By Inari Saltau

In the state of so-called “Australia”, gender and race are deeply intertwined within the structure of the colonial state and are central to the logics that underpin and uphold Australia’s punitive, protectionist, border-centric Refugee and asylum-seeker regime.

Gender and race conceptually construct and are used to validate the policies and treatment of Refugees and people who seek asylum in Australia, which are I argue are continuations of the invasion, colonisation and ongoing state sanction white-supremacist narrative that is foundational to Australia as a settler-colony and as nation-state. 

At the centre of the Australian state is the invasion of the landmass now known as Australia built upon the dehumanisation and attempted genocide of the hundreds of Indigenous nations through a declaration of ‘Terra Nullius’ (land without ownership) (Bolger 2016: 144). By discursively reducing Indigenous peoples to native flora and fauna European colonists falsely claimed sovereignty over the continent. Moreover, British colonists employed a racist hierarchy framed within a pseudo-scientific discourse to justify the practices of eradication, assimilation, child-theft, land acquisition, imprisonment, sexual violence, abuse, and enslavement as well as a gendered narrative that there was a need to ‘save’ Aboriginal women and children (Strakosch 2011: 20; Watson 2009: 2-3).  

The Australia state was established by colonisation and is founded upon structural white-supremacy and racism and the racist ideology that founded the state remains crucial to upholding the conception of settler-colonial sovereignty and patriarchal logics that support the cruel Australian Refugee and Asylum seeker regime (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 141). 

This is exemplified in the refugee and asylum seeker policy of the Coalition government ‘Operation Sovereign borders’. The name of the policy itself reveals the insecurity the settler state feels over the inherent illegitimacy of Australian sovereignty (as this was never ceded by any of the hundreds of Indigenous nations at the time of British Invasion). ‘Operation Sovereign borders’ is the name of the current border policy that has seen ‘unauthorised’ maritime arrivals intercepted and detained on Manus and Nauru (Fraenkel 2016: 279). Much like the practices of oppression that have been used against Indigenous people in Australia over the past 230 years, the methods of domination used against the imprisoned population on Manus and Nauru have also included systematic torture, sexual assault, restricted and inadequate health care, starvation, illness, violence, psychiatric cruelty and deeply traumatic living conditions which have been imposed on all of the prisoners including men, woman and children (Boochani 2018; Evershed, Farrell and Davidson 2016).

Mandatory detention is a mere continuation of long employed colonial domination methods that are rooted within Indigenous oppression, false sovereignty, the desire to legitimise that sovereignty and the racist reiteration of incarceration, domination and torture on non-white peoples.

Drawing upon the theory of the kyriarchal system that has been adopted by academic, journalist and poet Behrouz Boochani to describe the intersecting oppressions (such as sexism, racism and colonialism) that uphold hegemonic dominance in society in his theorisation of the Manus detention centre (in which he is currently detained); it is important to note that while I discuss racialised policies specifically in this context, it is impossible to disconnect race from the other interconnected forms of systematic oppression.

As Boochani elaborates, in the Kyriarchal system the racism intrinsically entwined into the logic, rationalisation and implementation of the offshore detention prisons is also connected to, and reinforced by, patriarchal gendered standards. The imprisonment of hundreds of men on Manus (all of whom have either been separated from their family units or are single) feeds into a narrative that their masculinity poses a threat to Australians and, when combined with racially charged stereotypes, has been deployed to delegitimise their status as Refugees. In terms of gender the pervasive accounts of sexual assault and violence that have occurred on Nauru against imprisoned refugees and asylum seekers (most predominantly women and children), highlights the inherently cruel use of gender as a structure of the Australian detention regime (McPherson 2014:89)

The Australian white-supremacist regime that controls people seeking asylum and refugees is built upon colonisation, is structurally racist, and this racism is supported and reinforced by patriarchal narratives of gender. By understanding the processes of false sovereignty, settler colonialism, Indigenous oppression, racist immigration policy, forced incarceration and torture that has characterised the two-hundred- and thirty-year history of the settler-colonial Australian state it is possible to better understand how this history has formed an inherently racist and gendered refugee and asylum seeker model that urgently needs to be replaced. Finally, in understanding these connections it is possible to reconfigure new, Feminist conceptions that have the potential to operate outside of the Kyriarchal, colonial, racist and sexist paradigm.

Inari is a white settler living on the lands of the Jagera, Yuggerapul and Turrbul peoples. They are the National Director of Outreach and Engagement for the One Woman Project and studies critical development and gender studies at the University of Queensland.

References:

Ang, Ien. "From White Australia to Fortress Australia: The Anxious Nation in the New Century." In Legacies of White Australia race, culture and nation, by Laksiri

Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard. University of Western Australia Press, 2003.

Bolger, Dawn Donghua. "Race Politics: Australian Government Responses to Asylum Seekers and Refugees from White Australia to Tampa." Western Sydney University (ProQuest), 2016.

Boochani, Behrouz. A Letter from the Manus Island. The Saturday Paper, 2017.

Boochani, Behrouz "Manus Prison Theory." The Saturday Paper. August 2018. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/topic/2018/08/11/manus- prison-theory/15339096006690 (accessed November 2018).

Boochani, Behrouz No Friend but the Mountains. Picador, 2018.

Crock, Mary, Ben Saul, and Azadeh Dastyari. Future Seekers II Refugees and Irregular Migration in Australia. The Federation Press, 2006.

Evershed, Nick, Paul Farrell, and Helen Davidson. The lives of asylum seekers in detention detailed in a unique database. The Guardian, 2016.

Federation Conference. "Official Record of the Proceedings and Debates of the Australasian Federation Conference, Melbourne 1890." 1890. http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/data-2/fed0053.pdf.

Fraenkel, Jon. "Australia’s Detention Centres on Manus Island and Nauru: An End of Constructive Pacific Engagement?" The Journal of Pacific History (Routledge ) 51, no. 3 (2016).

Gleeson, Madeline. Offshore: Behind the Wire on Nauru and Manus. New South Publishing, 2016.

Gosden, Diane. " What if no one had spoken out against this policy?’ The rise of asylum seeker and refugee advocacy in Australia ." Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (University of New South Wales) 3, no. 1 (2006).

Higgens, Claire. Aylum by Boat: origins of australia's refugee policy. UNSW Press, 2017.

Huggins, Jackie. "'Writing My Mother's Life',." In Sister Girl: Writings of Aboriginal Activitist Jackie Huggins, by Jackie Huggins. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1998.

Joint Standing commitee on migration regulations. Australia's refugee and humanitarian system: Achieveing a balance between refuge and control. Canberra: Parliament of the commonwealth of Australia, 1992.

Jupp, James. From white Australia to Woomera: the story of Australian Immigration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

McAdam, Jane, and Fiona Chong. Refugees: Why seeking Aslyum is legal and Australia's policies are not. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2014.

McMaster, Don. Asylum Seekers: Australia's Response to Refugees. Melbourn University Press, 2001.

McPherson, Melina. Refugee Women, Representation and Education: creating a discourse of self-authorship and potential. Taylor and Francis, 2014.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Phillips, Janet, and Harriet Spinks. Boat arrivals in Australia since 1976 . January 5, 2011. https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/BN/2011-2012/BoatArrivals#_Toc285178607 (accessed November 1, 2018).

Quijano, Anibal. "COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY." Cultural Studies (Routledge) 21, no. 2-3 (2007).

Rodríguez, Encarnación Gutiérrez. "The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism." Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugee 34, no. 1 (2018).

Sales, Rosemary. Understanding Immigration and Refugee Policy. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2007.

Stevens, Rachel. "Political Debates on Asylum Seekers during the Fraser Government 1977-1982." Australian Journal of Politics and History (The University of Queensland and Wiley Publishing), 2012.

Strakosch, Elizabeth Rose. "Neoliberal Indigenous Policy in Australia: Government, Sovereignty and Colonialism." (The University of Queensland Press) 2011.

Trainor, Brian T. "asylum seekers, colonialism & the de-legitimisation of the australian state." Australian Quarterly (Australian Institute of Policy and Science) 75, no. 5 (2003).

United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees. Figures at a Glance. June 19, 2018. http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html (accessed October 2018).

Watson, Irene. "Aboriginality and the Violence of Colonialism." borderlands (www.borderlands.net.au) 8, no. 1 (2009).