Cirrus@Austlit

'Tom Zubrycki's documentary film Molly and Mobarak (2003) and John Doyle's television mini-series Marking Time (2003) were both released during the most vehement anti-refugee governmental regime of contemporary Australian history. Whilst the Howard government and the Ruddock and Vanstone ministries were intent on dehumanizing refugees, these film-makers - amongst other Australian artists - were intent on humanizing them. Afghani refugees were portrayed in these films attempting to create viable lives in rural Australia, as thousands of Afghani asylum seekers were detained by government policy in remote and offshore detention centres. This article considers Zubrycki's and Doyle's portrayals of Afghani refugees as political and aesthetic interventions into official discourses distancing the interests of 'Australians' from those of the refugee 'others' (Gannon and Saltmarsh 2006, 2007). At the same time as applauding these interventions, this article also attempts to map their limits by asking in particular whether the conventions of film narrative inevitably contain and tame. Does narrative carry with it, in these instances at least, a conservatism where empathy becomes most possible when the other is made over to become like 'us'?' (Publisher's abstract)

'John Doyle's mini-series Marking Time, which screened on the ABC in 2003, tells the story of a white Australian boy, Hal, who falls in love with an Afghan refugee girl, Randa. The mini-series was publicized as a narrative about Australian tolerance and multiculturalism, set against the backdrop of events from 2001 such as the Tampa incident. But we can read it as a fantasy of white multiculturalism in which white Australians are central to the nation and must order multiculturalism by facilitating the entry of non-white migrants into the nation. Within this fantasy, Hal and Randa's relationship functions as an idealized interaction between the white, male national subject and the peripheral figure of the female, non-white refugee. The non-white woman's body comes to symbolize the space where the white nation may be reproduced under the control of white men. Appearing in Australian culture at a watershed moment when the acceptability of even conservative white multiculturalism was being questioned, Marking Time's fantasy of the appropriation of the non-white woman highlights the precarious status of women (white and non-white) within the nation, and the need to reconceptualize belonging and borders.'

'This article examines the genial 1950s matinee-styled adventure, King of the Coral Sea, a film set on Thursday Island. With Chips Rafferty playing pearling lugger captain Ted King, the film extends Rafferty's previous iconic national repertoire of digger, drover and bushman in an unprecedented (in entertainment cinema) imaginative 'nationalization' of the Torres Strait. The article proposes that the narrative - concerning the protection of the nation's daughters and borders from the threat of shadowy European illegal migration - can be read as a fantastic reversal of power relations in the post-war Pacific, where Australian multiracial enterprise is ably supported by American muscle. It locates the production and reception of the film within the discursive habitat of popular illustrated magazines, focusing on the visual deployment of race and gender in respect to assimilationist anxieties that form part of the imagining of a modern 'Australian way of life'. It further considers how this discourse shapes the deployment of the Torres Strait in a diegetic and extradiegetic relay, in order to imagine an established nationhood for Australia.'

'The John Hillcoat-directed, Nick Cave-penned film, The Proposition (2005), is most instantly recognizable as one recent reinterpretation of 'the western' cinematic genre, which makes the focus of this article on its representation of the garden and female corporeality unlikely. Yet, The Proposition is not a stock transferral of 'the western' to contemporary imaginings of late nineteenth-century colonial Queensland, and an attentiveness to the peripheral interest of The Proposition in the garden and female bodies, rather than the climactic show-down in the main street (which never occurs in Hillcoat's film), raises tangential but telling issues about borders and migration in a settler context that are perhaps not the anticipated subject of a film that ostensibly turns around its eponymous proposal: the murder of one outlaw brother by another to save the life of a third male sibling.'