Missing water: imagination and empathy in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen

Abstract

Australia's cultural and political life is dominated by the image of the boat, most recently in the form of border anxiety concerning asylum seekers arriving by boat from the north. In this context, it is surprising to note the cinematic refrain of a literal absence of boats in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen, by which the visual iconography of the boat (as a physical object) is disavowed at the same time as it is underscored and over-exploited in the service of a certain kind of politicized cinema. This paper traces a trajectory from Steven Wallace's Turtle Beach (1992) to more recent film and television examples including Khoa Do's Mother Fish (2010) and the Special Broadcasting Service's Go Back to Where You Came From (2011–2012). Regarding Asian Australian narratives as merely ‘boat stories’ disavows their wider significance by reducing them to personal histories, but these ‘boat stories without boats’ ask far more in terms of the imaginative investment required of spectators in order to generate empathy, in this case towards the plight of asylum seekers.

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Corrigendum

Notes

^1. When the Tampa entered Australian waters, the prime minister ordered that the shop be boarded by Australian special waters. Within a few days the government introduced the Border Protection Bill and outlined its so-called ‘Pacific Solution’ whereby asylum seekers were to be taken to the island of Nauru for consideration of their refugee status, rather than on-shore, in Australia.

^2. Australia is a signatory to the United Nations 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and to the subsequent 1967 Protocol. As a signatory Australia recognises the right of refugees to enter the country for the purposes of seeking asylum, regardless of how they arrive or whether they hold valid travel or identity documents.

^3. In the lead up to the federal election, the Howard government made public allegations in October 2001 that asylum seekers on a sinking vessel had thrown their children overboard in a ploy to be rescued and taken to Australia. A Senate select committee inquiry into the incident found that no children had in fact been at risk of being thrown overboard and that the government had known this prior to election. The government was criticized for misleading the public in support of its strict border control policies, yet won the election that year with an increased majority based in large part on this platform.

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Olivia Khoo

Olivia Khoo is a senior lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She is the author of The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Hong Kong University Press, 2007) and co-editor with Sean Metzger of Futures of Chinese Cinema: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures (Intellect, 2009).