doing the same, Embassy: Canadas Foreign Policy Newsweekly, no 67, 17 August 2005, p 5. 13 ibid. 14 ibid. 15 Sherene H Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2004, pp 679. 16 ibid., p 67. 17 ibid., p 36. 18 Cohn, op. cit. 19 US Department of State, Secretary Condoleezza Rice remarks with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer after their meeting, accessed 16 January 2006, <http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2005/ 45632.htm>. 20 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Politics of Race: A Possessive Investment in Patriarchal White Sovereignty, Plenary Keynote, The Body Politic, University of Queensland, 25 November 2004. 21 Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005, p 3. 22 ibid. 23 Greg Fry, The war against terror and Australias new interventionism in the Pacific, SSGM [State, Society and Governance in Melanesia] Conference Papers, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2005, p 3. 24 ibid. 25 Transcript of the Prime Minister The Hon John Howard MP Interview with Kerry OBrien 7.30 Report ABC, 23 June 2003, accessed 25 November 2005, <http://www.pm.gov.au/news/interviews/Interview 194.html>. 26 Greg Sheridan, Neighbour trouble, Australian, 22 April 2006. 27 The White Mans Burden subtitled The United States and the Philippine Islands was first published in 1899 in McClures Magazine. 28 Cited in Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, Kipling, the White Mans Burden and U.S. imperialism, Monthly Review, vol 55, no 6, 2003, p 7, accessed 25 November 2005, <www.monthlyreview.org/1103editors. htm>. 29 ibid., p 9. 30 ibid.
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31 Helen Irving (ed.), The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p 352. 32 Goldie Osuri and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, White diasporas: media representations of September 11 and the unbearable whiteness of being in Australia, Social Semiotics, vol 14, no 2, 2004, p 167. 33 Tarcisiu Tara Kabutaulaka, Failed state and the war on terror: intervention in Solomon Islands, Analysis from the EastWest Center, no 72, 2004, p 7, accessed 30 November 2005, <www.eastwestcenter.org/stored/ pdfs/api072.pdf>. 34 ibid. 35 ibid., p 6. 36 ibid., p 7. 37 See Perera, A Pacific zone?, op. cit. 38 Sinclair Dinnen, Lending a fist? Australias new interventionism in the Southwest Pacific, SSGM Conference Papers, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2004/5, p 3. 39 The Solomons Crisis, Saturday Extra, ABC Radio National, 21 April 2006, <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/saturday/stories/s1621147.htm>. 40 ibid. 41 Bridging the Gap between State and Society: New Directions for the Solomons, Oxfam, 2006, p 7, <http://www.oxfam.org.au/>. 42 The Solomons Crisis, op. cit. 43 ASPI, op. cit., p 19. 44 Rajaram, op. cit. 45 On white interests see John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media, Routledge, New York, 1998, p 97. 46 Moreton-Robinson, op. cit. 47 Said, op. cit., p 55. 48 Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts, Random House, New York, 2004, p 5. 49 ibid., p 4. 50 ibid. 51 ibid. 52 ibid., p 9. 53 Cohn, op. cit. 54 Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, Racial suicide: the relicensing of racism in Australia, Race & Class, vol 39, no 2, 1997, p 11. 55 See Watson, this volume. 56 Watson, this volume. On the shut down of unviable Aboriginal communities, see Vanstone accused of paternalistic approach to Indigenous communities, The World Today, ABC Local Radio, 9 December 2005, accessed 5 May 2006 <http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content /2005/s1527535.htm>. 57 By an inexorable logic, as the last pages of this essay were being written, a new expos of shocking levels of sexual violence and abuse resulted in calls for military intervention in remote communities. See for example, Nicholas Rothwell, Cry of the innocent, Weekend Australian, 2021 May 2006. 58 Helen Hughes, Can Papua New Guinea come back from the brink?, Centre for Independent Studies, Issue Analysis, no 49, 13 July 2004, <http://www.cis.org.au/IssueAnalysis/ia49/IA49.pdf>. 59 Susan Windybank, This mission had moral hazard written all over it, Australian, 20 April 2006.
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60 On the ECP see Tim Anderson, this volume; on the complex relationship between the ECP and RAMSI, see Alan Patience, The ECP and Australias middle power ambitions, SSGM Discussion Paper, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2005; and Anthony J Regan, Clever people solving difficult problemsperspectives on weakness of state and nation in Papua New Guinea, SSGM Working Papers 2, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2005. 61 On the black GST, see <http://www.reconciliationvic.org.au/index. cgi?tid=192>. 62 Watson, this volume. 63 On racialised punishment and the links between Aboriginal missions, detention camps and Guantanomo Bay, see Perera, What is a camp ...?, op. cit. 64 Watson, this volume. 65 See also Perera, The good neighbour: conspicuous compassion and the politics of proximity, Borderlands, vol 3, no 2, 2004, <http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/perera_good.htm>. 66 Migration changes consider Indonesias concerns: Vanstone, ABC News Online, 14 June 2006, accessed 11 July 2006, <http://www.abc.net. au/news/newsitems/200606/s1663210.htm>. 67 Balthasar Kehi, Australias relations with East Timor: peoples loyalty, governments betrayal, Borderlands, vol 3, no 2, 2004, <http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/kehi_timor.htm>. 68 Bush Telegraph, ABC Radio National, 21 November 2005. On the competing sovereignties see Bruce C Campbell and Bu V E Wilson, The Politics of Exclusion: Indonesian Fishing in the Australian Fishing Zone, Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, Perth, 1993. 69 Greg Sheridan, Melanesia is a huge disaster, Australian, 20 April 2006. 70 ibid. 71 Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present, Blackwell, Maldon, 2004. 72 Sinclair Dinnen, The trouble with Melanesia in Ivan Molloy (ed.), Eye of the Cyclone: Issues in Pacific Security, Pacific Islands Political Studies Association, Sippy Downs, Queenland, 2004, p 74. 73 ibid., pp 745. 74 Epeli Hauofa, The ocean in us, The Contemporary Pacific, vol 10, no 2, 1998, p 391. 75 Joyce in hot water over Antarctic mining plan, PM, ABC Radio, 1 May 2006. 76 Peter Hanks, Patrick Keyzer and Jennifer Clarke, Race and the Law of Territories: Australian Constitutional Law: Materials and Commentary , LexisNexis, Chatswood, NSW, 2004, p 1057. 77 Henry Reynolds, The Macassans and the History of Northern Australia, Keynote Address, Middle Passages, Maritime Museum, Fremantle, 12 July 2005. 78 Campbell and Wilson, op. cit., pp 556, 59. 79 Steve Pennells and Regina Titelius, Terrorism and drugs linked to poachers, West Australian, 29 October 2005. 80 See also Ruth Balint, Troubled Waters, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 2005. 81 See Campbell and Wilson, and Balint this volume. 82 Bush Telegraph, op. cit.
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Chapter Eight A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare: Palm Island and Australian Sovereignty Dinesh Wadiwel
1 Excerpt from Australian Abo Call, no 6, September 1938. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p 84. 3 Michel Foucault, Two lectures in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977, trans. Colin Gordon et al., Pantheon Books, New York, 1980, p 90. 4 ibid., p 123. 5 Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, vol 15, no 1, 2003, pp 1140. 6 ibid., p 13. 7 ibid., p 12. 8 ibid., p 39. 9 Chloe Hooper, The tall man, The Monthly: Australian Politics, Society and Culture, no 10, 2006, p 34. 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, vol 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin Books, London, 1998, p 138. 11 Hooper, op. cit., p 34. 12 Erykah Kyle and Vince Mundraby, Open Letter from Palm Island Aboriginal Council to the Premier, 28 November 2004, accessed 12 July 2006, <http://www.palm-island-australia.bnet-newmedia.co.uk/politics. php?page=2>. 13 Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs: the Untold Story, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1997, p 229, italics in original. 14 ibid., pp 723. 15 Marnie Kennedy, Born a Half-Caste, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1990, p 7. 16 Carl Wyles quoted in Stuart Rintoul, The Wailing: A National Black Oral History, William Heinemann, Port Melbourne, 1993, p 207. 17 See for example Kidd, op. cit., p 84; or Bill Rosser, Dreamtime Nightmares: Biographies of Aborigines under the Queensland Aborigines Act, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1985, pp 93, 146. 18 Henry Reynolds and Dawn May, Queensland, in Anne McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines Under the British Crown, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1995, p 187; see also Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1999, p 98. 19 Reynolds and May, ibid., p 188. 20 Attwood and Markus, op. cit., p 102. 21 See for example Bill Rosser, This Is Palm Island, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1978, p 35; and Ruby de Satge quoted in Rosser, Dreamtime Nightmares, p 23. 22 Quoted in Rintoul, op. cit., p 207; see also Kidd, op. cit., p 229. 23 Bill Rosser, Return to Palm Island, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1994, pp 734; see also Reynolds and May, op. cit., p 195. 24 Kennedy, op. cit., p 17. 25 Kidd, op. cit., pp 1056. 26 ibid., p 86. 27 ibid., p 101.
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28 Reynolds and May, op. cit., p 187. 29 Perera, What is a camp? ..., Borderlands, vol 1, no 1, 2002, <http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_2002/perera_camp.html>. 30 ibid. 31 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, p 15. 32 ibid. 33 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1988. 34 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p 27; see also Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005, p 51. 35 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p 65. 36 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, p 138. 37 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p 166. 38 ibid. 39 ibid., p 170. 40 ibid., p 8. 41 See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and The Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Zone Books, New York, 1999, and The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004. 42 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p 173. 43 Kennedy, op. cit., p 9. 44 Kidd, op. cit., pp 1789. 45 Bancroft quoted in ibid., p 101. 46 Perera, op. cit. 47 Mbembe, op. cit. 48 ibid., p 40. 49 ibid., p 25. 50 ibid., pp 289, 32. 51 ibid., pp 1213. 52 See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, and The Open: Man and Animal, op. cit. 53 Mbembe, op. cit., p 23. 54 ibid., pp 223. 55 Michel Foucault, Governmentality, trans Colin Gordon et al. in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London, 1991, pp 989. 56 ibid., p 100. 57 ibid., p 102. 58 ibid., pp 923; see also Colin Gordon, Governmental rationality: an introduction, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect, op. cit., 1991, pp 151. 59 Foucault, ibid., p 94. 60 ibid., p 94. 61 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, pp 5373. 62 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Viking Press, New York, 1964, and Zygmunt Bauman, The Bauman Reader, Peter Beilharz (ed.), Blackwell, Massachusetts, 2001. 63 Harris quoted in Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, 1989, p 179.
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64 For example, see Bruce Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 2003, pp 1567, 252; and Anne McGrath, A national story, in Anne McGrath (ed.), Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1995, pp 154. 65 Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The sovereign whip: flogging, biopolitics and the frictional community, Voicing Dissent: New Talents 21C, Journal of Australian Studies, no 76, 2003, pp 11725. 66 Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australias Identity, Viking, Camberwell, 2005, p 155. 67 Pat OMalley, Indigenous governance in Mitchell Dean & Barry Hindess (eds), Governing Australia: Studies in Contemporary Rationalities of Government, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, pp 1634, see also pp 1589. 68 Kidd, op. cit., p 343. 69 Fiona Nicoll, From Diggers to Drag Queens: Configurations of Australian Identity, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2001, pp 1634. 70 Palm Island needs drastic changes, ABC News Online, 6 February 2006, accessed 13 February 2006, <http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/ 200601/s1542608.htm>. 71 Kidd, op. cit., p 347. 72 Andrew Boe, Palm Island: something is very wrong, The Brisbane Institute, 21 April 2005, accessed 19 May 2006, <http://www.brisinst. org.au/resources/boe_andrew_palmisland.html>. 73 Phil Mercer, Aborigines dark island home, BBC News, 4 December 2004. 74 Boe, op. cit. 75 Hooper, op. cit., p 46.
Chapter Nine Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death Jon Stratton
I would like to thank Sophie Sunderland and Suvendrini Perera for their thoughts and suggestions on earlier versions of these ideas. 1 John Stonehouse, Death of an Idealist, WH Allen, London, 1975, p 168. 2 ibid., pp 1678. 3 Quoted in John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987, p 53. 4 ibid., p 58. 5 ibid., p 54. 6 Meaghan Morris, On the beach in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A Treichler (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York, 1992, p 458. 7 Suvendrini Perera, Race terror, Sydney, 2005, Borderlands, vol 5, no 1, 2006, p 23, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol5no1 _2006/perera_raceterror.html>. 8 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts, 17871868, Collins Harvill, London, 1987, p 145. 9 ibid. 10 ibid., p 160. 11 ibid., p 161.
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12 ibid., p 302. 13 Bruce Kercher, Perish or prosper: the law and convict transportation in the British Empire 17001850, Law and History Review, vol 21, no 3, 2003, <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/21.3/forum_kercher. html>. 14 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969, p 95. 15 Fiske, Hodge and Turner, op. cit., p 59. 16 See Jon Stratton, Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998, pp 7680. 17 Andrew Patterson, Taking Back the Moral High Ground, published online by European Peoples Anti-Defamation Organisation, October 2004, accessed 2 August 2006, <http://www.epado.bravehost.com/takingback00. htm>. 18 Perera, op. cit., p 28. 19 Meaghan Morris, White panic or Mad Max and the sublime, Senses of Cinema, no 18, 2002, <http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/18 /mad_max.html>. 20 Annie Rule, personal communication. 21 Stratton, op. cit. 22 Morris, White panic, op. cit. 23 Jon Stratton, Borderline anxieties: what whitening the Irish has to do with keeping out asylum seekers in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2004, pp 22238. 24 ibid. 25 Tony Kevin, A Certain Maritime Incident: The Sinking of SIEV X, Scribe Publications, Carlton North, Victoria, 2004, p 3. The further details also come from Kevin. 26 Suvendrini Perera, They Give Evidence: bodies, borders and the disappeared in Tseen Khoo (ed.), The Body Politic: Racialised Political Cultures in Australia (Refereed Proceedings from the UQ Australian Studies Centre Conference, Brisbane, 24 26 November 2004) , University of Queenslands Australian Studies Centre (ASC) and Monash Universitys National Centre for Australian Studies (NCAS), Brisbane and Melbourne, 2005, p 5, 2 August 2006, <http://www.asc.uq.edu.au/bodypolitic/ perera.pdf>. 27 Kevin, op. cit., p 8. 28 David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, Dark Victory, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, NSW, 2003, p 323. 29 ibid., p 324. 30 Perera, They Give Evidence, op. cit., p 10. 31 Morris, White panic, op. cit. 32 ibid. 33 Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Scribe, Carlton North, Victoria, 2005, p 19, Tavans italics. 34 Marr and Wilkinson, op. cit., p 41. 35 Peter Mares, Borderline: Australias Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2001, p 67. 36 Don McMaster, Asylum Seekers: Australias Response to Refugees, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001, p 72.
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37 Mares, op. cit., p 67. 38 Bill Baker and Peggy Bendel, Come and say gday, on the Travel Marketing Decisions website, 2 August 2006, <http://www.atme.org/pubs/archives/ 77_1898_11926.cfm>. 39 Tom ORegan, Cinema oz: the ocker films, in Albert Moran and Tom ORegan (eds), The Australian Screen, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1989, p 76. 40 ibid., p 77. 41 Baker and Bendel, op. cit. 42 Mares, op. cit., p 68. 43 Tom ORegan, The enchantment with cinema: film in the 1980s in Albert Moran and Tom ORegan (eds), The Australian Screen, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1989, p 136. 44 Meaghan Morris, Tooth and claw: tales of survival, and Crocodile Dundee, in The Pirates Fiance: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism, Verso, London, 1988, p 248. 45 Stratton, op. cit., p 146. 46 Morris, Tooth and claw, op. cit., p 254. 47 When I lived in Darwin in the late 1980s there was a much retold urban myth circulating. It seems that the Northern Territory government had employed at great expense a hot-shot advertising company from either Sydney or Melbourne to develop a campaign to encourage Territorians to be more friendly and helpful to tourists. The tagline of the campaign the company mounted was: Tell a tourist where to go. 48 Baker and Bendel, op. cit. 49 McMaster, op. cit., p 57. 50 Here quoted from McMaster, op. cit., p 57. 51 Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, Annandale, Victoria, 2003, p 48. 52 Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1985, p 98. 53 ibid., p 98. 54 Philip Ruddock, Immigration Reform: the Unfinished Agenda, 18 March 1998, Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, accessed 2 August 2006, <http://www.immi.gov.au/media/publications/the-facts/ speech.htm>. 55 See for example Marr and Wilkinson, op. cit.; and the newer edition of Mares, op. cit., entitled Borderline: Australias Response to Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the Wake of the Tampa, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002. 56 Marr and Wilkinson, op. cit., p 175. 57 ibid., pp 11617. 58 Giorgio Agamben, The camp as nomos of the modern, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds), Violence, Identity and Self-Determination, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997, p 107. 59 Marr and Wilkinson, op. cit., p 131. 60 Quoted in Tavan op. cit., pp 656. 61 Mares, 2001, op. cit., p 68. 62 ibid., p 69. 63 Joseph Pugliese writes in Subcutaneous law: embodying the Migration Amendment Act 1992, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2002, that: In the context of Australias refugee prisons, laws power of mandatory, indeterminate detention of refugees is exercised through and across the
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64
65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81
bodies of its human targets. In the context of these refugee prisons, however, every act of self-harm simultaneously marks an attempt to transliterate law from its linguistic and discursive register to its corporeal articulation and effects, thereby rendering visible its complex order of violence (p 24). The most extreme act of self-harm here is suicide. The government refuses to release the figures for those detained who have died by their own hand. One discussion of Australia as utopia can be found in Elizabeth McMahon, The gilded cage: from utopia to monad in Australias island imaginary in Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith (eds), Islands in History and Representation, Routledge, London, 2003. Quoted here from Matthew Burke, The pedestrian behaviour of residents in gated communities, 2 August 2006, <http://dpi.wa.gov.au/mediaFiles/ walking_21centconf01apaper_burke.pdf>. On the Milat case, see Mark Whittaker and Les Kennedy, Sins of the Brother: The Definitive Story of Ivan Milat and the Backpacker Murders, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2001. Elliott Leyton, Compulsive Killers: The Story of Modern Multiple Murder, Washington Mews Books, New York, 1986, p 261. ibid., p 269. Life sentence for hostel fire killer, BBC News, 18 March 2002, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asiapacific/1878159.stm>. On the Falconio and Lees case, see Robin Bowles, Dead Centre, Bantam, Sydney, 2005. Voyage of self-discovery Down Under, BBC News, 11 April 2002, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1923501.stm>. ibid. Sarah Howden, Feisty females still happy to go it alone, in The Scotsman, 24 January 2006, <http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=975&id= 116772006>. Howdens research, though, was faulty. She claims six, rather than seven, British backpackers were killed in the Childers fire and that Stuttle was murdered in 2004 not 2002. Roslynn Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p 67. See Marr and Wilkinson, op. cit., pp 2858. McLean on the companion DVD with Wolf Creek. Julia Gillard, John Howard: 10 Years On, Speech to the New South Wales Fabian Forum, 22 March 2006, accessed 2 August 2006, <http://www. fabian.org.au/1047.asp>. Perera, They Give Evidence, op. cit. ibid. Irene Watson, Settled and unsettled spaces: are we free to roam? in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects, Allen & Unwin, North Sydney, forthcoming.
Chapter Ten Security Politics and Us Anthony Burke

My sincere thanks to Suvendrini Perera for the invitation to the 2005 conference which stimulated this piece, and to the interchanges with fellow
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presenters Irene Watson, Maria Giannacopoulos, Henry Reynolds, Ruth Balint, Maxine Chi, and Tim Anderson. Thanks also to Jenny Millea, whose insightful thoughts and suggestions were of great help in stimulating and crystallising my thinking. 1 Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security: Australias Invasion Anxiety, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001, pp xxxiiixxxv. 2 Philip Ruddock, Transcript: Doorstop Interview Hyatt Regency Adelaide, 1 August 2005, <http://www.ag.gov.au/agd/www/ministerruddockhome. nsf>. 3 Louise Dodson and Joseph Kerr, Terror redefines our freedom, Sydney Morning Herald, 67 August 2005, p 1. 4 See Commonwealth of Australia, Anti-Terrorism Bill (No 2) 2005, and the report of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No 2) 2005, November 2005. 5 Dodson and Kerr, op. cit. 6 G8 leaders condemn barbaric attacks, CNN.com, 7 July 2005, <http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/07/blair. statement>. Blair went on to say that it is important that those engaged in terrorism realize that our determination to defend our values and our way of life is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world. 7 Queen condemns bombing outrage, BBC.co.uk, 8 July 2005, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4665537.stm>. 8 See Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 1998, and Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2003. 9 Burke, op. cit., p xxiv. 10 See Chapter 1 of Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics & Violence: War against the Other, Routledge, London, 2006. 11 For commentaries that raise this problem, see Barry Hindess, Politics as government: Michel Foucaults analysis of political reason, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol 30, no 4, 2005, pp 389413, and Andrew Neal, Cutting off the kings head: Foucaults Society Must Be Defended and the problem of sovereignty, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, vol 29, no 4, 2004, pp 37398. 12 Condoleezza Rice, Remarks aboard the USS Port Royal, 16 March 2006, 23 June 2006, <http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2006/63165.htm>. 13 Statement of Secretary of Defense Donald H Rumsfeld, Senate Appropriations Committee, FY2006 Supplemental Request, United States Senate: Committee on Appropriations, 9 March 2006, accessed 23 June 2006, <http://appropriations.senate.gov/hearmarkups/record.cfm?id= 252399>. 14 Bruce Cumings, The emperors old clothes, The Nation, 19 February 2001, <http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010219/cumings>. 15 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, pp 2733, 49. 16 NSC68: US objectives and programs for national security (April 14, 1950), reproduced in Ernest R May (ed.), American Cold War Strategy: Interpreting NSC68, St Martins Press, Boston, 1993, p 25.
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28
29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
ibid., pp 26, 29. Schmitt, op. cit., pp 46, 51. Burke, In Fear of Security, p 98. William E Connolly, Pluralism, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005, p 3. ibid., p 6. Minister tells Muslims: accept Aussie values or clear off , ABC News Online, 24 August 2005; Ban Muslim scarves, The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 29 August 2005. Peter Costello, Worth Promoting, Worth Defending: Australian Citizenship, What It Means and How to Nurture It, Address to the Sydney Institute, 23 February 2006. ibid., emphases added. An important related issue, which I do not have the space to take up here, is the exclusivist notion of secularism implicit in the speech. Costello cannot acknowledge that religious morality, doctrine or law can make a positive contribution to legislative or political debate and, given their social significance, cannot effectively be divorced from them. His version of secularism tends to efface its history in a strategic bargain with Christianitywhich henceforth preserved its cultural and social hegemonyand effaces its tendency to deny the worth of alternative (religious) sources of morality. There are obvious complexities in how to rethink secularism so that a plurality of moral discourses (including those from various religions) can be interwoven with a pluralistic democracy. See Chapter 1 of Connolly, Pluralism and his Why I Am Not a Secularist, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1999, and Seyla Benhabibs discussion of the French and German headscarf affairs in The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp 171202. Australia paranoid: security politics and identity policy in Anthony Burke and Matt McDonald (eds), Critical Security in the AsiaPacific, Manchester University Press, Manchester, forthcoming. Kevin M Dunn, Australian public knowledge of Islam, Studia Islamika, vol 12, no 1, 2005, p 5. Paul OSullivan, Terrorism and Security: The Australian and European experiences, Director-Generals Address to Canberra based EU Ambassadors, 7 March 2006, accessed 23 June 2006, <http://www. asio.gov.au/Media/comp.htm>. What follows is a shortened version of the discussion in Chapter 5 of Burke, In Fear of Security, pp 1848. Zygmunt Bauman, The making and unmaking of strangers, in Postmodernity and Its Discontents, Polity, Cambridge, 1997, pp 215. ibid., p 26. John Howard, Australia and Asia: An Enduring Engagement, Address to the AustraliaAsia Society, 8 May 1997, p 1. ibid. Fiona Allon, Home as cultural translation: John Howards Earlwood, Communal/Plural, no 5, 1997, p 15. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, pp 2831. ibid., pp 18, 22, 30.
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37 See Carol Johnson, Narratives of identity: denying empathy in conservative discourses on race, class and sexuality, Theory and Society, no 34, 2005, pp 3761. 38 A selection of texts addressing this phenomenon include Carol Johnson, Governing Change, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2000; Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2003; Robert Manne, In denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right, Quarterly Essay, no 1, 2001; Humphrey McQueen, Suspect History, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, 1997; Greg McCarthy, Postmodern discontent and the National Museum of Australia, and Kylie Message and Chris Healy, A symptomatic museum: the New, The NMA and the Culture Wars, both in Borderlands, vol 3, no 3, 2004, <http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol3no3.html>. 39 John Howard, Politics and patriotism: a reflection on the national identity debate, Grand Hyatt Hotel, Melbourne, 13 December 1995. 40 John Howard, Address to the Nation, 19 September 1999. 41 Burke, In Fear of Security, pp 21222. 42 Suvendrini Perera, The good neighbour: conspicuous compassion and the politics of proximity, Borderlands, vol 3, no 3, 2004, pt 4, <http://www. borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no3_2004/perera_good.htm>. 43 John Howard, House of Representatives, Hansard, 30205, 27 August 2001. 44 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics as First Philosophy, trans. Sean Hand and Michael Temple, in Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999, p 78. 45 See chapters 9 and 3 of Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics & Violence. 46 See Seyom Brown, The Illusion of Control: Force and Foreign Policy in the 21st Century, Brookings Institution Press, Washington DC, 2003. 47 Mike Seccombe and Louise Dodson, Safety before liberty, say most voters, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 August 2005. 48 Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Advancing the National Interest, p 2. 49 Seccombe and Dodson, op. cit. 50 David Wroe, Iraq was motive for bombing: suspect, Age, 2 August 2005, p 1. 51 Hannah Arendt, Reflections on violence in Catherine Besteman (ed.), Violence: A Reader, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2002, pp 1934. 52 See Ghassan Hages discussion of the phenomenon of suicide bombing in Chapter 8 of Against Paranoid Nationalism for a challenging argument along these lines. 53 Raimond Gaita, There is no honour in doing evil for a good cause, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 2006. 54 Tony Blair, The war on terrorism is a battle against the closing of minds, Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 2006. 55 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Touchstone, New York, 1970, pp 85, 89.
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Contributors
Tim Anderson is a lecturer in political economy at the University of Sydney and a civil rights activist. His research areas are the political economy of human rights, international trade and development, independent economic development and indigenous rights. Ruth Balint is a lecturer in the School of History at the University of New South Wales. She is the author of the Vogel award-winning Troubled Waters: Borders, Boundaries and Possession in the Timor Sea (Allen & Unwin, 2004). She is also the writer/director of the documentary film Troubled Waters (2001). Anthony Burke is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations, University of New South Wales. He is the author of the books Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other (Routledge, 2007) and In Fear of Security: Australias Invasion Anxiety (Pluto Australia, 2001) and co-editor, with Matt McDonald, of Critical Security in the AsiaPacific (Manchester University Press, 2007). He is also the publisher and founding editor of the Borderlands e-journal. He is currently working on a book about modern war and technological reason. Maxine Chi lives and works in Perth, Western Australia. She was born in Broome, Western Australia, where she spent her early years until she left to attend high school in Perth. She regularly returns to visit family and friends and reconnect with country. She identifies as a Bardi (Aboriginal) woman and a Broome woman of mixed race. She has worked in the area of Indigenous affairs for approximately thirty years in various government and non-government agencies.
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She was awarded an MA (Indigenous Research and Development) at Curtin University for her research and thesis about Aboriginal peoples use of the sea in Broome. Maria Giannacopoulos is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, where she also teaches critical theory. Her research is concerned with reconceptualising dominant knowledges about law to expose the ways that law is necessarily implicated in the production of racial violence. Her most recent publication appears in Borderlands ejournal and is titled Terror Australis: White Sovereignty and the Violence of Law. Suvendrini Perera is currently a Senior Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology and has published widely on topics relating to colonial discourse, race, ethnicity, multiculturalism and refugee policy. Among her publications are Reaches of Empire (Columbia University Press, 1992) and Asian and Pacific Inscriptions: Identities/Ethnicities/Nationalities (Meridian, 1995). She is currently working on a project funded by the Australian Research Council on borders and junctions in Australasia and the Pacific region. Henry Reynolds is presently a Senior Writers Fellow with the Literature Board of the Australia Council and is Adjunct Professor at Riawwunna, the Aboriginal Studies Centre, University of Tasmania. He has published many books on the history of EuropeanAboriginal relations. His most recent books are North of Capricorn (Allen & Unwin, 2003) and Nowhere People (Allen & Unwin, 2005). Jon Stratton is Professor of Cultural Studies at Curtin University of Technology. He has published widely in cultural studies, including cultural studies of Australia. His most recent books are Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis (Pluto Australia, 1998) and Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities (Routledge, 2000). He has recently completed a book on the specificity of Australian popular music of the 1970s and 1980s, provisionally titled Sounds Australian, to be published in 2007.
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Dinesh Wadiwel is a writer based in Sydney, with an interest in sovereignty, violence and biopolitics. Dinesh is currently working on a book on animal life and political sovereignty. Irene Watson is a Research Fellow with the University of Sydney, and remains affiliated with Flinders University Law School. She has worked as a legal practitioner with the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement and has written and spoken extensively on law and culture. She is the author of the 2002 publication Looking at You Looking at Me. A member of the Tanganekald and Meintangk peoples of the Coorong, her activism spans over thirty years, as a worker and an advocate for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights.

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Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001

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Front pages.our patch.

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Edited by Suvendrini Perera

Symposia Series NETWORK

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Part I Sovereign Imaginaries

Part II Sovereign Horizons

Part III Sovereign Terror

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Front pages.our patch.qxp

Hansen and Stepputat stipulate that:

exclusivist and repressive formation of sovereignty, arguing that they constitute:

part I title page.qxp

part I title page.qxp

Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities

Where Does Colonialism Situate, or What Spaces Might Be Free of It?

M a b o , T a m p a and the NonJusticiability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Mabo, Tampa and the Non-Justiciability of Sovereignty

Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation?

Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation?

Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation?

Part of a Continent for Something Less Than a Nation?

part II title page.qxp

part II title page.qxp

Another participants response was:

Were not f recreational fishermen, we fish to catch a feed.10

The Intertidal Zone

M a r e N u l l i u s and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Indonesian Fishermen and Australias Northern Waters

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy

parallel examination of the problems of Australian national identity and institutions.

Into the Colonising Space

part III title page.qxp

part III title page.qxp

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare: Palm Island and Australian Sovereignty

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

A Particularly Governmental Form of Warfare

Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourists and Death

Dying to Come to Australia

Death and the Australian Border

Dying to Come to Australia

Dying to Come to Australia

Dying to Come to Australia

Dying to Come to Australia

Dying to Come to Australia