<nettime> The "Ethnic Other" Show

[David A Cox <dcox@netspace.net.au>]

The "Ethnic Other" Show, or how "Big Brother" both Masks and Reveals the
real Big Brother of the Detention Centres.

The image of the "caged ethnic" outlined in Ghassan Hage's book "White
Nation" evokes for him a very closely related one: that of a tamed animal.
For Hage, the logic of detention camps is very closely linked to that
which defines the relationship of pets and farm animals to humans. As Hage
outlines, the difference between a tamed animal and a domesticated one is
that the tamed animal is too wild to be able to wander freely in the home,
but rather must hover between the status of a trusted domesticated pet and
the totally wild beast. For 'home' read 'nation' and for animal read
'ethnic other'. Detention centres enable a symbolic 'taming' of the ethnic
other, reinforcing the primacy of the imagined central
white-man-in-control whether he be in Federal Parliament (Phil Ruddock) or
at home in front of the telly with his remote control, TV guide and tinny.

For Hage, the plethora of images of (often angry) ethnic people behind
razor wire serves to deliberately dramatise a nationalist fantasy of the
white Australian's self appointed right-to-subjegate and the
right-to-control and monitor cultural space. Significantly, it dramatises
this fantasy often for the benefit of cameras, and the imagined broader
population. Where the nation is the 'home' and the ethnic other is the
'animal', the detention centre operates as a kind of immigration
people-zoo, or 'sanctuary' for the benefit of those who consider
themselves the natural managers of the national space. When John Howard
declares that "we will determine who enters Australia" in full page
national newspapers, he knows most of the readers will interpret 'we' to
mean 'white Australians who consider ourselves to be in charge of the
cultural and national space'.

The detention centre is everything the suburban home is not. The camps are
far from any kind of domestic ambience. They are official, in dusty, hot
and distant places, they have boom-gates, control towers, they are policed
by (usually white) men and women in uniforms, and filled with Commonwealth
standard issue cars, armoured vehicles, furniture and fittings amidst an
architecture of drab utility.  Flourescent lights, cieling mounted
televisions, plastic moulded outdoor chairs and tables. The image is of
policed space, controlled space, militarised space.

What is often touching for me is seeing in the carefully chosen officially
vetted images of post-riot television footage of the centres, evidence of
attempts to make these places less like  high security prisons: hastily
done murals, childrens' drawings, pictures put up on the walls.  I used to
work near a detention centre at a language centre for refugees in
Maribyrnong, outside Melbourne and I know something of the logic behind
them. They evoke the logic of Commonwealth thinking made architectural.
They are about the fastidious and beurocratic catagorisation of people
into groupings, based on ethnicity, cultural tradition and country of
origin. This is what the British Empire prided itself on, nay prides
itself on, even now in its dying days. I was once asked to oversee the
student's painting of a mural on one of the drab walls of the portable
classrooms of the language centre. For all I know it might still be there.
Some of my students had family members inside the adjacent Detention
centre. It felt wrong then. It feels wrong now.

In the 1980s I worked for the Victorian Education Department, teaching art
to Lebanese, El Salvadorian, Chilean, Vietnamese and Cambodian children,
at what was called a Language Centre in Maribyrnong, outside Melbourne.
Many of the young students had been traumatised by recent war situation
experiences. They and I were occasionally treated to the distant muffled
sound of nearby Defense department testing of machine guns. The centre
was, deliberately it would seem, placed out near or alongside buildings
and infrastructure linked to the immigration department, the department of
defense, and other infrastructual expressions of closed,  nationalistic
officialdom. 

The inmates of Woomera and others like it, it would appear, for all their
remote distance from the neatly mowed lawns of conservative Australia are
actually there to be viewed by the machinations of corporate media power,
like animals in a cage, for the benefit of both the domestic media
consuming population, whose suburban, everything-in-its-rightful-place
ideology must place the ethnic other in his or her alloted slot. In this
way, populations are managed, like television programs themselves are
managed, to cater to the values of the white, middle class conservative,
nationalistic audience. 

If the 'ethnic other show' that is the ongoing plight of refugees in the
camps has other shows to buttress them, they could easily be the various
'lifestyle' shows which privalege the young white homeowners, and then
frame this vapid 'content' amidst a blizzard of ads for home insurance,
home loans, investment firms, new cars and other emblems of bourgeois
aspiration. The viewers of such shows are probably the mainstream
Australian electorate - those who will vote in either the Liberals or the
Labour Party, both of whom basically support the detention of so called
'illegal immigrants'. For them the cult of 'home' is most likely, or so it
would seem, all there is to Australia - the home of those for whom
property ownership and assets management distinguish even amongst
themselves, who are the 'real' Australians and those who are not. 

'Denying' cameras access to the Woomooras and the Port Hedlands serves to
symbolically 'blind' the broader television viewing Australia to the
realities of the camps, if not what they stand for.
At the same time, the prescence of these same cameras reinforces the
international message the officials wish to send out to the world:  money
and goods may flow freely across our borders in both directions but
people, especially non-english speaking ethnic minorities must understand
they are subject to the Gaze and Judgement of Governmental, Nationalist
power. One is also reminded of course that the inmates of these shameful
camps must also watch Channel 9 news and have for themselves the indignity
of seeing their own plight on National television.

They might also watch other shows which dramatise the central sanctity of
suburban living through situation based game shows like "Survivor", where
young attractive (mainly white) young people are invited to pretend that
they are alone in the 'wilderness' and must crawl over each other for
access to food, shelter and sex. Virtual 'survival' of this sort plays out
the anxieties of the suburban mindset - what if my comforts were taken
away from me? What if I had to fend for msyelf without the mall? Without
my Lexus? Without my job? What if *someone took these things away from
me?!*

The sovereignty of the house-as-home, the domestic space and workplace is
also echoed in shows like "The Weakest Link" where a control-freak
dominatrix 'host', a morphed version of Judge Judy, punitively puts
contestants in their place, and should they fail, forces them to take the
"walk of shame". Here again is for the benefit of our asylum seeker the
logic of transnational capitalism, and its petit bourgeois shopkeeper and
taxi-driver like expression of meanness, competitive
'survival-of-the-fittest' ideology and the suburban ideal of weeding out
the undesirables through measured policing. All this in between ads for
home management products: insecticide, money management accounts, and
white bread commercials. The real 'walk of shame' is that taken by the
parade of 'others' who must expose themselves to public scrutiny in the
news breaks - the ethnics, the queers, the 'gang-members', anyone, it
would seem, who is not white, middle class and living in the 'burbs.

Then there is "Big Brother" which turns an idealised surburban home into a
kind of luxury detention centre for the voyeurism of the TV audience. How
surreal is must be to be an immigrant, out in the middle of nowhere, to be
awaiting one's visa to enter (the real) Australia, while watching "Big
Brother", waiting to see if this or that hunk is about to be 'voted out'
of the show by the judgemental eye of the television public. Now we all
get to play at being the DIMIA official, drunk on power, actually paying
for the privalege of managing the national space.

The trial-by-media managed Spectacle of "Big Brother" is mirrored
perfectly by the ongoing detention centre show on the news and current
affairs, where the real Big Brother, Johnny Howard and his lapdog fascist
sidekick Phil Ruddock along with those Labour party apologists for the
same draconian immigration policies, seek to manage public opinion with
almost exactly the same techniques used by programming executives at major
commercial media corporations. Who will you vote in or out? I suppose if
I'm voting it must be democratic, right?

The aim seems to be to remind all of us inmates that the legal processes
at play within the DIMIA led restriction on immigration to
some-people-over others has a virtual as well as an architectural, and
cultural expression. For the countless disinterested suburbanites who
share John Howard's deeply racist nationalism based on what Hage calls the
'Fantasy of the White Nation', the spectacle of white people in uniforms
subjegating the 'third-world-looking' 'illegal immigrants' is consistant
with the logic of mainstream TV - National "Survival", weeding out the
"Weakest Links" in the tragedy that is the real "Big Brother" - the
contemporary Australian political landscape.


David Cox May 7 2002

Thanks to Molly Hankwitz

References:

Hage, Ghassan, "White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a
Multicultural Society"

Big Brother (Channel 10)

The Weakest Link (Channel 7)

Survivor (Channel 10)

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