Abstract
The speaker is Sir Samuel Griffith, Premier of Queensland, Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, and “one of the major participants in the story of Federation.”2 Griffith’s description of the process that successfully annexed the Torres Strait Islands, though falling just short of acquiring Papua for Queensland, is terse and to the point. It lays bare the sweep of a colonial voracity. How does this appetite to take in the horizon shape the imaginative and affective borders of the island-nation and its contemporary maps of the region in a period of renewed imperial aspiration, the global war on terror? What are the processes of spatialization, the imaginative geographies, and the territorial teleologies at work in a war that, through the active, racially marked investment, emotional and material, of the state, remaps Australia’s horizons? How do these imaginative geographies enable the spatializing of rated relations and contour the distributions, dispersions, and temporalities of power that enact and reproduce differential forms of sovereignty over national-regional space? These are the central questions I pursue in this chapter.
She [Queensland] could not get New Guinea but managed to get as near as possible. We followed round as close as we could get between the islands and the coast of New Guinea, taking in practically everything.
—Samuel Griffith1
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Notes
Quoted in W. E. Holder, “The Queensland ‘Border’: The Legal Position,” in The Border and Associated Problems: The Torres Strait Islanders, ed. E. K. Fisk, Maree Tait, W. E. Holder, and M. E. Threadgold, vol. 5 (Canberra: Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1974), 38.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 54–55.
On teleologies of nation see Suvendrini Perera, “Futures Imperfect,” in Alter/Asians, ed. Ien Ang, Sharon Chalmers, Lisa Law, and Mandy Thomas (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000), 3–24;
for a discussion of “telic tales” of Australian sovereignty in the context of refugee arrivals, see Prem Kumar Rajaram, “Locating Political Space: Asylum and Excision in Australia,” in Borderscapes: Rethinking the Politics of Migration and Belonging, ed. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 263–82.
See Suvendrini Perera, “A Line in the Sea: The Tampa, Boat Stories and the Border,” Race & Class 44, no. 2 (2002): 23–39.
Sanford E. Schram and Philip T. Neisser, Tales of the State: Narrative in Contemporary US Politics and Public Policy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
Australian Strategic Policy Institute [ASPI], Our Failing Neighbour: Australia and the Future of the Solomon Islands (Sydney: ASPI, 2001).
See Amy Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities: Reflections on Language and Space,” Radical History Review 85 (2003): 82–93.
Martin Regg Cohn, “Australia, America’s ‘Deputy Sheriff,’ Punches above Its Weight and Criticizes Canada for Not Doing the Same,” Embassy: Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly 67, August 17, 2005, 5.
Sherene H. Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 67–69.
Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, Sovereign Bodies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 3.
Cited in Harry Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, “Kipling, the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and US Imperialism,” Monthly Review, 55, no. 6 (2003), 7.
Helen Irving, ed., The Centenary Companion to Australian Federation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 352.
Goldie Osuri and Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, “White Diasporas: Media Representations of September 11 and the Unbearable Whiteness of Being in Australia,” Social Semiotics 14, no. 2 (2004): 167.
Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka, “‘Failed State’ and the War on Terror: Intervention in Solomon Islands,” Analysis from the East-West Center72 (2004): 7, www.eastwestcenter.org/stored/pdfs/api072.pdf
Sinclair Dinnen, “Dilemmas of Intervention and the Building of State and Nation,” in Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands, ed. Sinclair Dinnen and Stuart Firth (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, Australian National University, 2008), 3.
Sinclair Dinnen, “Lending a Fist? Australia’s New Interventionism in the Southwest Pacific,” (Canberra: SSGM Conference Papers, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 2004/05), 3. See also Dinnen and Firth, Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands, ed. Sinclair Dinnen and Stuart Firth (Canberra: Asia Pacific Press, Australian National University, 2008), 3.
On white interests see John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1998), 97.
For a contrary view to Doogue’s, see David Welchman Gegeo and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo, “Whose Knowledge? Epistemological Collisions in Solomon Islands Community Development,” The Contemporary Pacific 14, no. 2 (2002): 377–409.
Robert Kaplan, Imperial Grunts (New York: Random House, 2004), 5.
Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese, “‘Racial Suicide’: The Relicensing of Racism in Australia,” Race & Class 39, no. 2 (1997), 11.
Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past Present and Future (Im) Possibilities,” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 31.
Goldie Osuri, “War in the Language of Peace, and an Australian Geo/ Politics of White Possession,” ACRAWSA e-journal 4, no. 1 (2008): 8, http://www.acrawsa.org.au/journal/acrawsa%205–5.pdf
“Bush Telegraph,” ABC Radio National, November 21, 2005. On the competing sovereignties in ocean fishing, see Bruce C. Campbell and Bu V. E. Wilson, The Politics of Exclusion: Indonesian Fishing in the Australian Fishing Zone (Perth: Indian Ocean Centre for Peace Studies, 1993).
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Maldon: Blackwell, 2004).
Sinclair Dinnen, “The Trouble with Melanesia” in Eye of the Cyclone: Issues in Pacific Security, ed. Ivan Molloy (Sippy Downs, Queensland: Pacific Islands Political Studies Association, 2004), 74.
Epeli Hau’ofa, “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10, no. 2 (1998): 391.
Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific, 1993), 7.
Peter Hanks, Patrick Keyzer, and Jennifer Clarke, Race and the Law of Territories: Australian Constitutional Law: Materials and Commentary (Chatswood, NSW: LexisNexis, 2004), 1057.
Ruth Balint, “Mare Nullius and the Making of a White Ocean Policy,” in Our Patch: Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001, ed. Suvendrini Perera (Perth: Network Books, 2007), 87–104.
See also Ruth Balint, Troubled Waters (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005).
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© 2009 Suvendrini Perera
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Perera, S. (2009). Our Patch. In: Australia and the Insular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103122_7
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