It’s hard to know where to begin, talking about this image and this object.
My ur-memory of being born in Adelaide – lying on the front lawn, perhaps 14 months old, under the measureless blue sky.
Every sense I had of Australia was founded on measurelessness. It was vast: deserts, distances, summer temperatures and lack of water, thinness of population. It was extreme in all respects; it was that shape on the map of the world on my first, cylindrical pencil-case, at my first school, far from the rest of the world. It was where we lived.
Australia was an abstraction, but a physical one.
In some ways that was our sense of ourselves – that lack of definition. There were stockmen, stations, deserts, mines, schools (Schools of Mines) and the unmentioned uncomfort of the Aborigines. There was work and the weekend, cricket, tennis, picnics. There was not-being-England-or-Europe-or-America. There were rain and sun and roads, church, school, going to town and going to the bay. At Victor Harbor we watched the Southern Ocean smash on the State’s granite edge. The word un-Australian did not exist. There was no Australian English parallel to the linguistic foundation of HUAC. (If it had existed we would’ve seized it for the rich lexicon of schoolyard abuse. It would’ve applied to every migrant in sight.)
And yet, around 1996-1997, around the time John Howard first took office, I began to see it on the net. At first I was full of bewildered laughter. Then I supposed it signalled a new move on the remaining threads of Aboriginal existence – all that 40,000 year old rock art vandalizing the mining-leases.
It was quite clear , even from this distance, that Australian meant wrapped in the flag xenophobia, detention centres, and conditions of detention that didn’t border on torture but 747’d into it, visa, sunglasses, beer and bubbly and baggage, bent on a bloody good time.
Detention Centres: on the edge of the Nullarbor, on Christmas Island. Iron-roofed, concrete sheds at Woomera, wooden huts on Christmas Island – families separated, huge suicide / attempted suicide / self-mutilation rates… Afghanis, Hazzara, Iraquis, Iranians fleeing the wars “our side” had started / funded / taken over, too poor or paperless to fly in unmolested, were attempting to arrive in leaky boats from Indonesia.
The Federal Government’s response was to move the Australian territorial line, so that anyone arriving on a speck of rock northwest of Western Australia would not have arrived on Australian soil and therefore been entitled to protection under several treaties we were proud to have signed in the late 1940s, but would have arrived nowhere – paperless, stateless, detainable. The problem, from two elections’ worth of Australian POV, was neither the wars we buggered around on the edge of nor our foreign policy, but the (Indonesian) fishermen who sailed the boats.
Which sometimes sank.
On the eve of the 2001 Federal election one of them did. The Australian Navy ship on hand reported that the adults had thrown the children overboard (in an effort to compel the Australian Navy to rescue them). That interpretation was wrong, was almost immediately revised by the navy, and the correction sent to the Prime Minister’s office. But the original report was broadcast and re-broadcast as news, propaganda for the Howard government. It may have won him his 3rd term.
The image of refugees throwing their children overboard was the very definition of un-Australian.
In sympathy with al-Qaeda and in revenge for Australia’s part in the independence of East Timor, the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiah mounted two suicide-bomb attacks on tourists at Kuta Beach, on Bali, in October, 2002. Eighty-eight Australians were killed, among others: in Australia the catch-cry against the people-smugglers, and the smuggled people – all of them un-Australian – was now terrorism. Terrorism was undeniable, graphic and vivid, and undeniably aimed at us, and people-smuggling was the risk of terrorism. There were so many refugees being intercepted, and there was enough opposition to having detention centres on Australian soil that the 3rd Howard Government devised “The Pacific Solution” – bare bleached rock enclosures on Nauru, which was strong-armed into taking detainees, and paid to. Nauru had nothing to export once we’d mined it to the sea-line for superphosphate.
The detainees waited until their cases could be heard. There were astonishingly few Australian speakers of the required languages. The one or two who had been released and tried to return to Afghanistan disappeared completely on the Afghani border or thereabouts, very likely killed by the forces they had been fleeing. Several Australian citizens – women, generally – of Philipino or other non-Caucasian extraction were seized and “deported” to Manila or wherever the Minister of Defence thought they’d come from.
This much I gathered from reading The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, from Australian blogs and emails from friends.
I sat at the screen and saw.
Everything I’d ever been told about Australia was wrong – a lie, a fantasy – and always had been. According to promoted social reality, if we hadn’t always been (invasions, convict prisons, Aboriginal massacres), in the meantime we had become more generous, more equal, more open, less cruel than the rest of history.
Post-war immigrants had never had the easy time the newsreels made out, but once we had given homes to the homeless after World War II. And now we were locking refugees up in barbed-wire camps in the desert, keeping them indefinitely, driving them to self-mutilation and suicide.
They can’t be trusted, put them somewhere, lock them up. The catch-cry of the twentieth century coming from Australian throats, re-electing that government again and again. That this victimization could be the path to domestic political power –
Even the dry yellow-brown hills were lies. We weren’t better than or different from anyone else: if any evil could be conceived, we could conceive it.
The hills lurched and paled and retreated, turned to paper. They’d never happened to me, moving past the window as we drove, throwing the road and the car around their heavy masses, above and past the gullies that created the evening winds, or that stood in the near distance, through the window at school. They’d happened to someone else.
And now, in Oregon, if I went to move off the chair in front of the computer, I moved slowly; I didn’t know how to trust what my eyes told me about the relationship of my feet to the ground.
==
In 2005 QANTAS had an astonishing deal, which meant I could go home and see the family and friends I’d hardly seen in twenty years. One of the friends saved me the Howard fridge magnet. “Bloody government,” she said. “It’ll take decades to re-civilize the place.”
And now I’m looking at it, and it’s hard to know how to even think about this image and this object.
The image is the first thing that catches your eye. A young woman is glancing and smiling happily at another young woman, a policewoman. Their smiles and body language suggest that they share something, have something in common, agree on something. Conversation with the police is friendly, non-threatening, cozy, two girls chatting.
After seeing the image the eye takes in the next-largest element, the headline.
First there’s the sickly condescension – Let’s. It’s a word used to suggest agreement between a child and its parents’ wishes, mediated through that odious near-child representative, the prefect. For all the allegedly friendly chat in the photo, we (the public, the citizens) aren’t really adults. We … need to be managed, need to be persuaded, need to be told.
Let’s look out – a coercive suggestion (join the commonly-established agreement) and do something you didn’t have the acumen to see for yourself. You need to be told.
– for Australia. Which must be too young to look out for itself, because we’re not confessing to naivete or witlessness as a country (are we?). We’re certainly not confessing to fascism and its spin and spawn.
So, looking out for Australia is like / becomes young women getting together to look “out for” (keep in mind and act in the interests of) the younger/less powerful/less aware/less.
Australia is undefined, except as explicitly Caucasian, female, unarmed, unthreatening, concerned with nurture and care, implicitly wanting to protect and be protected.
This use of a policewoman is a complete subversion of the progress towards equality Australian women made over the previous 30 years.
This use of a policewoman is a device to present the capture and imprisonment under conditions of torture look like maternal care.
This use of a policewoman is a device to present a cheerful-looking young woman as just herself, and not the false face of mining magnates & associated interests.
Two girls having a chat. Detention camps disguised and justified.
Even while it’s utterly racist, duplicitous, injurious to its victims and insulting to its readership, the Howard fridge-magnet is also absurd. (Is that what makes it Australian? That ineradicable amateurism?) The block back-grounded in blue gives the phone number for a translation service for reporting suspicious activity if you don’t speak English well... But you need to read English well enough to make your way through this slab of 8-point Ariel, the longest block of prose on the page.
Of course, that could be the point.
I go on staring.
Someone designed this object. Someone wrote the copy. Someone, one of us, an Australian, went to work one day, was told to make this by another Australian, and did.
==
The detention centres still exist (in the desert) (offshore). We’re used to them.
==
Officially.
Throughout the stretch of Howard governments (1996-2007), Australian human rights groups investigated, documented, made representations to the government and to at least one independent Senate enquiry. (I wrote letters; vapid paragraphs on ornate letterhead came in reply.) Amnesty International investigated. Refugee prisoners – because that’s what they are – go on hunger strikes.
The Gillard government has reintroduced “the Pacific solution” because there’s likely to be a Federal election before the end of 2013, and locking up refugees “still plays well in Middle Australia.”
Well there it is: an Australian middle America to go with un-American un-Australia.
The friend who gave me the fridge magnet is right. It will take decades to re-civilize the place, if we ever do. Our governments, both flavours, are neo-Georgian: they’ve gone back to running prisons for the demonized and criminalized poor, and enabling the global and gobalized rich.
My ur-memory of being born in Adelaide – lying on the front lawn, perhaps 14 months old, under the measureless blue sky.
Every sense I had of Australia was founded on measurelessness. It was vast: deserts, distances, summer temperatures and lack of water, thinness of population. It was extreme in all respects; it was that shape on the map of the world on my first, cylindrical pencil-case, at my first school, far from the rest of the world. It was where we lived.
Australia was an abstraction, but a physical one.
In some ways that was our sense of ourselves – that lack of definition. There were stockmen, stations, deserts, mines, schools (Schools of Mines) and the unmentioned uncomfort of the Aborigines. There was work and the weekend, cricket, tennis, picnics. There was not-being-England-or-Europe-or-America. There were rain and sun and roads, church, school, going to town and going to the bay. At Victor Harbor we watched the Southern Ocean smash on the State’s granite edge. The word un-Australian did not exist. There was no Australian English parallel to the linguistic foundation of HUAC. (If it had existed we would’ve seized it for the rich lexicon of schoolyard abuse. It would’ve applied to every migrant in sight.)
And yet, around 1996-1997, around the time John Howard first took office, I began to see it on the net. At first I was full of bewildered laughter. Then I supposed it signalled a new move on the remaining threads of Aboriginal existence – all that 40,000 year old rock art vandalizing the mining-leases.
It was quite clear , even from this distance, that Australian meant wrapped in the flag xenophobia, detention centres, and conditions of detention that didn’t border on torture but 747’d into it, visa, sunglasses, beer and bubbly and baggage, bent on a bloody good time.
Detention Centres: on the edge of the Nullarbor, on Christmas Island. Iron-roofed, concrete sheds at Woomera, wooden huts on Christmas Island – families separated, huge suicide / attempted suicide / self-mutilation rates… Afghanis, Hazzara, Iraquis, Iranians fleeing the wars “our side” had started / funded / taken over, too poor or paperless to fly in unmolested, were attempting to arrive in leaky boats from Indonesia.
The Federal Government’s response was to move the Australian territorial line, so that anyone arriving on a speck of rock northwest of Western Australia would not have arrived on Australian soil and therefore been entitled to protection under several treaties we were proud to have signed in the late 1940s, but would have arrived nowhere – paperless, stateless, detainable. The problem, from two elections’ worth of Australian POV, was neither the wars we buggered around on the edge of nor our foreign policy, but the (Indonesian) fishermen who sailed the boats.
Which sometimes sank.
On the eve of the 2001 Federal election one of them did. The Australian Navy ship on hand reported that the adults had thrown the children overboard (in an effort to compel the Australian Navy to rescue them). That interpretation was wrong, was almost immediately revised by the navy, and the correction sent to the Prime Minister’s office. But the original report was broadcast and re-broadcast as news, propaganda for the Howard government. It may have won him his 3rd term.
The image of refugees throwing their children overboard was the very definition of un-Australian.
In sympathy with al-Qaeda and in revenge for Australia’s part in the independence of East Timor, the Indonesian militant group Jemaah Islamiah mounted two suicide-bomb attacks on tourists at Kuta Beach, on Bali, in October, 2002. Eighty-eight Australians were killed, among others: in Australia the catch-cry against the people-smugglers, and the smuggled people – all of them un-Australian – was now terrorism. Terrorism was undeniable, graphic and vivid, and undeniably aimed at us, and people-smuggling was the risk of terrorism. There were so many refugees being intercepted, and there was enough opposition to having detention centres on Australian soil that the 3rd Howard Government devised “The Pacific Solution” – bare bleached rock enclosures on Nauru, which was strong-armed into taking detainees, and paid to. Nauru had nothing to export once we’d mined it to the sea-line for superphosphate.
The detainees waited until their cases could be heard. There were astonishingly few Australian speakers of the required languages. The one or two who had been released and tried to return to Afghanistan disappeared completely on the Afghani border or thereabouts, very likely killed by the forces they had been fleeing. Several Australian citizens – women, generally – of Philipino or other non-Caucasian extraction were seized and “deported” to Manila or wherever the Minister of Defence thought they’d come from.
This much I gathered from reading The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, from Australian blogs and emails from friends.
I sat at the screen and saw.
Everything I’d ever been told about Australia was wrong – a lie, a fantasy – and always had been. According to promoted social reality, if we hadn’t always been (invasions, convict prisons, Aboriginal massacres), in the meantime we had become more generous, more equal, more open, less cruel than the rest of history.
Post-war immigrants had never had the easy time the newsreels made out, but once we had given homes to the homeless after World War II. And now we were locking refugees up in barbed-wire camps in the desert, keeping them indefinitely, driving them to self-mutilation and suicide.
They can’t be trusted, put them somewhere, lock them up. The catch-cry of the twentieth century coming from Australian throats, re-electing that government again and again. That this victimization could be the path to domestic political power –
Even the dry yellow-brown hills were lies. We weren’t better than or different from anyone else: if any evil could be conceived, we could conceive it.
The hills lurched and paled and retreated, turned to paper. They’d never happened to me, moving past the window as we drove, throwing the road and the car around their heavy masses, above and past the gullies that created the evening winds, or that stood in the near distance, through the window at school. They’d happened to someone else.
And now, in Oregon, if I went to move off the chair in front of the computer, I moved slowly; I didn’t know how to trust what my eyes told me about the relationship of my feet to the ground.
==
In 2005 QANTAS had an astonishing deal, which meant I could go home and see the family and friends I’d hardly seen in twenty years. One of the friends saved me the Howard fridge magnet. “Bloody government,” she said. “It’ll take decades to re-civilize the place.”
And now I’m looking at it, and it’s hard to know how to even think about this image and this object.
The image is the first thing that catches your eye. A young woman is glancing and smiling happily at another young woman, a policewoman. Their smiles and body language suggest that they share something, have something in common, agree on something. Conversation with the police is friendly, non-threatening, cozy, two girls chatting.
After seeing the image the eye takes in the next-largest element, the headline.
First there’s the sickly condescension – Let’s. It’s a word used to suggest agreement between a child and its parents’ wishes, mediated through that odious near-child representative, the prefect. For all the allegedly friendly chat in the photo, we (the public, the citizens) aren’t really adults. We … need to be managed, need to be persuaded, need to be told.
Let’s look out – a coercive suggestion (join the commonly-established agreement) and do something you didn’t have the acumen to see for yourself. You need to be told.
– for Australia. Which must be too young to look out for itself, because we’re not confessing to naivete or witlessness as a country (are we?). We’re certainly not confessing to fascism and its spin and spawn.
So, looking out for Australia is like / becomes young women getting together to look “out for” (keep in mind and act in the interests of) the younger/less powerful/less aware/less.
Australia is undefined, except as explicitly Caucasian, female, unarmed, unthreatening, concerned with nurture and care, implicitly wanting to protect and be protected.
This use of a policewoman is a complete subversion of the progress towards equality Australian women made over the previous 30 years.
This use of a policewoman is a device to present the capture and imprisonment under conditions of torture look like maternal care.
This use of a policewoman is a device to present a cheerful-looking young woman as just herself, and not the false face of mining magnates & associated interests.
Two girls having a chat. Detention camps disguised and justified.
Even while it’s utterly racist, duplicitous, injurious to its victims and insulting to its readership, the Howard fridge-magnet is also absurd. (Is that what makes it Australian? That ineradicable amateurism?) The block back-grounded in blue gives the phone number for a translation service for reporting suspicious activity if you don’t speak English well... But you need to read English well enough to make your way through this slab of 8-point Ariel, the longest block of prose on the page.
Of course, that could be the point.
I go on staring.
Someone designed this object. Someone wrote the copy. Someone, one of us, an Australian, went to work one day, was told to make this by another Australian, and did.
==
The detention centres still exist (in the desert) (offshore). We’re used to them.
==
Officially.
Throughout the stretch of Howard governments (1996-2007), Australian human rights groups investigated, documented, made representations to the government and to at least one independent Senate enquiry. (I wrote letters; vapid paragraphs on ornate letterhead came in reply.) Amnesty International investigated. Refugee prisoners – because that’s what they are – go on hunger strikes.
The Gillard government has reintroduced “the Pacific solution” because there’s likely to be a Federal election before the end of 2013, and locking up refugees “still plays well in Middle Australia.”
Well there it is: an Australian middle America to go with un-American un-Australia.
The friend who gave me the fridge magnet is right. It will take decades to re-civilize the place, if we ever do. Our governments, both flavours, are neo-Georgian: they’ve gone back to running prisons for the demonized and criminalized poor, and enabling the global and gobalized rich.
Prisons are also sickeningly profitable.
ReplyDeleteSomething about the imagery of the magnet, and the way you talked about it, evoked strong images of Fahrenheit 451, for me.
I worry for my kids in this world.
Beautifully written. :)