THESES SIS/LIBRARY TELEPHONE: +61 2 6125 4631 R.G. MENZIES LIBRARY BUILDING NO:2 FACSIMILE: +61 2 6125 4063 THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY EMAIL: [email protected] CANBERRA ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA USE OF THESES This copy is supplied for purposes of private study and research only. Passages from the thesis may not be copied or closely paraphrased without the written consent of the author. Affect, Belonging, Community Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Performance and Writing in post-2001 Australia Emma Cox A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University October 2009 Acknowledgements I have been fortunate to have as principal advisor Jacqueline Lo, whose energy, intellectual rigour and positive spirit have been vital to this project. I am grateful also to Helen Gilbert for her generous support and incisive critical engagement. Thank you to my associate advisors, Jennifer Webb and Caroline Turner. And to Raewyn Arthur and Margaret Brown of the School of Humanities at the Australian National University, whose help and efficiency are greatly appreciated. A number of people and institutions have provided crucial assistance and research material: Victoria Carless; Towfiq Al-Qady; Rosie Scott; Leah Mercer; Rand Hazou; Alison Jeffers and Rachel Finn (In Place of War, Manchester); Linda Anchell; Susan Metcalfe; Helen Leeder; Don Reid; Sandy McCutcheon; Ryan Paine; Stephanie Johnston (Wakefield Press, Adelaide); Ann Morrow; Les Morgan; The Refugee Council Archive, University of East London; the Refugee Claimants Support Centre, Brisbane; Royal Holloway, University of London. Special thanks are due to Shahin Shafaei for sharing his time, experience and knowledge, to Ardeshir Gholipour and Jane Watson, who put the values of generosity and hospitality into practice, and to the effervescent Christine Bacon (Actors for Human Rights, UK). I gratefully acknowledge the editors and anonymous reviewers of RIDE: Research in Drama Education, Journal of Australian Studies, Australian Studies and Life Writing who developed and published work derived from this research. 11 ·nianks to Clair Hurford, Michelle Weinman and family, Christine l'&Paul and family, and Andrew \Valker and the girls, who generously provided a succession of homes away from home in Canberra. Heartfelt thanks to my family, particularly my parents Anne and Graham Cox for their unflagging support, generosity and enthusiasm for the project. Finally, thank you to Jaya Savige for insightful critical feedback and the innumerable discussions that contributed so much to this project, and for constant encouragement and love. 111 Abstract This doctoral dissertation examines the production aud function of representations of asylum in writing and performance in Australia since 2001. It encompasses creative work that portrays asylum seekers (people whose protection claim has not been assessed) and refugees (people whose status has been determined within the terms of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees) as well as work that engages with the issue of asylum more broadly. My selection of performative work includes theatrical production, performative art installation, protest action and film, and my selection of written work includes novels, poetry, memoirs, short stories and letters. The timeframe of the analysis acknowledges 2001 as a decisive period in the development of punitive national policy (and ideology) on unauthorised asylum seekers, concurrent with the escalation of sovereign security discourse worldwide after 11 September, that continue to inflect Australia's engagement with non-belonging non-citizens. If the upheavals of 2001 and concomitant proliferation of creative arts response mark the starting point of this study, the last two years have presented a renewed intensification of the challenges faced by the world's displaced. Recent global economic crises have heightened the vulnerability of people living in economically and politically unstable parts of the world, prompting an increase in refugee numbers; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, stated in a press conference with the Australian Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Chris Evans, in February 2009 that recent economic deterioration is an "accelerating factor" upon the existing pressures that force people movements, and moreover, a "generator of xenophobia" directed at refugees in many parts of the world. In its emphasis on creative and cultural work in writing and performance, approached to a significant extent in terms of counter-representations to (usually) pejorative government IV and news media discourse, this project speaks to crucial questions posed by Suvendrini Perera, writing in response to tbe Tampa incident of 2001: "The terrain of representation, of language, imagery and narrative ... emerges as a crucial site for contesting the disconnection and separation of refugees and asylum seekers from wider society. Wnat representations of refugees, other than official ones, are available in the public sphere? What ate the forms and modalities by which refugee stories are told and made visible?" ("A Line" 32-3). Despite its broad analytical umbrella, encompassing writing and performance - both forms that themselves contain a number of representational modalities - created by Australians and by refugees, this study can only begin to provide an answer to Perera's questions. In doing so, it develops an overarching (though hy no means exclusive) theoretical concern with affective cross· cultural engagement. l endeavour to illustrate some of the ways in which selected creative representations construct spaces of affective contact and connection between human lives separated-in-proximity by sovereign demarcations of national community. v VI Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iv Introduction: Human Refuse in an Interconnected World 1 1 The Intersubjective Witness: Trauma Testimony in Performance 47 2 Dialogue and Decentralisation: Anthologies of Writing 94 3 The Citation of Injury: Regarding the Exceptional Body 135 4 The Border Space and the Sovereign State 177 5 Welcome to Country? Positioning Indigenous Sovereignty 218 Conclusion: Making Ground 257 Bibliography 263 vii Vlll Introduction: Human Refuse in an Interconnected World The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in tbe production not of life or deatb, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival. --Giorgio Agamben, Remnants o/Auschnitz On the morning of 16 April 2009 a small Indonesian boot that had been intercepted by a Navy patrol vessel off Australia's north-west coast exploded, killing five of the forty-seven Afghan asylum seekers on board and injuring dozens more. Thirteen seriously injured people were evacuated directly to the Australian mainland for urgent burns treatment, while twenty-nine were transported to AED Oil's Front Puffin rig in the Timor Sea before being treated on the mainland and later detained on Christmas Island. \>mile the group of thineen were entitled to access Australia's refugee determination and appeals procedures, the remaining twenty-nine were not, having first arrived at an excised offshore place. The oil rig stands outside Australia's maritime migration zone under the terms of legislation devised in response to the "Tampa affair" of August 2001, when the Australian government refused to allow 438 asylum seekers rescued in international waters by the Norwegian container vessel MV Tampa to enter Australian territorial waters. This turning point in the development of national policy (and ideology) on unautbo.rised asylum seekers, concurrent with the escalation of sovereign security discourse worldwide after 11 September, continues to inflect Australia's engagement with non-belonging non-citizens. The authority-through-disavowal over the bodies of the asylum seekers taken to the oil rig can be traced to the state-devised instrumentalisation of lives at sea that underpinned Tampa eight years earlier. Articulations and points of causality between events of 2001 and the present form a crucial contextual basis for this study, which examines the production and function of representlltions of asylum in writing and performance in Australia since 2001. This includes creative work that portrays asylum seekers (people whose protection cl.aim has not been assessed) and refugees (people whose status has been determined) as well as work that engages with the issue of asylum more broadly.1 In its emphasis on creative and cultural production, approached to a significant extent in terms of counter-representations to (usually) pejorative government and news media discourse, this project speaks to crucial questions posed by Suvendrini Perera, v;rrh:L'lg in response to Tampa: "The terrain of representation, of language, imagery and narrative ... emerges as a crucial site for contesting the disconnection and separation of refugees and asylum seekers from v.-ider society. Wnat representations of refugees, other than official ones, are available in the public sphere? What are the forms and modalities by which refugee stories are told and made visible?" ("A Line" 32-3). Despite its broad analytical umbrella, encompassing writing and performance - both forms that themselves contain a number of representational modalities - created hy Ausrralians and by refugees, this study can only begin to provide an answer to Perera's questio11s. In doing so, it develops an overarching (though by no means exclusive) theoretical concern