Benevolent Asylum
A reader of Foucault might say that white Australia, with its anxieties and racisms, emerged out of the relationship of incarceration to the ocean. As prisons and asylums were built beside the continent’s oceans, bays and rivers, walls and water were coupled into a terminal psyche. The ships of the First Fleet were the first such walls, holding the labour force of the future colony within. Ashore, these wooden prisons were duplicated in stone. This relationship of water to imprisonment has not changed much today, as the central controversy of Australian nationalism is over refugees. As recently as December 2010, refugees have drowned after crashing into the rocks around Christmas Island, the detention centre there has burned into spectacular flame, and there has been a new policy to deport arrivals over the sea to Malaysia. This drama is the drama of colonisation all over again, as people who are unwelcome in their own countries find themselves incarcerated in another land.
Activists have been pointing out the continuity between the colonisation of Australia and its refugee crisis since policies of indefinite detention became big news in the 1990s. Artists, too, have intervened, by draping flags over their faces à la Magritte and sewing up lips in a bloody duplication of some of the asylum seekers’ own protest actions.1 Lily Hibberd’s Benevolent Asylum springs from this history of an Australian art that is critical of anti-refugee nationalism. The quality of Hibberd’s installation lies in its making the historical continuity between colonial Australia and contemporary incarceration visible on a series of television screens. These screens are scattered amidst a rubble of paper, scaffolding and boat sails in the main space of the
1. See boat-people.org and Mike Parr’s Close the Concentration Camps, 2002.