Manus continues Aussies’ colonial past
University of Canterbury senior lecturer Garrick Cooper examines why the Lucky Country’s colonial hangover continues to ensure it is only lucky for some.
Is it now indecent to treat all humans decently? Last week’s attempt by the Australian government to violently ‘liberate’ asylum seekers detained on Manus Island was the latest chapter of its contempt for international law, human rights – as contentious as they may be – and the settling of, arguably, new norms of decency and indecency.
In some ways the Australian government is Trump’s trailblazer.
Furthermore, its actions can be linked to its own history of colonialism and imperialism.
Bodies of water have long been used as natural barriers to liberty (such as Alcatraz, Manus Island and Christmas Island) or a security barrier (like a castle moat).
Waters have the effect of restricting the movement of people from one landmass to another.
But, to make this completely effective, humans also actively restrict the movement of others.
Some people are – riffing off philosopher Frantz Fanon’s canonical decolonial text Les damne´s de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth) – often forcibly damned to a particular patch of earth.
Freedoms and rights then are clearly not to be uniformly shared across humanity. A lesser discussed feature of colonialism is the attempt to control who moves across waters and to where.
The violent enslavement and forced movement of millions of West Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas from around the late 17th century is the obvious example.
I say ‘‘lesser discussed’’ because colonialism is associated with setting up colonies, extracting resources from those lands and peoples, and then sending the wealth back to the motherland.
We tend to focus our attention on the violence that occurs on terra firma, not on the seas or offshore islands.
Australia’s detention of asylum seekers and refugees entering its waters on boats and the consequent imprisonment in offshore detention centres is a continuation of that colonial practice.
The modern state of Australia was founded on being, effectively, a huge detention centre and destination for the damned of Great Britain.
Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore provides a harrowing account of the lives of convicts sent to Australia.
Men, women and children were treated horrifically. Colonisers continued to move people onto offshore islands after they arrived.
Rottnest Island off the coast of Fremantle, Western Australia, was used to imprison thousands of indigenous Australians, forcibly removed from their own lands, from the early 1800s for nearly a century.
Even accounting for a shift in morals and values across time, the accounts are confronting, and show how inhumane humans can be.
And so places like Manus Island, Nauru and Christmas Island represent Australia’s colonial practices reconfigured for the 21st century.
Australia might be known as the Lucky Country but clearly there are forces at play to ensure it is only lucky for some, and not others.
We shouldn’t be surprised by the use of offshore detention centres by the Australian government which goes back multiple administrations from both sides of the political spectrum.
The detention centres have received significant scrutiny and criticism from within Australia and without.
Gillian Triggs of the Australian Human Rights Commission was infamously and outrageously attacked by the Abbott government in Senate hearings for her 2014 report on the inner workings of the detention centres and the government’s attempt to cover it up.
The Australian government has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to its right to treat human beings appallingly, under the ruse of security.
The same amount of energy and commitment to addressing systemic and social issues, I imagine, would be welcomed by indigenous Australians.
Australia acts as though it is completely unencumbered by international laws or treaties. A law unto itself, Australia acts with impunity.
There appears to be no political fallout at the polls for any government that treats asylum seekers and refugees terribly.
However, for any government that seems ‘‘soft’’ on asylum seekers and refugees – where ‘‘soft’’ really means to treat people humanely – there would be harsh political ramifications.
But, like Trump in America, the Australian government is a symptom, not the problem itself. It is the set of conditions which gave rise to and prop up these administrations that requires much more scrutiny, not just their actions.
When discussing the political efficacy of Pacific nations in international affairs, Tongan philosopher Epeli Hau’ofa once lamented the view that focused on the smallness of Pacific nations.
The notion of Pacific nations as small only holds true if one conceives of the boundaries of the Pacific nations as the shores of each island or the collection of islands that make up each state. For Hau’ofa such thinking was a hangover of colonialism.
Polynesia, or Oceania, is a much bigger version of Venice in the South Pacific.
The waters of Oceania were, for seafaring folk, the highways to other peoples to negotiate with, resources to trade for, and lands to settle.
We in New Zealand are one of the benefactors of this phenomenon, and yes, we do reciprocate, as we ought.
Human beings have always moved and travelled across land and seas, and no amount of walls, travel bans and patrolling of the seas will stop this completely from happening.
But that is no consolation for the terrible suffering being endured by asylum seekers and refugees on places like Manus Island.
The Australian government has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to its right to treat human beings appallingly, under the ruse of security.
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