Third Text, 2014

Vol. 28, No. 6, 555– 562, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775

The Aesthetics and Politics of

Aftermath Photography
Rosemary Laing’s welcome to
Australia (2004)

Verónica Tello

The past decade or so has seen intensified interest in a genre of documen-

tary photography variously referred to as late photography, after-the-fact
photography or aftermath photography. Aftermath photography, as I
refer to it, finds its precedents in Roger Fenton’s images of the Crimean
War from the mid-nineteenth century, such as Valley of the Shadow of
Death, and in Alain Resnais’ 1955 film Night and Fog, which takes as
its subject matter the abandoned Nazi concentration camps of Auschwitz
and Majdanek. While these works form crucial precedents for aftermath
photography, the genre did not properly emerge as a consistent documen-
tary paradigm until the 1990s. This period sees the emergence, for
example, of Joel Meyerowitz’s images of Ground Zero, Luc Delahaye’s,
Paul Seawright’s and Lyndell Brown and Charles Green’s photographs
of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Rosemary Laing’s iconic
photograph of the defunct Woomera refugee detention centre, welcome
to Australia (2004). Capturing the aftermath of war, terrorism and
other forms of human suffering, these photographs are distinguished
through their imaging of vacant and/or ruined buildings and landscapes,
or what David Campany astutely articulates as ‘the trace of the trace of
the event’.1
1. David Campany, ‘Safety in The historical conditions for the emergence of this genre as a consist-
Numbness: Some Remarks
on Problems of “Late
ent paradigm of art are inherently interconnected to the perceived redun-
Photography”’ (2003), in dancy of the photograph’s capacity to capture the live event, a capacity
Campany, ed, The which, since the 1960s and the emergence of the Portapak camera, has
Cinematic, Whitechapel and
MIT Press, London and
increasingly been passed onto video and television.2 This sense of redun-
Cambridge, Massachusetts, dancy has intensified with the advent of video cameras on mobile phones
2007, pp 185 –186 and the increasing presence of amateur footage in the news cycle. Leaving
2. Ibid the task of transmitting the decisive moment to video, today, Campany

# 2014 Third Text

556
3. David Campany,
Photography and Cinema,
Reaktion, London, 2008,
p 44
4. Ibid, p 47
5. This is discussed in John
Roberts, ‘Photography
after the Photograph:
Event, Archive and the
Non-Symbolic’, Oxford
Art Journal, vol 32, no 2,
2009, pp 281 –298
6. Campany, Photography
and Cinema, op cit, p 44
7. Campany, ‘Safety in
Numbness’, op cit, p 192
8. Laing’s welcome to
Australia, collected by the
University of Queensland
Art Museum, the National
Gallery of Australia, the
National Gallery of
Victoria, Monash
University Museum of
Art and Bendigo Art
Gallery
9. See Campany, ‘Safety in
Numbness’, op cit, pp
192 –193; and Sarah
James, ‘Making an Ugly
World Beautiful, Morality
and Aesthetics in the
Aftermath’, in Julian
Stallabrass, ed, Memory of
Fire: The War of Images
and Images of War,
Photoworks, Brighton,
2008, pp 12– 15.
10. Julian Stallabrass, ‘Rohan
Jayasekera and Julian
Stallabrass in Conversation
About the Sublime Image
of Destruction’, http://
www.scribd.com/doc/
34876318/Rohan-
Jayasekera-Questions-and-
Answers, accessed 25 May
2011
11. James, ‘Making an Ugly
World Beautiful’, op cit,
p 15
12. Ibid
13. Campany, ‘Safety in
Numbness’, op cit, p 192
14. Ibid
15. Ibid, p 193. Similarly,
James argues: ‘In courting
the sublime, it does not ever
“press too close” to the real
human face of war.’ James,
‘Making an Ugly World
Beautiful’, op cit, p 14
argues, ‘photographers often prefer to wait until an event is over. They
are as likely to attend to the aftermath because photography is, in relative
terms, at the aftermath of culture’.3 By turning their lens to the scene of
aftermath, these photographers ‘studiously avoid’ the aesthetics of the
spectacular ‘news media image’ – since they know that aftermath
imagery cannot be readily subsumed within the news cycle.4 Indeed,
many aftermath photographers are former photojournalists who have
opted to show their work in the museum.5 Circumventing the ephemeral-
ity, topicality and, for some, the fetishization of the image of human suf-
fering in the mass media, the large-scale image of aftermath, destined for
the museum, reads as something closer to a ‘monument’ than a
‘moment’.6 As Campany argues, aftermath photography ‘is often used
as a kind of vehicle for mass mourning or working through’.7 This is
evident, for example, in the commemorative function of Seawright’s
images of Afghanistan and Brown and Green’s of Iraq, commissioned
and collected by the Imperial War Museum and the Australian War
Memorial respectively. It is also evident in the widespread collection of
Laing’s welcome to Australia by most state and national galleries
across Australia.8 However, claims to a commemorative function
cannot, of course, be so easily attained.
While acknowledging the uses of the contemporary aftermath
photograph as a form of commemoration, many critics have questioned
the ethics and aesthetics of the genre and its relations to the event it
memorializes. The aesthetics of aftermath photography creates too
large a distance between the viewer and the atrocities it traces – in
effect abstracting the event – critics argue.9 Through the aftermath
photograph, the ‘danger’ or horror – the violence of the 9/11 attacks
and the Woomera Detention Centre – is kept at bay by the image’s
aesthetic and temporal distance from the event.10 In failing to
produce a confrontation with the brutality of the events that are the
focus of aftermath photography these images, argues Sarah James,
make the event ‘dangerously unreal, strangely theatrical, detached,
inhuman’.11 The image’s ‘coolness’ – as opposed to the zealousness
of humanist documentary photography for example – and its seeming
banality or abstraction, argue critics, means that the events remain
‘ungraspable’ – it presents itself as a ‘dreamlike landscape’.12 So if
the aftermath image has been catalysed to instigate mourning, we
must ask, argues Campany, whether ‘mourning by association
becomes an aestheticized response’.13
There is a sense in which the late photograph, in all its silence, can easily
flatter the ideological paralysis of those who gaze at it without the social or
political will to make sense of its circumstance.14
In other words, the aftermath photograph falls prey to the very same
problems of reification it has attempted to circumvent by avoiding the
fleeting spectacle of video or the decisive moment: it institutes, critics
argue, ‘a world beyond our own comprehension . . . and so it is a reified
as much as rarefied response’.15
Subsequently, the experience and aesthetics of aftermath photography
are akin, argue some critics, to the sublime – that is, an experience that is
incomprehensible, beyond acknowledgement and assimilation. ‘There is
something about the scale and resolution of most museum photography

16. Stallabrass, ‘Rohan
Jayasekera and Julian
Stallabrass in
Conversation’, op cit,
unpaginated
17. Ibid. Like other late and
aftermath photographers,
Laing works with large-
scale prints and large-
format cameras, the sum of
which produces epic,
highly detailed and often
overwhelming images: a
sublime of pictorial data.
18. In Rosemary Laing’s
welcome to Australia, for
example, we could say that
the placement of the
detention centre’s fence and
barbed wire on the horizon
line, extending beyond the
pictorial surface towards
infinity, instantiates the
mathematical sublime, the
horrific extension of the
detention centre.
Meanwhile, the framing of
the detention centre as a
wedge, which makes plain
the brutality and force of
this architectural space,
manifests a dynamic
sublime. I elaborate on this
later in this article.
19. Stallabrass, ‘Rohan
Jayasekera and Julian
Stallabrass in Conversation’,
op cit, unpaginated
20. The term
‘aftereffectiveness’ is
borrowed from Gene Ray,
Terror and the Sublime in
Art and Critical Theory:
From Auschwitz to
Hiroshima to September
11, Palgrave Macmillan,
New York, 2005, p 1.
21. Under the sublime,
‘distance’, argues Ray, is not
‘sustainable’ because ‘the
sublime hit – akin to
trauma – ruptures the
borders between art and
life’. The binaries of the
‘real/simulacra’, ‘inside/
outside’ and ‘art/life’ are
undone. Ray, Terror and the
Sublime, op cit, p 11. Also
see Gene Ray, ‘Hits: From
Trauma and the Sublime to
Radical Critique’, Third
Text 97, vol 23, no 2, 2009,
pp 135–149.
22. Ray, Terror and the
Sublime, op cit, p 1
557
that trades on the sublime’, observes Julian Stallabrass.16 This is a
sublime of pictorial data – allowed by medium and large-format
cameras on which high quality large-scale printing is contingent.17 But
the aftermath photograph also presents a mathematical sublime, which
refers to the notion of ungraspable magnitude, and a dynamic sublime,
which refers to the notion of ungraspable force.18 In aftermath imagery
we encounter, for example, the mathematical sublime via the oft-used
panoramic view, which conjures ‘epic’ landscapes and the dynamic
sublime via the representation of blown-up or destroyed buildings. The
sublime, as critics of aftermath photography articulate it, has the poten-
tial to present a threat to the subject physically and on the level of the
imagination, impeding ‘our rational descriptions of the world and our
powers over it’:19 the terror, for example, of the force of war machinery.
However, some critics argue that since in aftermath photography the
viewer is too far distanced from the horror of the event – we see for
example the architectural remains but not the bodies – in knowing
that the threat is virtual rather than actual, we experience pleasure
rather than pain. That is the pleasure symptomatic of the sublime that
derives from encountering grand horror while remaining safe from its
clutches.
Critics are correct in deploying terms such as ‘abstraction’ and
‘sublime’ to describe the aesthetics of aftermath photography, but the
politics of these terms is, I argue, not as clear as they suggest.
In drawing on the sublime and abstraction, the aftermath photograph
can in fact allow for an ethical engagement with traumatic histories.
Thus in what follows I offer a different conception of the sublime to
that which currently exists in the discourse of aftermath photography.
After this, I expand on the productive relations between the sublime,
abstraction and the aftermath photograph through an analysis of
Laing’s welcome to Australia. But first: a different theory of the
sublime.
THE TRAUMATIC SUBLIME
If, since the eighteenth century, the sublime has suggested a complex
mix of terror and awe as found in raw nature, in the twentieth
century the sublime is propagated by the disasters of ‘structural
barbarism’: that is, the nodes of the state of exception and imposition
of biopolitical violence characteristic of colonialism, genocide, Fascism,
detention centres.20 If during the eighteenth century, Kant argued that
the imagination’s incapacity to cope with the threat of Nature was
compensated by reason’s faith in human destiny (thus offering some
pleasure) then this is no longer possible in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. After colonial genocide, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the
continual appearance of nodes of the state of exception, ‘the ruined
destiny of human reason and its moral law can offer no compensatory
pleasure’, argues Gene Ray.21 The modern and contemporary sublime
is instead closer to a process of trauma, a ‘rip’, and violation – it is
‘a category of damage’.22 It ‘marks the limits of conventionalized,
assimilable experience and the vulnerability of the psychic organisation
558

to disrupting penetrations from the outside’.23 In turn, ‘it is a threat to

the imaginary integrity of subjectivity’.24
In experiencing the traumatic sublime – for Ray (after Kant) when
reason is confronted by its limits, when the event is too overwhelming
for thought, leaving the figure speechless, immobile, suspended – we
are unable to think it, which in turn, as Ray (after Lacan) argues,
means that we ‘miss the appointment’.25 In the process of trauma ‘a
different temporal regime is in force – that of Nachträglichkeit, or
aftereffectiveness’.26 Years, decades, generations, pass before the
traumatic sublime, and its affects, are summoned, encountered,
grappled or mourned by society. ‘Overpowered, lacking the means
23. Ibid to confront and interpret the [traumatic] hit as experience . . . the
24. Ibid missed traumatic moment can only be reconstructed in retrospect’,
argues Ray.27
25. Ibid The deferred, repressed, traumatic sublime often returns to us, for
26. Ibid secondary witnessing, via the traces of the past: the clothes in Christian
27. Ibid Boltanski’s installation Personnes (2010), for example, evoke
28. Ray puts forward a similar
without invoking the sublime historical referent of Auschwitz.28 Such
argument with respect to traces and negative images of absence have the power to strike, disturb
the work of Joseph Beuys in and astonish us long after the event. This is the case with Laing’s
ibid, pp 33 –49.
welcome to Australia.

Rosemary Laing, welcome to Australia, 2004. C photograph, 110 × 224 cm. # Rosemary Laing, courtesy Tolarno Galleries,
Melbourne.

29. While the Tampa affair
attracted international
media attention, the Pacific
Solution influenced border
protection policies such as
Britain’s New Vision
proposals and Italy’s
‘Mediterranean Solution’.
30. See Charlie Hailey, Camps:
A Guide to 21st-Century
Space, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
2009.
31. Rosemary Laing, interview
with the author, Sydney, 14
November 2008
32. The ban was put on
photographs that could
‘humanise or personalise’
refugees. The ban was
imposed on the Australian
Defence Force, which,
through its border
protection scheme, was in
constant contact with
refugees. See Mark Forbes
and Kerry Taylor ‘Refugees
Denied Human Face’, The
Age, 18 April 2002, http://
www.theage.com.au/
articles/2002/04/17/
1019020661365.html,
accessed 1 May 2010.
33. Anthony Gardner, ‘Rapt in
Rhetoric’, Broadsheet, vol
35, no 3, 2006, pp 144 –
147. Gardner goes on to
say that Laing’s work
‘ultimately return[s] the
detention centre to a form
of visual spectacle’.
559
TRAUMA AND ABSTRACTION
Welcome to Australia emerged in the aftermath of the watershed standoff
between the Norwegian cargo ship the Tampa – carrying 438 Iraqi and
Afghani refugees – and the Australian government, and the subsequent
manifestation of the Pacific Solution in 2001: a seminal refugee policy
that saw – among other things – the excision of the Australian territory
of Christmas Island (where the Tampa refugees were attempting to disem-
bark) from the country’s migration zone and the use of the Australian
Navy in order to ‘turn back the boats’.29 At the same time – after 9/11
– the world witnessed the parallel, global, rise of detention centres for
the incarceration of refugees and suspected terrorists.30 In this era, Guan-
tánamo and Abu Ghraib became household names around the world. But
in Australia, another detention centre would come to affect the nation’s
psyche.
Located in the South Australian desert, the Woomera Detention
Centre was opened in 1999 to imprison refugees who arrived on the
nation’s shores by boat. Riots, the detainment of children, hunger
strikes, lip sewing, suicide and attempted suicide were constantly
reported in the media. Due to increasing pressure by activists and the
United Nations Human Rights Commission, in April 2003 the Australian
Government shut down the Woomera Detention Centre. By the time
Laing arrived a year had passed since its closure.
In welcome to Australia Woomera Detention Centre appears desolate,
peopleless: it is as if history is at a standstill. Laing arrives too late to
capture the decisive moment – the news media image of riots outside
the detention centre; documentation of refugees pressed up against the
fence, or, as one refugee did, jumping onto the fence and its razor wire
as an act of protest. But Laing arrives in time to capture for posterity
the empty architecture of the Woomera Detention Centre.
In part, the missing figure of the refugee in welcome to Australia is a
reflection of the historical juncture out of which this image emerges.
That is, it is a contingency of Laing’s belated arrival, but it is also
bound to the fact that while during the mid-2000s it may have been poss-
ible to capture images of protestors or refugees behind the fence, it was
very difficult to access, and impossible for the public to record life
inside the detention centre. Indeed, even after its closure it was very diffi-
cult for Laing to access the detention centre, since it is situated within the
restricted military site of the Woomera Prohibited Area.31 Moreover,
during this era the Government had imposed a ban on images that huma-
nized refugees.32 At this moment in time, then, artists needed to find
alternative ways to image the plight of refugees. This manifested, for
example, in Mike Parr’s performance, Close the Concentration Camps
(2002), in which we see the artist sewing his lips and face in an act of soli-
darity with refugees. It also manifested in Mat Gallois’ installation Con-
tainment, constructed of cyclone fencing, galvanized pipe and razor wire,
which simulates the exterior of a detention centre. And it manifested in
Laing’s welcome to Australia, which captures the desolate landscape
and architecture of the Woomera Detention Centre.
For Anthony Gardner, by focusing on the ‘starkly symmetrical form of
Woomera’s wire fencing’,33 welcome to Australia produces a problematic
‘abstraction’ of the events that took place at Woomera; its large scale and
560
34. Anthony Gardner, ‘Un-
Australian and Proud’, un
Magazine 6, summer,
2005, pp 36 –37. The full
quote is: ‘Being “Un-
Australian” or “political”
may be a strategic style,
incorporating political
“edginess” within lush
artworks so that their
prices increase at the same
rate as the impression of
political profundity (on the
parts of both artist and
collector). Dare I cite here
Rosemary Laing’s welcome
to Australia [sic] (2004), a
Gursky-style abstraction of
the Woomera detention
centre so lightweight that it
wouldn’t topple a gallery
wall let alone government
ideology?’ Regarding the
use of the term ‘spectacle’
in relation to Laing’s work,
see ibid.
35. Fer quoted in Mark
Godfrey, Abstraction and
the Holocaust, Yale
University Press, New
Haven and London, 2007,
p4
36. Godfrey, Abstraction and
the Holocaust, op cit, p 4
37. Ibid
38. This is Laing’s description
of the Woomera Detention
Centre, which critics have
used repeatedly in their
analysis of Laing’s images.
See for example Vivenne
Webb, The Unquiet
Landscapes of Rosemary
Laing, Museum of
Contemporary Art,
Sydney, 2005, p 17; Tanya
Peterson, ‘Hallucinations’,
in Handle With Care –
CONTEMPORARY
VISUAL ART PROJECTS
2008: to walk on a sea of
salt, Australian Biennial of
Australian Art,
Contemporary Art Centre
of South Australia,
Adelaide, 2008,
unpaginated; and Wayne
Tunnicliffe, ‘You Cannot
Get Past the Fence’, in
Robert Storr, ed, Think
with the Senses: Feel with
the Mind: Art in the Present
Tense, Rizzoli
International, New York,
2007, p 54.
‘glossy’ format render it a type of spectacle, inducing a certain mode of
vacuity.34 However, abstraction, or the negation of representation and
information, does not necessarily equate with a distanced, inadequate –
reified or rarefied – engagement with history. Abstraction, as Briony
Fer has argued, is ‘a type of art which does not allow us to interpret it
with reference to what is depicted’.35 It requires the viewer to engage
with it in a manner that does not take into account a representation of
that which is signified. This is not to say, as Mark Godfrey has argued,
that abstract art ‘refuses signification’.36 Rather, it implies that:
In front of abstract art works, the lack of a depicted image tends to
heighten our awareness of materials, of compositional (or anti-compo-
sitional) structures, of the process of looking itself.37
Accordingly, Laing heightens our awareness of welcome to Australia’s
composition, size and excessive pictorial detail. She composes the
image so that the detention centre, which occupies the image’s horizon
line, appears, in her words (and this is crucial) as ‘a violent wedge’.38
The tip of this wedge is situated at the centre of the image, while its con-
tours expand into a two-point perspective beyond the image’s frame.
Moreover, by using a medium-format camera, Laing brings our attention
to the materiality of the architecture of the detention centre, its grid of
rectilinear palisade fencing and its vortical strands of razor wire.
Finally, Laing hangs the large-scale photograph of welcome to Australia,
which measures 110×224 cm, so that our gaze hits the image’s horizon
line and engages the violent wedge.
With welcome to Australia Laing hoped to ‘show the functionality’ of
the Woomera Detention Centre’s architecture, so that the viewer may
embody, in her words, ‘a traumatic ownership of subjectivity’.39 That
is, I infer, the detention centre’s traumatic affects and penal aesthetics:
or in other words something akin to the traumatic, dynamic, sublime.
The Woomera Detention Centre, with its grid of palisade fencing and
reams of razor wire, ‘announces’, as Joseph Pugliese argues in relation
to his analysis of welcome to Australia, ‘its violent domination of
nature and the imposition of a carceral order’.40 The detention centre’s
fence, electrified by 9000 volts and colonized by razor wire, ‘dispenses’,
Pugliese argues, ‘object lessons on the power of the nation state, its puni-
tive rule of law and its life negating power’.41 Indeed, razor wire is a
potent symbol of biopolitical punishment:
The technical polyvalence of [razor] wire – its capacity to repel any living
thing . . . produces a kind of shock when it is used to enclose people,
shaking their certitude that they are human.42
If the composition of welcome to Australia allows viewers to encounter
something akin to the detention centre’s dynamic sublime, its traumatic
affects, then it also prompts the viewer’s engagement with something
akin to the mathematical sublime. That is, the seemingly infinite grid of
palisade fencing and razor wire, which expands beyond the image’s
frame into a two-point perspective. As Rosalind Krauss argues in her the-
orization of the grid:
Logically speaking the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity. Any
boundaries imposed upon it by a given painting or sculpture [or photo-
graph] can only be seen – according to this logic – as arbitrary. By

39. Laing, interview with
author, op cit
40. Joseph Pugliese, ‘The
Tutelary Architecture of
Immigration Detention
Prisons and the Spectacle of
“Necessary Suffering”’,
Architectural Theory
Review, vol 13, no 2, 2008,
pp 206 –221
41. Ibid
42. Olivier Razac, Barbed
Wire: A Political History,
New Press, New York,
2002, p 85; quoted in
Pugliese, ‘The Tutelary
Architecture of
Immigration Detention
Prisons’, op cit, p 209
43. Rosalind E Krauss, The
Originality of the Avant-
Garde and Other
Modernist Myths, MIT
Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1985,
pp 18 –19
44. Giorgio Agamben, Means
Without End: Notes on
Politics, University of
Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, 2000,
pp 43 –44
45. Pugliese, ‘The Tutelary
Architecture of
Immigration Detention
Prisons’, op cit, p 215
46. For a reading of Australia as
a camp see Suvendrini
Perera, ‘What Is a Camp . . .
?’, Borderlands vol 1, no 1,
2002, http://www.
borderlandsejournal.
adelaide.edu.au/vol1no1_
2002/perera_camp.html,
accessed 10 April 2008.
47. Anthony Burke, Fear of
Security: Australia’s
Invasion Anxiety, revised
edition, Cambridge
University Press, Port
Melbourne, 2008, p 18
48. Perera, ‘What Is a Camp . . .
?’, op cit, unpaginated.
Also see Burke, Fear of
Security, op cit, p 27.
49. Lesley Instone, ‘Walking
Towards Woomera:
Touring the Boundaries of
“UnAustralian
Geographies”’, Cultural
Geographies 17, 2010,
p 363
561
virtue of the grid, the given work of art is presented as a mere fragment, a
tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric. Thus the grid
operates from the work of art outward, compelling our acknowledgement
of a world beyond the frame.43
The grid is boundless, perpetual and subject to repetition. Through its see-
mingly endless extension, in welcome to Australia the grid of palisade and
razor wire comes to image the sublime proliferation of the camp both here
and elsewhere: from Woomera, Lampedusa, Abu Ghraib and Guan-
tánamo to Christmas Island. The grid, as a range of contemporary art-
works make plain, is synonymous with the aesthetics of detention
centres and camps. Think for example of Gregor Schneider’s 21 Beach
Cells (2007), Mona Hatoum’s Interior Landscape (2008) and Alfredo
Jaar’s Infinite Cell (2004), to name a few. The camp, as Agamben has
argued, appears wherever the distinction between the citizen and the
other prevails, wherever the state of exception is instilled and humans
are simultaneously subjected to the nation-state’s rule and exempted
from elementary human rights.44 But the expansion of the grid of palisade
and razor wire is not only spatial; it is also temporal. As Pugliese has
acutely observed, ‘the immigration prison and its razor wire grid must
be situated within the genealogy of their colonial predecessors: the
colonial stockade and the Indigenous mission and reserve’.45
BIOPOLITICAL VIOLENCE AND
ITS AFTERMATH
Upon its subjection to British colonization in the eighteenth century, Aus-
tralia became a camp.46 The country was imagined as a ‘gulag continent’
for Britain’s criminal class that would sever and displace these subjects
from the motherland through ‘an apartheid of sea and unfathomable dis-
tance’, ensuring Britain’s health and freedom from infection from the
‘virulent’ Other.47 But in preparation for the creation of this excision
and mass prison, another camp had to be implemented for the native
population. In 1860, the Indigenous Australian, displaced and terrorized
by British colonization and reduced in population from an estimated one
and a half million to an approximate sixty thousand in a matter of
decades, was described by the Board for Protection of Aborigines as a
‘landless and homeless refugee’.48 The displacement and subjection of
the indigenous Australian to the logic of biopolitics – to distance the
subject that threatens the health and progress of the nation – found its
continuation in the manifestation of alien internment camps during the
First and Second World Wars. During the First World War over 6000
European migrants were interned in Holsworthy camp near Liverpool
on the outskirts of Sydney, and during the Second World War more
than fifty detention centres for ‘enemy aliens’ – Germans and Japanese –
were set up around Australia. The exclusion of the body which has ‘no
claim on the nation’ and which must therefore be exempt from the law
is also the governing logic for the manifestation of refugee detention
centres in Australia during the 1990s and 2000s.49
Upon the ‘unauthorised’ arrival of boatpeople in the early 1990s a dia-
lectic of border panic and border security came to affect the Australian
psyche and this in turn resulted in the creation of numerous onshore
562
50. Ibid
51. Juan Davila, ‘Woomera’,
Artlink, vol 23, no 1, 2003,
p 19; Perera, ‘What Is a
Camp . . . ?’, op cit,
unpaginated; Adam Geczy,
‘Mike Parr: Close the
Concentration Camps’,
Artlink, vol 23, no 1, 2003,
pp 43 –46
52. On the notion of
‘impossible’ histories in
Australia, see Lorenzo
Verancini,
‘Historylessness: Australia
as a Settler Colonial
Collective’, Postcolonial
Studies, vol 10, no 3, 2007,
pp 271 –285.
53. Ibid
and offshore detention centres. Woomera Detention Centre was one of
the first and certainly the best known of the refugee camps set up in
contemporary Australia.50 Seeking to extrapolate the conditions of
‘bare life’ – life stripped of rights and political significance – and the
detention centre’s dependence on a xenophobic state, artists such as
Juan Davila and Mike Parr, and academics Suvendrini Perera and
Nikos Papastergiadis, summoned the spectres of some of the darkest
moments of the twentieth century by publicly naming the Woomera
Detention Centre a ‘concentration camp’.51 That a camp existed in Aus-
tralia seemed for many an ‘impossible’ notion.52 A common response to
the events that transpired at Woomera was disbelief: how could a place
like it have manifested in Australia?53 But the camp and the associated
processes of biopolitical violence had always existed in Australia. It is
the pervasive, if not also concealed, force underlying the formation of
the Australian nation.
If the aftermath photograph projects an aesthetic sublime – displaying
the force of colonial, modern and contemporary biopolitical violence and
its perpetual expansion – it does so not to produce a vacuous pleasurable
viewing experience. Rather the aftermath photograph, at least as it is
manifested in welcome to Australia, projects an aesthetic sublime to
evoke the vanishing points of history, to allow for a continuous, and
also belated, encounter with the traumatic historical event. If in part it
does so via abstraction, it is to evoke a way of looking different from
that which we lend the quintessential documentary image, generating
the Woomera Detention Centre’s penal aesthetics and invoking the trau-
matic sublime by means other than the figurative. Welcome to Australia
instead uses belatedness and absence in engaging the viewer’s imagination
with the aftermath of biopolitics.
This work was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts through its New Work
funding scheme.