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Abstract
At various points in their (post)colonial histories, the border-protective politics of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have mobilized off-shore islands as spaces of “inclusive exclusion”. Yet, even as spaces of exception and/or exclusion, off-shore islands dismantle inside/outside distinctions. I discuss a selection of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand novels featuring both literal and metaphorical islands used for removal, internment or containment of Indigenous peoples and wartime “enemy aliens”. Through their attention to the poetics of island form, and coasts as more-than-human spaces, the novels underscore how islands bring the relation between inside and outside into question, complicating the articulation of borders.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Latouche differentiates development’s castaways from the island narrative par excellence, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “Development’s castaways do not resemble Robinson Crusoe at all. They are more like betrayed Fridays, misled and abandoned by their master” (Citation1993, 215).
2 As island nations, both Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia are vigilant about border biosecurity in relation to potential economic and environmental harm, seeking to protect uses of land that were, however, introduced at the cost of destruction of Indigenous ecologies and environmental practices.
3 The Chatham Islands’ Indigenous names are Rēkohu (Moriori) or Wharekauri (Māori). Under an arrangement called the Pacific Solution, Australia also arranged deals with Papua New Guinea and Nauru to establish detention centres for asylum seekers on Manus Island and Nauru, rather than have them land on Australian territory. The arrangement lasted from 2001 to 2007. However, Christmas Island continued to hold detainees after 2007.
4 Although borders denote this absolute distinction, in practice they encompass liminal zones between inside and outside. While Derrida’s (Citation1987) reworking of Kant’s parergon would challenge the absolute nature of the distinction in the first place, border politics disavow any such ambivalence.
5 For example, following the 2001 Tampa incident, a Norwegian ship (the Tampa) carrying rescued refugees was refused permission to enter Australian waters when it tried to reach Christmas Island. The Australian parliament “retroactively declared parts of its sovereign territory no longer to be included in Australia for the purposes of migration. This was called ‘the power of excision’” (Mountz Citation2011, 124). Edmond notes, of excised islands: “This means that people who reach these islands can no longer claim refugee status … In order to preserve the health and integrity of the nation its islands are being lopped off and cast adrift” (Citation2003, 144). See also McMahon (Citation2003, 194) and Leroy in this issue.
6 Apart from the islands of Tasmania, islands around the coast of “mainland” Australia that have been locations of prisons or internment camps for Aboriginal people include Fraser Island, off the Queensland coast; St Helena Island prison, near the mouth of the Brisbane river; and Rottnest Island, off the south coast of Western Australia. During the 1860s, Māori “rebels” fighting against colonial forces were exiled to Wharekauri (the Chatham Islands) and imprisoned there. A well-known exile was Te Kooti, who had fought with the colonial government forces, but was sent to Wharekauri in 1866 on suspicion of being a spy.
7 While islands were not the only sites for wartime “enemy alien” internment camps, such camps were located on Rottnest Island, Western Australia, Torrens Island, South Australia, and Bruny Island, Tasmania. These camps operated from 1914 to 1915, before internees were transferred to other locations. Aotearoa New Zealand operated Motuihe Island, in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, as an internment camp during World War I, and Somes Island, in Wellington Harbour, during both world wars.
8 On the arbitrariness of potential “exclusion,” see McGill (Citation2001, 111).
9 As Riquet notes, while a 2007 reader produced for the discipline of island studies included no contributions from literary or cultural studies scholars, ten years later “literary scholars have become regular contributors to the Island Studies Journal” (Citation2019, 11, n.1). Riquet’s introduction offers a useful overview of literary and cultural studies work on islands.
10 Mudrooroo took this name in 1988, and the novel was published under the name Colin Johnson. However, since Mudrooroo is the name through which his work is now best known, I refer to the author of Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription as Mudrooroo.
11 Wooreddy was husband to the woman whose name Mudrooroo renders as Trugernanna, though is more often referred to as Truncanini or Truganini, recorded historically as the “last woman” of her tribe (Wilson Citation2015, 6).
12 Governor Arthur tells Robinson, “As much as I would like to begin immediately to remove the natives from the main island … I must await the outcome of the military operation … In a week or so, it will have reached the neck [of Tasman’s peninsula] and sealed it as a cork in the neck of a bottle. Then I must send mounted parties on to the peninsula to see what we have caught’” (133).
13 Similarly, in the Governor’s plan of “placing them in some secure place where they may be taught,” the word “secure” hovers between concern with the safety (security) of the Aboriginal people, and concern with settlers’ safety from Aboriginal people by way of their secure(d) containment.
14 Thus here, and in the following texts I discuss, such “refuge” islands are spaces of the order of “bare life” (Agamben Citation2005), in contrast to the islands of refuge for the protection of super-wealth from the institutions and regulations of state economies, as discussed by Ramsey-Kurz (this issue).
15 As Foucault notes, “In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory … or else the individual has to submit to certain rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures” (Citation1986, 26).
16 The defensive self-insularity of colonial-national settlement is taken to its neoliberal culmination in Ramsey-Kurz’s discussion (this issue) of insularity depicted in McCarthy’s Satin Island as “a disastrous state of bankruptcy into which an utterly degenerate West has descended, ironically enough, in times of globalization.”
17 My argument here is indebted to Anne McClintock’s (Citation2014) discussion of imperial spatio-temporal ghosting.