The sub-heading of this book is ‘Colonialism, Immigration Detention and a Nation’s Failure to Mourn’. It brings together strands of Australia’s national story that often are not linked.
We Australians – or at least those of us of Anglo-Celtic extraction, which is relatively fewer and fewer of us but still powerful – often aren’t good at making connections like those that Macken makes. Anthropologist WEH Stanner years ago pointed out we (the Australian Anglo-Celts again) had been very good at excising from view, forgetting and ignoring a large part of our history, the part that recorded violence against First Nations people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. Stanner is a presence in any book like this.
Julie Macken is from Western Sydney University and used to be a journalist. Today, she campaigns with others to end Australia’s immigration detention system.
Macken’s book is published in a Springer/Palgrave Macmillan series Studies in the Psychosocial that ‘seeks to investigate the ways in which psychic and social processes demand to be understood as always implicated in each other’. The book is
dedicated [says Macken] to those who have lived and those who have died in Australia’s immigration detention regime. In honour of the hope that drove you, in recognition of the pain that assailed you and the harm we have done to you, to your mothers, to your nanas, to the men, women and children who cherished you so deeply. I am so sorry.
Macken links that detention regime to the whole of Australian history. Here are her chapter headings, with some of her sub-headings in parentheses:
1. Linking the ‘No’ vote to ‘Stop the Boats’
2. A sickened sovereignty (Putting the nation on the couch)
3. A dream in three parts: A nation in pieces, 1778-1972 (Denial, disappearance and ‘the Great Australian Silence’ – see Stanner above)
4. Waiting with baseball bats, 1972-1996
5. Is it torture? (Anatomy of a death in custody)
6. Words make worlds (Disappearing the asylum seeker)
7. Privatising abuse (Cruelty and denial are the point)
8. Mania or mourning (Mourning requires more than death)
9. Conclusion: What is to be done? (Let them stay and why names and faces matter).
As a child, I was impressed by the title of one of my father’s books, Fear Drive My Feet. The book, by Peter Ryan, was about Australia’s New Guinea war in the 1940s, but the concept stuck with me. I used it to head an article, quoting Julianne Schultz, who in turn quoted Macken’s then forthcoming book. Schultz’s article in Guardian Australia was headed (‘Australians mostly have little to worry about. So why do we succumb to fear?’).
Read Macken’s book and look for those long Australian threads. Look for how many of them fall under the heading of ‘Fear’ and how often fear prevents us making connections, even connections that recognise the humanity of all people, not just those who look and think like us. It won’t be an easy read, but worth it.
Australia is a fragile, divided, anxious nation [Schultz quotes Macken]. We vote for policies that destroy the sacred core of people, of children, simply to assuage and manage our own fear. We are unable to accept the reality of Australia’s colonial violence and we all continue to pay a dangerously high price for this delusion.
The country that went silent on the Australian (Frontier) Wars has largely become tongue-tied on immigration detention.
Macken’s book is accessible online, chapter by chapter.
Picture credit: detail of book cover
28 August 2025
This book note first appeared on our sister site, Honest History.
More from
General
category
