State Crime and Immigration Control in Australia: Jock Serong’s On the Java Ridge

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the Australian government’s immigration policies in the context of the global refugee crisis in the years 2015–2016, as reflected and dramatised through the polemical novel by Australian author Jock Serong, On the Java Ridge (2017). This novel testifies to one of the most disturbing effects of globalisation, namely, the unprecedented scale of population mobility, mainly as a result of famine, climate warming, and war conflicts of all kinds. In this atmosphere of anxiety and fear, the unrelenting flow of refugees is seen not only as a menace to the rule of law and human rights but also as a destabilising element that might compromise the comfortable lifestyle of First World countries. This has led many governments, including the Australian government, to take measures to stop refugees and asylum-seekers from reaching their soil. As a number of criminologists suggest, some of these measures might be regarded as state crime, as they often violate international law and human rights on the pretext of reaching organisational goals. This article shows how Serong’s novel illustrates a number of shady immigration control measures allegedly taken by the Australian government which, following Michael Welch’s terminology, can fall into two main categories: “loud panic/the wall of noise” and “quiet manoeuvring/the wall of governance,” with a view to criticising this system and urging rich countries, in particular Australia, to take action on one of the most pressing problems plaguing the world today.

KEYWORDS:

• state crime
• immigration control
• refugee persecution
• Australian immigration policies
• Jock Serong
• On the Java Ridge

Notes

1. See Wright and Friedrichs, “White-collar Crime”; Cullen and Benson, “White-collar Crime”; Tunnell, “Political Crime and Pedagogy”; Wright, “Left-Out?”; Lynch, McGurrin, and Fenwick, “Disappearing Act”; Ross and Rothe, “Ironies of Controlling”; Shichor, “Scholarly Influence”; and Cochrane, “Drowning in It.”

2. See Friedrichs, Trusted Criminals.

3. Cochrane, “Drowning in It,” 1.

4. Green and Ward, “State Crime, Human Rights,” 110.

5. Mullins and Rothe, “The Forgotten Ones,” 137.

6. Green and Grewcock, “The War Against Illegal Immigration,” 98.

7. Cochrane, “Drowning in It,” 2–3.

8. See Pickering, “Border Terror; Weber, “Policing the Virtual Border.”

9. Cochrane, “Drowning in It,” 6.

10. Pickering, “Crimes of the State,” 143.

11. Ibid., 144.

12. Ibid., 145.

13. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration,” 325–26.

14. Bashford and Strange, “Asylum-Seekers and National Histories,” 326.

15. Ibid., 516.

16. Burke, Fear of Security, 174.

17. Ibid., 170.

18. Manne, “The Nation Reviewed,” 8.

19. Pickering, “Crimes of the State,” 147.

20. Ibid., 147–49.

21. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

22. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration.”

23. Bauman, Globalisation, 89.

24. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration,” 329.

25. Ibid., 329 (emphasis in original).

26. Pickering, “Common Sense and Original Deviancy.”

27. Klocker and Dunn, “Who’s Driving the Asylum Debate?”

28. Slattery, “Drowning not Waving.”

29. Serong, On the Java Ridge, 147–48. Henceforth page numbers are cited in the text.

30. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration,” 331.

31. Ibid., 331–32.

32. Grewcock, Border Crimes, 169.

33. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration,” 336 (emphasis in original).

34. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8 and 71.

35. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration,” 333 (emphasis in original).

36. O’Malley, “Firm that Does the Dirty Work”; AHRC, Immigration Detention Report, 1.

37. AHRC, Immigration Detention Report, 1.

38. The Age, “Govt Implicated in SIEV-X Sinking.”

39. Pickering, “Border Terror.”

40. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics.

41. Welch, “The Sonics of Crimmigration.”

42. Pickering, “Crimes of the State,” 160.

43. Ibid., 156.

44. Ibid., 157.

Additional information

Funding

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Regional Development Fund (DGI/ERDF) (code FFI2017-84258-P); and the Government of Aragón and the FSE 2020–2022 programme (code H03_20R), for the writing of this essay.

Notes on contributors

Dolores Herrero

Dolores Herrero is Full Professor of English Literature at the Department of English and German Philology, University of Zaragoza, Spain. Her main research interests are postcolonial literature and cinema, on which she has published extensively. Among her various activities she was the editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies (1998–2006), and Secretary of EASA (European Association for Studies on Australia) (2011–2015).