Abstract
On November 4, 2003, the day of the Melbourne Cup, the most significant sporting event in Australia (“the race that stops a nation”), a fishing boat, the Minasa Bone, landed on Melville Island, about 20 kilometers off the northern capital of Darwin. The Islanders, Indigenous Tiwi people, were surprised to come across obviously foreign men on the beach who asked them, “Is this Australia?” Perhaps the arrivals were confused by the large number of black faces and the general Third World look of the place. The Islanders’ answer marked a subtle distinction: You are on Melville Island. Yes, it is in Australia. In but not of. Did the arrivals register any qualification? There were fourteen of them plus the Indonesian crew of four. They requested water, indicated they were from Turkey, and asked for asylum. Only a few weeks earlier the Islanders had been instructed by visiting officials what to do in such an eventuality. The men were provisioned, quickly dispatched back to their boat, and the authorities notified. These Islanders were the first and last Australians, apart from the navy and immigration bureaucrats, that the new arrivals would set eyes on.
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Notes
Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Locating Political Space: Asylum and Excision in Australia,” in Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, ed. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 263–82.
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More detailed accounts of the Tampa can be found in Suvendrini Perera, “A Line in the Sea” Race & Class 44, no. 2 (2002): 23–39.
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© 2009 Suvendrini Perera
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Perera, S. (2009). Bodies, Boats, Borderscapes. In: Australia and the Insular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_4
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