Cirrus@Austlit

'In the week before the May 2022 general election, decks of playing cards depicting a boat in distress were distributed to children at the Cisarua refugee learning centre in West Java. The cards show the small boat lurching dangerously, as waves pile high above it. Tiny brown figures hang over the sides at risk of falling or jumping overboard. One clings to a shaky mast. A woman lies prone on the deck. The cards are stamped with the Australian coat of arms and a link to the government’s Zero Chance campaign. The visuals echo those of a previous scare campaign directed at asylum seekers, titled No Way: You will not make Australia home. No Way included a short film that culminated with a scene of a boat engulfed by the ocean, accompanied by the soundtrack of a desperate heartbeat fading into silence.' (Introduction)

'With the ultimate aim of ending deaths in custody, the Deathscapes project maps the sites and distributions of custodial deaths in locations such as police cells, prisons and immigration detention centres, working across the settler states of Australia,  the US and Canada, as well as the UK/EU as historical sites of origin for these settler colonial states.

'It presents new understandings of the practices and technologies, both global and domestic, that enable state violence against racialized groups in settler states. Within the violent frame of the settler colonial state, centred on Indigenous deaths as a  form of ongoing clearing of the land, the deaths of other racialized  bodies within the nation and at its borders–including Black, migrant and refugee deaths–reaffirm the assertion of settler sovereignty.

'To focus on Indigenous deaths and other racialized deaths is not to collapse the differences between racialized groups, or to ignore the presence of other racialized populations in these states, but to address some of the shared strategies, policies, practices and rationales of state violence deployed in the management of these separate categories.'

Source: Deathscapes.

'The burning of boats, that classic figure for the impossibility of return, was, for over a decade a practice routinely staged by the Australian state as a form of ‘deterrence’ against other unwanted entrants – even as it served, for those just landed, to confirm the finality of their arrival. More recently, this official “torching rite” of no return meets its counterpart in the bizarre logic of the “orange lifeboat,” where asylum seekers are forcibly turned back to an uncertain fate aboard unsinkable, air-conditioned capsules.

'This paper considers questions of arrival, departure and refugee and diasporic subjectivities in the context of Australian refugee policy. Some readers may notice in my subtitle an allusion to V.S. Naipaul’s memoir, The Enigma of Arrival, but more immediate to my concerns is Amitav Ghosh’s articulation of a distinction between exodus and dispersal narratives. Whereas narratives of exodus fix their gaze on the shore of arrival, Ghosh suggests, dispersal compels a return to the pain of rupture and the movement of departure: the sting of smoke evermore in our eyes from our burning possessions; before us, the steady flaming of our boats.

'Marking Stuart Hall’s indispensable theorizing of diasporic subjectivities in the wake of his passing earlier this year, I ask how refugee and disapora bodies and subjects are made and unmade in the context of the Australian borderscape, understood as a set of makeshift, protean geographies of making live and letting die.' (Publication summary)

Perera situates her exploration of Australian histories and futures 'in the context of the millennium and its anxieties'. She considers the appeal of 'Hansonism' and draws on a range of literary texts to demonstrate the limits and the potential of the imperfect, ideal of 'coexistence'.

'Less than fifteen years ago, on 23rd May 1984, a few months after her fiftieth birthday, a black woman who had always told her nine children she would write a book some day, sat down to do so. She had left school at the age of fifteen, unable to imagine a future for a black teacher of either white or black children. Instead,she trained as a clothing machinist in Sydney, and through hard necessity later acquired the bush skills of 'fencing, burning off,lopping and ring-barking, and pegging roo skins'...' (extract)