This Paper Interrogates the Relationship Between Conscience and Hospitality As Played Out

The (in)hospitable space of Australia’s Christmas Island: excision zone or excising of conscience

Looking specifically at the representations of the territory of Christmas Island, excised from Australia’s migration zone in 2001, this paper examines the relationship between conscience and hospitality as played out in the Australian ‘asylum seeker narrative’. A product of the colonial ontology of ‘being white Australian’ (Nicolacopoulos & Vassilacopoulos, 2002), the asylum seeker narrative (and also this ‘being’) are shaped by the language of dispossession – the ‘past’ colonial act of dispossession and the fear of a ‘future’ act of dispossession through the coming of the stranger.

How does a national conscience (white, guilty and invoked in the language of engagements and our tolerance of the ‘other’); the commitment to borders (legal, ethical and political); and the historical trajectory of what is ‘Australian space’, sit in relation to hospitality? A ‘welcome reception’ by the Australian government is dependent upon the possession of valid legal documentation. Yet, a welcome that confirms the white Australian claim of ‘tolerance’ is not a welcome, nor a recognition, but a claim of legitimacy. It is a claim to ‘truth’ (in the form of a valid visa or claim to asylum) within a ‘legalised’ sovereignty that uneasily resists the ‘truth’ of its own origins. This suggests that the crossing of borders/boundaries becomes then, not a crossing of the universal, but a crossing of something more intimate - a more intimate ‘truth’ that questions the ‘authority of the host’. This paper will explore how, in excising the jurisdictional rights attached to the land of Christmas Island – thus rendering the island a site of human disposal (as Australia once was to England) – Australia excises any attempt at a hospitable recognition. I will also aim to suggest why, then, Christmas Island may be such an alluring image in the national conscience.