‘Welcome to paradise’: Asylum seekers, neoliberalism, nostalgia and Lucky Miles

Abstract

This article considers the Australian film Lucky Miles (2007) in the context of the developing emphasis in Australia through the 1990s and 2000s on neoliberal policies. This emphasis started with the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and was qualitatively reinforced by the conservative coalition government of John Howard. Lucky Miles is a film which narratives the experience of asylum seekers arriving on the Australian mainland. My focus is particularly on the impact of neoliberalism on the role of the border and on the popular attitude towards asylum seekers. To help develop this argument I also consider the film Children of Men (2006), which is set in Britain in a dystopian future. I analyse Lucky Miles to understand how it replicates anxieties about asylum seekers and the porosity of the border that are, at bottom, a consequence of changing attitudes bred by neoliberal policies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Suvendrini Perera for her close and thoughtful reading of an earlier version of this article.

Notes

1. All these box office figures come from Dale (2007).

2. Olivia Khoo has made a similar point. She writes that:

Despite the proliferate categories for the nation's cast of marginal characters, there is a reluctance, or an inability, to make space for Asians within such a seemingly leveling discourse of marginality. It is not that prominent films recounting the stories of Asians in Australia, or of Australians in Asia, do not exist. Rather, this silence is perhaps due to the fact that the Asian Australian relationship is one that is difficult for many Australians to dream or conceive of fully yet. (Khoo 2008, 45–6)

3. There is now a large literature on neoliberalism. See, for example, Harvey (2005) and Saad-Filho and Johnston (2005).

4. For general, background information see Millbank (2001).

5. See Stratton (2009b).

6. In English law the idea of the alien goes back to the fifteenth century; see Kim (2000).

7. See also Hage (2002).

8. In 2008 a similar scene of border protection was narrated as bathos. Here is the event described in a news release from the office of the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Dr Sharman Stone:

Happy Campers, the new front-line border protection: Stone. The role of campers in detaining 12 Sri Lankan men, some of whom swam through shark-infested waters yesterday to illegally enter Australia, shows Federal Labor's border regime to be failing, the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Dr Sharman Stone, has said. (Stone 2008)I owe this reference to Kristen Phillips.

9. The first Vietnam Moratorium march, held in May 1970, saw around 100,000 people take to the streets of Melbourne and up to another 100,000 march in other cities in Australia. See Gerster and Bassett (1991, 46) for a discussion of the Melbourne march.