|
March 9, 2008
Angela Mitropoulos's Notes on the Frontiers and Borders of the Postcolony in the 2007 Sara Reader--Frontiers is concerned with John Howard's declaration of a de facto state of emergency over remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. This was justified by the protection of children from abuse – or, more specifically, the release of the report by the Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse in the Northern Territory. Mitropoulos asks a good question:
The obvious question being posed here is why, after cutting health and welfare services to indigenous communities, it has required a paramilitary intervention to, purportedly, ensure the health and welfare of those same communities.
She links the state of emergency in Northern Territory to events with the events around the Tampa-- the military seizure and interdiction in 2001, by the Australian government, of the Norwegian freighter that had rescued over 300 undocumented migrants from drowning, and states that:
In both these instances, what have been ongoing and widely-reported occurrences (undocumented boat arrivals and child abuse) were reconstructed as singularly alarming events providing the pretext for authoritarian displays of sovereignty – that is, declarations of an exceptional situation demanding, without question, the suspension of the normal functioning of the law so as to restore the presumed integrity of the Australian body politic.
She analysises this from the perspective of the distinction between frontier spaces and bordered realms which she corelates with the distinction – in Social Contract theories – between the 'state of nature' and 'society' that, in turn, are the ideal-typical placeholders for the 'West' and the colonies.
|
