By Gary Kinsman
All photos by Patrick Barnholden
The contradiction was acute and painful. In front of us was the awesome monolith Uluru (called Ayer’s Rock by the colonizers) which has major historical, cultural and spiritual significance for the indigenous Anangu people. We were on a tourist tour in Uluru- Kata Tjuta National Park in what is now called the Northern Territory of Australia. The tour that day ended with a wine and cheese party for us tourists at a viewing station in front of Uluru. Off to the side and very marginalized were several indigenous women trying to sell their artwork who were ignored by most of the tourists. Tour guides even helped to set this otherizing up through their well intentioned warnings to us to not take pictures of these women without their permission given the indigenous understanding that photos of indigenous people prevent them from moving onto the afterlife. The racist and settler colonial character of Australian state formation and the tourist industry became agonizingly clear to us in this moment.
The next day we were reminded of this contradiction very eloquently when we walked around Uluru and we read the signs placed by the Anangu people near where tourists often try to climb Uluru. Here they contrasted the settler mentality that wants to ‘conquer’ and ‘own’ Uluru to the indigenous request to instead connect with and learn from Uluru. .
We were on a two and a half-month visit to Aotearoa (the Maori name for what the settlers called ‘New Zealand’) and what is now called Australia. One of my deepest learnings from this encounter — which is perhaps easier for me to see coming into it as an ‘outsider’ than in the ‘Canadian’ context — is the profound white settler colonial character of both ‘New Zealand’ and ‘Australia.’ Both states are built on the colonization and marginalization of the indigenous peoples just as in ‘Canada.’ These colonial state formations were also shaped by the different compositions of struggles that indigenous people were able to mount to racism and colonialism. While the Maori were able to mobilize considerable military resistance to the invaders the major strategy the indigenous people adopted in much of what is now called ‘Australia’ was to flee inland which is not to deny the major resistance they later organized that which continues to this day. Partially as a result of this history of struggle the Maori, despite the widespread racism and poverty most of them face, I found have a more prominent position in ‘New Zealand’ state formation than the indigenous peoples within ‘Australian’ state formation. The Maori are also more central to the ways that tourism has been organized in ‘New Zealand’ than indigenous peoples generally are in ‘Australia.’
Fighting for social transformation in ‘Australia’ and Aotearoa (as in ‘Canada’) requires a clear challenge to racism and settler colonialism as central to any progressive project. I met a number of fabulous settler activists and organizers in Auckland, and at the Social Justice summer school organized by the Kotare Trust I did two workshops at, who are trying to do just this and there are dedicated people doing this in ‘Australia’ as well.
We arrived in ‘Australia’ shortly after the murder of asylum seeker Reza Barath and the injuring of 60 others on Manus Island which is an Australian state funded detention centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG). This followed major troubles on Nauru, an island country in Micronesia in the South Pacific, another state-funded detention centre for asylum seekers not on Australian territory. Although the Labour Party — under pressure from popular protests — has become more critical recently there has been a major consensus between the Liberal (what might be seen as more conservative in the ‘Canadian’ context) and Labour parties in defining refugees and migrants as major ‘threats’ to ‘Australia.’ This is now based on the state policy of ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ which mobilizes state forces to prevent asylum seekers from reaching Australian territories. This involves both turning back boats trying to make it to ‘Australia’ creating very dangerous situations for refugees and migrants and also holding asylum seekers and migrants outside Australian territory. This offshore processing regime and the state goal of basically never allowing asylum seekers to settle in ‘Australia’ involves the Australian state in extending its neo-colonial relations with surrounding countries to provide these offshore detention and processing centres and also to provide for resettling refugees outside Australian territories – which they hope to now do in Cambodia. The use of this racist anti-refugee border strategy has become central to the ways in which Australian state formation is infiltrating and gaining neo-colonial influence in a number of poorer countries to the north of Australia. Aside from being a horrific policy towards refugees and migrants this is also now central to the neo-colonial relations ‘Australia’ is building with surrounding non-white countries.
Central to any radical politics in Australia must be opposition to these neo-colonial relations, defence of asylum seekers and migrants, and the development of No One Is Illegal perspectives. Unfortunately, from what I could see, despite a lively asylum seekers rights movement this is still very much a minority current on the left in ‘Australia.’ This highlighted for me how central to any project of radical social transformation is challenging both settler colonialism and racist and class-based border regimes.
While we were in ‘Australia’ the neo-liberal austerity politics of the right-wing Liberal-National Coalition Tony Abbot government provoked a storm of outrage in the March in March movement that brought close to 100,000 people into the streets across the country. Just before we left Australia we had the opportunity to join with tens of thousands of union members and social justice activists from various communities in the long-standing union organized May Day march in Sydney. The ranks for this march were swelled by the upsurge of activism against the Abbot government. We marched with a lively labour-based asylum seekers rights group. While I was able to clearly identify a number of revolutionary socialist groups on the march it was only at the end that I saw the red and black flags of an anarchist-communist contingent that included the banners “No More Petitioning” and “Down With the Political Class.’ I was left wishing that the unions in ‘Canada’ would organize similar May Day marches like the unions in Quebec used to do.
Leaving ‘Australia’ I took what I learned with me and, of course, the struggle and the learning continues!