Australian Whiteness and Refugee Politics

This paper offers the historical context and a conceptual framework to understand how race has shaped Australia's identity, border and asylum politics. It examines how socially constructed whiteness has fostered a perceived need to exert strict and often violent control over the movement of people of colour in and around Australia. We outline the colonial foundations of Australian whiteness and how it has fostered anxiety and bigotry at Federation and during the First World War, in contemporary multicultural and Indigenous policies, and on sporting fields. Whiteness operates along horizontal axes that promote racist insecurities and vertical axes that promote racist hierarchies. An imperative for spatial and racial mastery also underpins the twentyfirst century militarization of Australia's migration policy, as exemplified in deterrence measures such as mandatory detention, excision, interdiction and offshore processing and resettlement. Moreover, this whiteness is present in paternalistic claims that border policies are motivated by a compulsion to save lives at sea. Understanding the distinctively anxious and punitive character of Australian refugee politics requires coming to terms with Australia's history of white authority and committing to displacing it from the prominent place that it holds in the national identity.