Letters from Nauru

Guest post by Gillian Whitlock from the University of Queensland. Gillian has an ARC grant to work on the archives of asylum seeker materials held at the Fryer Library of her home institution, the University of Queensland. Her current project based on the archives, The Testimony of Things, will examine representations of asylum seekers through material testimony in the Nauru archives and beyond, to other borderscapes in Europe and North America.

In December 2007 the newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced the closure of two detention camps on the South Pacific Island of Nauru, ‘Topside’ and ‘State House,’ that had been established under his predecessor John Howard. The practice of transferring asylum seekers intercepted at sea to third countries in the Pacific for processing was a key part of the so-called ‘Pacific Solution,’ promulgated in 2001.

There were three essential components of the Pacific Solution: the excision of thousands of islands in Australia’s oceanic borderlands from its migration zone; the policy of towing back boats to Indonesia; and the removal of ‘unauthorised maritime arrivals’ to offshore detention centres in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The majority of the people accommodated on Nauru and Manus Islands arrived in late 2001 and early 2002, and between 2001 and September 2003, during the height of the ‘Pacific Solution’ a total of 1,544 asylum seekers (mostly from Afghanistan and Iraq) were accommodated there. When the Rudd government dismantled the ‘Pacific Solution’ in 2008 a ministerial press release noted that a total of 1,637 people had been detained there, and 70% had been resettled to Australia or other countries. The conditions of the offshore processing centres, lack of independent scrutiny, and the mental health impact of offshore detention have always been major issues of concern.

There have always been strong humanitarian campaigns in protest to the Pacific Solution. The Australian Human Rights Commission, for instance, releases ‘snapshots’ that record human rights issues arising from Australia’s approach to asylum (see here the most recent snapshot from 2013). In the wake of the decision to close the centres, humanitarian activists have made accessible the archives generated by their campaigns between 2001 and 2007. These provide rare insights into the offshore detention centres, mostly from the perspective of the asylum seekers themselves. There are currently several archival collections: the Julian Burnside/Kate Durham and Elaine Smith collections at the University of Queensland’s Fryer library; and the Records of Rural Australians for Refugees, 2000-2008 (some closed to researchers until 2060), the Papers of Grace Gorman, 2001-2003, and
 Papers of Marion Le, 199- at the National Library in Canberra.

These are extraordinarily heterogeneous collections. In the Fryer archives, for example, one finds letters exchanged between asylum seekers and activists, hand-made gifts, photographs taken from within the detention centres (with disposable cameras), drawings and artwork, Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs correspondence, hard copies of email correspondence and stubs of Telecom phonecards that were such a precious resource on Nauru. The Burnside Durham collection contains major artwork of contemporary humanitarian activism such as Kate Durham’s installation SIEV X, and Ross Gibson and Carl Warner installation ‘protection.’ The latter was commissioned in response to the Fryer archives and features photographs taken by asylum seekers in detention, ‘masked’ as required by ethical protocols.

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How to cite this blog post (Harvard style):

Whitlock, G. (2014). Letters from Nauru. Available at: http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk/letters-from-nauru/(accessed [date]).