Book Review: Refugee Journeys – ed. Jordana Silverstein and Rachel Stevens
The growth in Australian refugee research over recent decades has provided wider and critical perspectives, often from compelling first person accounts of post-refugee and subsequent generation experience. Originating from a Melbourne University conference on ‘Global Histories’, these 11 contributions come from a range of fields: refugee integration studies, language and media representations, law and policy, and various types of history – oral, subcultural, international comparisons, and critical/reflective. All these writers are seeking better outcomes, looking for greater clarity about the past and present, and the ‘why’ of policy, to explore ‘what might have been’ and could be in the future, in propitious circumstances. Yet it’s hard at present to know what might happen globally to provide these circumstances, which is not discussed. An increased demand for international labour due to the general decline in birth rates may provide opportunities for refugees, but more nativism and potential changes in domestic work patterns work the other way.
Legal academic Eve Lester tells us that one in ten of the 9 million who migrated to Australia since 1945 have been refugees, which is useful to know when comparing the influence on policy of humanitarianism, generosity, national interest and the politics of the Cold war and hot wars. She situates the Refugee Convention in its post-WW2 origins, with its boundaries of time and place which deliberately excluded refugees from outside Europe (less important and too many), while offering permanent re-settlement in the New World countries as the lure for their much needed labour force expansion. When the decolonisations of the 1960s meant large numbers were anticipated to be on the move (this time non-Europeans), the restrictions mentioned above were removed, and the 1967 Protocol emerged. The reason seems to be that the economic and strategic benefits to Europe and North America were now less, so the previous commitment was reduced – away from permanent re-settlement to “durable” solutions, allowing an emphasis on “voluntary return”. The refugee “barriers to exit” imposed by communist states after WW2 were no longer relevant to this new period, so discretion on refugee movements (“barriers to entry”) shifted towards the receiving countries. They created new ways to pull up the drawbridge according to their self-interest, with the results we see today. Obviously, there is much mutual benefit and enriched lives resulting from migrant and refugee movements. But it is a great start to the book’s purpose of understanding to look beyond the commonplace narrative of “good” and “bad” leaders taking decisions based on kindness or cruelty. There is much more to read in Lester’s explanation, such as the “pre-history”: how were refugees seen and dealt with before the 1951 Convention?
Melanie Baak describes the “haunting effect” of the refugee label, including by practitioners and researchers – how long until they’re not defined by their trauma, victimisation or disempowerment? Or indeed their race, as we see so often for base political purposes in Australia. Personal stories and reports of agency can reduce the objectification and dehumanisation, she says.
Jordana Silverstein reviews welfare officer reports on Timorese and Vietnamese refugee children in migrant hostels during the 1970-1980 period, and finds a control mentality. Because “the voices of the workers dominate” and rarely do the children report about themselves, many case reports are not well-regarded by Silverstein, who calls the management of these children a “part of a broad settler-colonial project of control and assimilation”, with the release of the archival material she has used illustrative of this. I thought her excerpt examples unexceptional and over-interpreted: to have it confirmed that the work practices and ideology of that period were different to what was applied in other child welfare areas, such as disability, adoption, fostering, and parenting, would have been useful.
Ann-Kathrin Bartels reviews the asylum debate in Germany, drawing on the text of German newspaper articles from 1985-1987, and comparing this with the Australian debates about Vietnamese boat people in the 1970s and early 1990s. Since Germany had such a prominent role in the European response to the Syrian exodus of a few years ago, a deeper appreciation in Australia of what informs its policies is apt. One policy difference is that the lack of a “humanitarian quota” in Germany means the strong notion of an “orderly queue” used to object to boat arrivals in Australia, is not part of the debate there. Another has been the longstanding reluctance to grant citizenship to Turkish or Slav workers, which may be now changing. The same Chancellor Merkel who welcomed Syrians with “We can do this” at the same time rejected multiculturalism (in its German version) in favour of assimilation.
Rachel Stevens tells of the 1971 conflict between east and west Pakistan, resulting in perhaps 30 million internally-displaced people and refugees located in West Bengal (India.) She reports successful community campaigning by a broad religious, political and internationalist-oriented coalition in Australia for a substantial financial response from a reluctant Federal government. Domestic politics in South Asia has not favoured much scholarship about this war, and it has been largely ignored in Australia. However, the importance of previous and extant relationships with Bengal by certain Australian diplomats, Baptist missionaries, and joint Catholic and Protestant public appeals, resulted in Australia being a big achiever for the size of its donation.
Kathleen Blair reports on the politicisation of language around asylum seekers – catchy phrases, slogans, descriptions which resonate – and how effective this has been at election times, from 1977 to 2013. From the Vietnamese ‘criminals’ of the 1970s to the more recent illegals, queue jumpers, boat people, terrorists, people smugglers, these have largely brought the two major parties towards each other, Labor trying to neutralise the issue by chasing the median voter. Fortunately, more rightwing differentiation is not perceived as useful: in the last 3 elections they have been used sparingly, and it seems that embedding them into common parlance no longer requires strong reinforcement. Like the dead cat on the table, they are a useful distraction which reliably triggers a negative response, especially to reference congestion or government service issues.
Interviews with Hazara refugees are also in the book, the first being Jamila Jafari’s experience of presenting her story of life in detention in They Cannot Take the Sky, a project to platform refugee voices, and the second is Salmi, Hassan and Jahan regarding their journey from Dahmarda to Dandenong via Denpasar. The authority of these first person reports to reveal the lived effects of policy has great impact.
Savitri Taylor, a law professor involved for 25 years in this field, goes back much further to the drafting of the Australian Constitution, which draws on her extensive legal and case knowledge. She starts with the ‘original sin’, from every Constitutional Convention from 1891, of allowing discrimination against non-Europeans which means “Australians cannot rely on their existing legal and political structures to deliver them from evil”, especially as court rulings tend to be favourable towards government interpretations. In recent history, she considers mandatory detention by the Labor Government in 1992 and offshore processing as watershed events in the incremental decline of standards. “The most insidious thing about every step taken was that it became the new normal and brought the next step into the realm of conceivable.” Yet except between 2004-2007 when the Coalition controlled both Houses of Parliament, the legislative steps could not have been taken without the support of non-government politicians. This is a powerful critique with a depressing conclusion.
Klaus Neumann has been writing history on refugee matters for a long time, and those who’ve read his work expect that his thoughts are often provocative and critical of conventional wisdoms held by all sides. “Uses and Abuses of Refugee Stories” is in that vein. He criticises those who try to use history as a morality lesson to contrast a good past with a “fallen” present, a political weapon to defend current policies, or to practise selective blindness in their moral judgements about individuals or countries.
While both have been criticised for their racist views, he has a good word for both Menzies in his offer to resettle Nauruans at Curtis Island in Queensland, and T.W. White, his representative at the Evian conference of 1938. He has a bad word for Bob Hawke and parliamentary allies, who allowed a deportee to be held in detention for 3 years longer than he should have. It is fitting in a review of this book to give him the last word: he wants “histories that are unsettling, disrupting notions of a seamless progression from the status quo ante to the status quo. Such histories may even allow for futures to be imagined that are not yet contained in the present, and which are attentive to pasts that did not culminate in the present.”
Kevin Bain’s refugee reading guide is at Bayside Refugee Support.
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