‘Territories of Contact: Two Australian Asylum Seeker Documentaries’, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 12.2 (2012): 16-29. (original) (raw)
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PHOTOESSAY: Refugee migration: Turning the lens on middle Australia
Pacific Journalism Review : Te Koakoa
This non-traditional research paper explores the role of photojournalism and documentary photography in shifting the power dynamic inherent in photographing refugee migrants in Australia—the refugee as an object of photographic scrutiny. It draws on visual politics literature which argues refugees have been subjected to a particular ‘gaze’, where their migration narratives are mediated, mediatised, dissected and weaponised against them in the name of journalistic public accountability in and for the Global North. This photo-documentary praxis project subverts this ‘gaze’ of the Global North and decolonises the power dynamics of the visual politics of refugee migration by turning the lens on middle Australia. Instead of questioning refugees, this project asks what is our moral responsibility to support them? These images are drawn from three years of photographically documenting the Meanjin (Brisbane) community that rallied around and eventually triggered the release of about 120 med...
Our starting point in this paper is the notion of the 'contact zone' first elaborated by Mary Louise Pratt (Pratt)to reconceptualise colonialism as a space of cross-cultural interaction and agency rather than as a static picture of domination and incorporation. The paper draws upon our research on refugee settlement in Australia to explore the hypothesis that the concept of the 'contact zone' expresses the contemporary global border between developed and developing societies, structuring and framing the people flows of refugees and labour that characterise the contemporary moment. Our attention is on how the settlement process deals with difference. By difference we mean a range of possibilities: racialised difference, cultural difference, and the difference of development and modernity. The border also has its uses in conceptualizing the character of this contact zone. Somerville and Perkins (Somerville and Perkins) develop a model of the contact zone as a range of specific kinds of 'border work' undertaken by actors: sometimes maintaining, sometimes crossing, borders of difference.
Pacific Journalism Review : Te Koakoa
This non-traditional research article argues that the refugee and asylum-seeker protests in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point between April 2, 2020 and April 14, 2021 can be viewed against a backdrop of Australian colonialism—where successive Australian governments have used former colonies in Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea as offshore detention facilities—as a dumping ground for asylum-seekers. Within the same context this article argues that the men’s removal to the Kangaroo Point Alternative Place of Detention is a continuation of this colonial policy of incarcerating ‘undesirables’ on occupied land, in this case on Meanjin—Jagera land identified by the colonial name of Brisbane. This extension of Australian sub-imperial and neo-colonial dominion and the imagining of its boundaries is viewed though the theoretical prism of a polymorphic border, a border that shifts and morphs depending on who attempts to cross it. In a departure from orthodox research practice, this article w...
Australian Responses to Refugee Journeys: Matters of Perspective and Context
Social Science Research Network, 2021
Since 1945, more than 9 million people have migrated to Australia. 2 Of these, some 1 million were refugees and displaced people, 3 although in the 1950s and 1960s institutional distinctions were not drawn between refugees and migrants. 4 In 1954, Australia provided the signature that brought the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees ('Refugee Convention') into force. 5 To some, whether supporters or opponents of refugee policy, these figures and the decision to accede to the Refugee Convention tell the story of refugee resettlement to Australia as a proud and generous history of leadership and humanitarianism dating back to 1 The author would like to thank Gabriel Smith for very helpful research assistance for this chapter. 2 Department of Home Affairs ('DHA'), Fact Sheet: Key Facts About Immigration (undated), archived webpage available at: webarchive.nla.gov.au/awa/20181010074801/www.homeaffairs.gov. au/ about/corporate/information/fact-sheets/02key; DHA, Visa Statistics, relating to the migration, asylum and humanitarian programs available at: homeaffairs.gov.au/research-and-statistics/statistics/ visa-statistics. 3 DHA, Fact Sheet; DHA, Visa Statistics. Figures vary, even on the DHA website. By one account, the resettlement figure now stands at 880,000 people; see: immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/ refugee-and-humanitarian-program/about-the-program/about-the-program; Klaus Neumann, Across the Seas: Australia's Response to Refugees: A History
Out of Focus and Out of Place: The Migrant Journey
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
A brief discussion of the limitations of the 1951 Refugee Convention definition of those eligible for asylum precedes the analysis of different texts in this chapter which look at varying ‘categories’ of those who have migrated. Up to this point, the book has, with one exception, concentrated upon the representation of refugee/migrants in film. This chapter addresses different aspects of the migrant experience through the medium of three graphic narratives and an experimental film. The aspects considered are the journey (Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, 2006), the asylum application process (Mana Neyestani’s Petit Manuel, 2015), and the misery and squalor—though also the migrant activism—evident in makeshift refugee camps (Kate Evans’s Threads from the Refugee Crisis (2017) and Sylvain George’s May they Rest in Revolt (2010).