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Otherness in Australia 1st ed. Edition

Jon Stratton
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Multiculturalism,
Whiteness and
Otherness in Australia
Jon Stratton
Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness
in Australia
Jon Stratton
Multiculturalism,
Whiteness
and Otherness
in Australia
Jon Stratton
UniSA Creative
University of South Australia
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-50078-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50079-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5
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Acknowledgments
These days I am attached as an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at

the University of South Australia. I should like to thank Professor Susan
Luckman for facilitating my presence there. Susan has been a thoughtful
colleague helping out where possible with funding and generally making
my life as an adjunct far more pleasant than is usual. My associates in
Creative People, Products and Places, of which Professor Luckman is the
Director, have been unfailingly supportive and friendly. A big shout out
especially to Kasia/Katrina Jaworski.
I should also like to thank Dr. Jessica Taylor who has functioned as my
research assistant on this project. Her work has been excellent and I thank
her particularly for her rapid turnarounds when I know that she has been
overwhelmed with other demands on her time.
Panizza Allmark, Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University, has
been both friend and partner through the life of this project. I thank
her for her support and love, easing my anxieties and being an emotional
refuge in times of need. I hope that I have reciprocated in at least some
small way. I thank Panizza also for her intellectual input to this project.
She is the coauthor of Chapter 2.
Some of the material in this book has appeared in different, and earlier,
forms in other places. Parts of Chapter 3 have been reworked from ‘With
God on Our Side: Christianity, Whiteness, Islam and Otherness in the
Australian Experience’ in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural
Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2016, pp. 613–626 and ‘Whiteness, Morality, and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Christianity in Australia’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no.

1, 2016, pp. 17–43. Chapter 5 is reproduced from ‘Whose Home; Which
Island?: Displacement and Identity in “My Island Home”’ in Perfect Beat:
The Pacific Journal for Research into Contemporary Music and Popular
Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013, pp. 33–53. Much of Chapter 6 was first
published in ‘The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits of White-
ness in Australia’ in Journal of the European Association for Studies on
Australia, vol. 2, no. 2, 2011, pp. 22–41.
Contents
1 Introduction: Logics of Exclusion 1
2 Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene

of the 1980s: Coauthored with Panizza Allmark (Edith
Cowan University) 41
3 With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture

of Religion and Race, Christianity and Whiteness,
Islam and Otherness, in the Australian Experience 73
4 The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes:

Neoliberalism, History and Pleasure in The Sapphires 119
5 Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement

and Identity in ‘My Island Home’ 145
6 The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits

of Whiteness in Australia 169
7 Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come

the Habibs! Race, Identity and Representation 203
vii
viii CONTENTS
8 Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive

Construction of the Underclass and Its Representation 231
9 Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened … 261
References 275
Index 305
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Logics of Exclusion
The guiding theme of this book is the importance of exclusion in the

modern state. To be more specific the assumption which underlies the
book is that while exclusion played a foundational role in the formation
of the modern state marking borders both internal and external to the
state, in the state reconstructed on neoliberal economic terms exclusion
has become pervasive. It exists not only at the border and demarcating
those acceptable within the state from those, the mad, the bad and
the shiftless, whom the state confined but there is now a circumstance
where to a lesser or greater extent anybody, but especially members of
certain marginalised groups, may find themselves excluded. The focus
of this book is Australia. In their discussion on the long-lasting impact
of Enlightenment values on Australian society, Baden Offord and his
colleagues (2014, p. 2) remark that one of the consequences of the coun-
try’s settler origins is that ‘cultural priorities that persist rest on a deep
fear of the other within (the indigenous) and the other without (generic
Asia, the migrant, asylum seeker)’. Here we have a way of understanding
why exclusion has been such a prevalent aspect of Australia’s social history
even before its reinforcement by neoliberalism.
This book picks over the rubble left by official multiculturalism. As
we shall see, multiculturalism in Australia functioned quite differently to
the multiculturalism that is enshrined in Canadian law through an act of
parliament. We can add that in both cases what has been described as
© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Stratton, Multiculturalism, Whiteness and Otherness in Australia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50079-5_1
2 J. STRATTON
multiculturalism is different again from what has passed for multicultur-

alism in Europe. Here is Alana Lentin and Gavin Tilley (2011, p. 13)
writing about the turn against multiculturalism there:
multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The

narrative goes something like this. The ‘multicultural fantasy in Europe’
(David Rieff ‘The dream of multiculturalism is over’ New York Times
2005) valorised difference over commonality, cultural particularity over
social cohesion, and an apologetic relativism at the expense of shared values
and a commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual
freedom.
In Europe, as Lentin and Tilley (2011, p. 13) go on to write: ‘In what

would once have been read as extremist language, [multiculturalism] is
regarded as cultural surrender’. Shared values were precisely the founda-
tion of official multiculturalism in Australia and far from it being thought
of as cultural surrender, multiculturalism was understood as broadening
and deepening the Anglo-Australian culture which remained privileged
but that, as a settler society, has always been thought of in Australia as in
process.
Australian multiculturalism worked to produce diversity lite, a diver-
sity that functioned in terms of shared values. When Australia sought to
increase rapidly its population after the conclusion of World War Two, and
achieved this by including in its intake members of national groups not
previously considered white enough to gain entry to Australia, it did so
with the conviction that, in fact, all these groups were really white. White-
ness was equated with cultural similarity. Multiculturalism’s emphasis on
inclusion in the first place only impacted certain groups, those already
identified as white. Official multiculturalism was a backwards-looking
policy at a time when Australia was being forced by the winds of global
change to end its White Australia policy, or what was left of it after it
had become increasingly etiolated through the 1960s. Australia in the
second decade of the twenty-first century has a very different and more
radically diverse population mix from that during the height of official
multiculturalism in the 1980s.
As a consequence of its neoliberal restructuring, Australia is now
also a nation-state pervaded by exclusion and precarity. Surveillance as
a population management technology has been normalised. The state has
increasing power thanks to laws which in other circumstances would be
1 INTRODUCTION: LOGICS OF EXCLUSION 3
associated with states of emergency. The border has become a site where
decisions over entry are made in relation to a person’s economic useful-
ness in the state. Wendy Brown (2010, p. 22) has commented in general
terms about the impact of neoliberalism on state governance:
Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut … by neoliberal rationality,

which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers
(large and small), which displaces legal and political principles (especially
liberal commitments to universal inclusion, equality, liberty and the rule
of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political sovereign to
managerial status.
Within the Australian state the most excluded are those who least fit the
long-established norm of Australianness, those who are identified as black,
and Indigenous Australians are a special case as they always have been, and
from a non-Christian religion, especially Muslims. In this neoliberal order
those most excluded also include people without jobs and private sources
of income, that is those reliant on the state for support. Included in this
group, often lumped together as the underclass, because of their tendency
to be excluded in the economic order, are many of the people identified
as black, including Indigenous Australians, and Muslims.
The State and Exclusion

In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (1977) wrote about the great
confinement that started in the mid-seventeenth century. Foucault’s
primary concern was with madness. Roy Porter (1990, p. 47) provides
a brief and useful description of Foucault’s argument:
Those whose lives affronted bourgeois rationality—beggars, petty crim-

inals, layabouts, prostitutes—became liable to sequestration higgledy
piggledy with the sick and the old, the lame and lunatic. Such problem
people, though different from normal citizens, were identical among them-
selves. Their common denominator was idleness. The mad did not work;
those who did not work were the essence of unreason.
We should note here the genealogy of the category Porter constructs

through the early nineteenth-century idea of the dangerous class to
Marx’s construction of the lumpenproletariat to the neoliberal forma-
tion of the underclass. What is confined is also excluded. The groups
4 J. STRATTON
Porter, following Foucault, lists were all confined within the embryonic
modern state. They were all, as Porter notes, different and as such were
threatening to the homogeneity of population which characterised the
ideological preoccupation with the national membership of modern states.
The new states themselves were sites of confinement, albeit represented
increasingly as places of national expression. The Peace of Westphalia was
concluded in 1648. It has often been cited as the key moment of transi-
tion in the establishment of the modern state, that is the state in which
authority within clear borders is absolute and cannot be legitimately chal-
lenged by forces from outside the borders. As Derek Croxton (1999,
p. 570) puts it: ‘In a system of sovereign states, each recognizes the
others as the final authorities within their given territories, and only they
can be considered actors within the system’. Sensibly critical of any claim
that change occurred as a sudden transformation expressed in the treaties
associated with the Peace of Westphalia, Croxton (1999, p. 591) never-
theless concludes: ‘Although no one yet conceived of sovereignty as the
recognition of the right of other states to rule their own territory, the
increasingly complex diplomatic milieu shows how a multi-polar system
was able to develop’. To this we can add Foucault’s insight that confine-
ment was becoming a guiding principle of social order. In terms of the
state that involved identifying a homogeneous population, a nation and
establishing borders which could be patrolled to manage entry and egress.
When in 1791 Jeremy Bentham compared building his new, disci-
plinary panoptic prison, founded on surveillance, as being preferable to
the transportation of convicts to New South Wales, he was distinguishing
two forms of exclusion, either confinement within the state or expulsion
from the state. By the late nineteenth century, and especially in the settler
colonies, the problem became one of exclusion from entering the state.
Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist discuss the importance of the restric-
tive entry laws in the British settler colonies for the 1905 Aliens Act in
Britain. The background was the immigration of large numbers of Ashke-
nazi Jews. As Bashford and Gilchrist (2012, p. 412) write: ‘Retaining
distinctive linguistic and religious culture, East End Jewry was perceived
by other Londoners as standing strangely apart from the native British
population’. Here we find a theme which becomes constant through
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: the fear of difference,
of the immigration of individuals who identify as members of a particular
group other than that dominant within that particular nation-state. These
migrants are felt to threaten the homogeneity of the national population.
In Australia one of the first acts passed by the first federal parliament in
1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act. This act, the foundation of
what became known as the White Australia policy, included the noto-
rious dictation test which was adopted from a similar provision in Natal
and had already been utilised in Western Australia. The dictation test was
instituted as a form of racial discrimination disguised as a literacy measure-
ment. The test could be administered at the discretion of the immigration
authority. Anybody entering Australia could be asked to write fifty words
in a European language of the administrator’s choice, later any language
of their choice. In one notorious early case in 1909 the survivors of the
shipwreck of the SS Clan Ranald in South Australia were made to take
a dictation test which they failed: ‘The 20 lascar seamen, identified as
“coloured”, were deemed illegal immigrants and sent to Melbourne to be
deported to Colombo on SS Clan McLachlan’ (Tao 2018). The test was
finally abolished when the migration policy was revamped in the Revised
Migration Act of 1958.
One of the driving concerns of Australian federation was the fear of
Chinese migration. Prior to federation individual states had passed legis-
lation specifically limiting the numbers of Chinese allowed to enter. In
1855 Victoria passed An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants
with the aim of restricting Chinese immigration and in 1861 the New
South Wales legislature passed the Chinese Immigration Restriction Act.1
As Wang Yu-bo (2004, p. 21) notes, ‘the exclusion movement against the
Chinese immigrants in Australia formed an important part of the Feder-
ation Movement’. From its inception Australia, like the colonies which
preceded the federated entity, was preoccupied with exclusion and, there-
fore, with the geographical border which as the limit of the state was
also the site of physical exclusion. Federation allowed for a unified policy
on exclusion and, therefore, gave greater clarity to the border now of
a unified state. In her discussion of the border in Australia, Suvendrini
Perera (2009, p. 163) writes that:
The border seals, in the senses of both securing and validating, the
‘nationalist compact’ between citizen and state, as the figures it excludes—
the noncitizen as foreigner or as alien within—cohere and endorse the
privileged subject of the nation.
6 J. STRATTON
It should come as no surprise that much of the Immigration Restriction

Act was concerned with what happens at the border, from making sure
that all crew members who arrive on a boat leave on it to the punishment
of people who bring ‘idiots or insane persons into the Commonwealth’.
Bashford and Gilchrist (2012, p. 412) go on to write that: ‘London
was being “swamped”, many began to claim, borrowing the metaphor
already common in anti-Chinese movements elsewhere’. Here we find
the use of a term which Margaret Thatcher later used in 1978. At that
time she was the leader of the Conservative Opposition, when she said
in a television interview that she thought ‘people are really rather afraid
that this country might be rather swamped by people of a different
culture’ (Thatcher 1978). In Australia it was used again by the populist,
anti-multicultural politician Pauline Hanson in her maiden speech in the
House of Representatives in 1996: ‘I believe we are in danger of being
swamped by Asians’ (Hanson 2016 [1996]). Swamped is a particularly
powerful metaphor because it not only carries the meaning of being
overwhelmed, more literally of drowning as the result of an inundation
of water, but it carries negative connotations derived from swamp as a
description of an area of stagnant water and so suggests that those who
are doing the swamping are disgusting or, indeed as we shall see, abject.
In all these cases the fear is of national cultural dilution and the push is
for an exclusionary policy. Hanson’s fear echoes that of the framers of
the Immigration Restriction Act which was the cornerstone of the White
Australia policy.
In this context, it should not be a surprise to find that immediately
before expressing her anxiety about Asians in Australia Hanson said: ‘I and
most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that
of multiculturalism abolished’ (2016 [1996]). The ideological foundation
of official multiculturalism was inclusion while the basis of the modern
state was exclusion. Hanson mixed up an internal population manage-
ment policy with a policy that decided who could enter and stay in the
state. This is not to say that Australian official multiculturalism was liberal,
with a small l. What this misunderstands is that the purpose of its inclu-
sivity was strategic. In the post-Second World War period and through
to the 1960s the Australian definition of whiteness had been stretched
to include many groups, such as Greeks and southern Italians, who had
quite different cultures to the hegemonic Anglo-Celtic culture. Multicul-
turalism, an idea taken from Canada where its deployment was in the
quite different context of a country looking for a way of managing two
dominant, competing settler cultures in addition to the cultures of smaller

migrant groups, functioned as a way of incorporating these diverse white
cultures into the hegemonic order.
The State, Homogeneity and Multiculturalism

In order to understand this preoccupation with inclusion we need to
take a step back and think about the formation of the nation-state. The
ideological basis of the nation-state was the claim of national homo-
geneity. Referencing Roland Robertson’s work Michael Billig (1995,
pp. 129–130) explains:
the heyday of the nation-state was from 1880 to 1920. Many of the states
that were to enjoy sovereignty during that period had been created in
the previous hundred or so years. A modernist spirit had attended their
creation. One of the essential characteristics of modernity was vital to
state-making: the intolerance of difference. The new states were to be
centralised polities, which flattened traditional regional, cultural, linguistic
and ethnic differences. As [Zygmunt] Bauman has claimed, ‘nationalism
was a programme of unification, and a postulate of homogeneity’. (Bauman
‘Soil, Blood and Identity’ Sociological Review, no. 40, 1992, p. 693)
The settler states were not immune to this imperative. In Australia,

as I have argued elsewhere, a key part of the creation of the Australian
nation-state in the last years of the nineteenth century was the whitening
of the Irish, the largest non-English group in the evolving nation-state
(Stratton 2004).
Whitening the Irish was a crucial move in the construction of Australia
as a white, settler nation-state. However, other differences also had to
be eradicated. The most important of these was the use of any language
that threatened the hegemony of English. Here we need to remember
the importance of language in the formation of European nation-states.
Benedict Anderson (1983, p. 84) explains:
The lexicographic revolution in Europe [from the second half of the

eighteenth century] … created, and gradually spread, the conviction that
languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of
quite specific groups—their daily speakers and readers—and moreover that
these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous
place in a fraternity of equals.
8 J. STRATTON
As settler colonies transformed into states so the privileging of a single

language became a foundational feature of the attempt to create a nation.
In Australia, as a consequence of the large number of Irish, and also Scots,
in the Australian colonies Gaelic, albeit in variant forms across those two
national groups, was a reasonably common language:
During the 1850s, Gaelic was so prevalent in Australia that there were
many Gaelic-speaking churches, at least one Gaidhlig-newspaper, and even
a Gaelic-Language school in Geelong! At that point Gaidhlig was spoken
most in small communities in northern New South Wales. Unfortunately,
Gaidhlig didn’t survive in New South Wales much past 1890, and church
services were no longer held in Gaelic after the 1890s. In Melbourne, there
were quite a lot of Gaelic speakers (both Scottish and Irish) well into the
mid-19th-century. (Rachel’s Ramblings 2013)
The demise of Gaelic as an everyday spoken language by around the time

of federation happened in concert with the whitening of the Irish. It
enabled English to be the unquestioned hegemonic language which all
migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds had to learn. It was
the de facto national language of the new nation-state.
In the post-Second World War period there was a push to increase the
population of Australia. Often justified at the time in terms of making
the defence of the vast continent more feasible the real reason had more
to do with the industrialisation of the country. One example was the
Snowy Mountains Scheme. As Grahame Griffin (2003, p. 39) writes:
‘During the 1950s and ’60s, the Snowy Mountains Scheme played a key
role in national mythmaking as an icon of technological, economic and
agricultural progress, and as a place of assimilation for non-British immi-
grants’. Ben Chifley, who was the Labor prime minister when the building
started in 1949, called it, ‘one of the greatest milestones on the march
of Australia to full national development’ (Griffin 2003, p. 39). Over
100,000 people worked on the Snowy scheme, most of them migrants.
The consequence of the push to increase migration numbers was that,
as not enough people from Britain could be persuaded to migrate,
migrants were drawn from a widened variety of sources. In addition to
other Northern European countries like Germany and the Netherlands,
displaced persons from eastern Europe, Maltese, southern Italians, Greeks
and Christian Lebanese were allowed to migrate. Between July 1949
and June 1970 almost 2,700,000 migrants arrived in Australia helping
to increase the total Australian population from just under 8,000,000 to

around 12,500,000. This is not the place to rehearse this history in detail.
What is important here is the broadening of the definition of whiteness
that was entailed and the impact on Australian cultural homogeneity of
large numbers of people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
At the same time, Arthur Calwell, the architect of the post-war immigra-
tion policy, remained a staunch supporter of the White Australia policy
until his death in 1973. In his memoirs, published in 1972, he wrote:
Those who talk about a multi-racial society are really talking about a poly-
glot nation. … No matter where the pressures come from, Australian
people will continue to resist all attempts to destroy our white society.
(Calwell 1972, p. 119)
Calwell had expanded the range of people who could migrate to Australia
but he remained convinced that that range was limited by whiteness.
Al Grassby, as minister for Immigration in Gough Whitlam’ s Labor
government, picked up the term multiculturalism from Canada and intro-
duced it tentatively in the title of a paper he presented at a symposium
in Melbourne in August 1973, ‘A multi-cultural society for the future’.
Pierre Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, had used the term in
a speech in 1971. Trudeau was addressing a very different problem to
Australia’s.2 When Canada was confederated in 1867 it included a large
French settler population who had been conquered by the British in
1760. Unlike in Australia where Gaelic was never spoken by a large
enough population to persist in the face of the hegemony of English,
French could not be expected to die out. During the 1960s French
Canada became increasingly vocal and assertive. In 1967 Charles de
Gaulle, the nationalist French president, while visiting Quebec encour-
aged secession when at the end of a speech from the balcony of Montreal
City Hall he included the phrase Vive le Quebec libre. In 1969 the Offi-
cial Languages Act placed French on the same footing as English as a
language of the state.
The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism had been
set up in 1963 by the then prime minister Lester Pearson to examine
the status of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada in response to
increasing agitation by Francophone Canadians. The remit of the commis-
sion referred to developing the Canadian Confederation ‘on the basis of
10 J. STRATTON
an equal partnership between the two founding races’. Race here identifies
linguistic groups. Eve Haque (2012, p. 17) comments that:
The establishment of the link between language and race in the crucible
of modernity meant that, in contemporary nation-building projects—as
that of the B and B Commission—language could become the basis of
the Other’s exclusion. Language could be modernity’s empty signifier of
promise for a universal community, disavowing racial exclusion even as it
simultaneously divides this putative universality through the deterministic
and immutable origins of separate languages.
In Canada, the privileging of two languages both tied to national groups

identified as races and to whiteness continued the White Canada policy
covertly as multiculturalism was being introduced. In Australia, during
the time of official multiculturalism there was a divide between native
English speakers and those constructed as Non-English-Speaking Back-
ground (NESB) migrants. To put it differently, in Australia speaking
English with an Anglo-Australian accent helped to whiten a person.
The final report of the Royal Commission was presented in five
volumes between 1967 and 1970. Haque (2012, p. 186) describes the
commission’s ‘attempt to engineer a new white settler bi-nation’. In
his speech in parliament in October 1971 responding to the report’s
recommendations Trudeau said:
for although there are two official languages, there is no official culture,
nor does any ethnic group take precedence over any other. No citizen or
group of citizens is other than Canadian, and all should be treated fairly.
(Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 [undated])
Trudeau acknowledged that Canada has two languages but diminished

the threat to Canadian unity by asserting the equal value of the cultures
of all the ethnic groups within Canada. As Brian Galligan and Winsome
Roberts (2008, p. 217) remark: ‘Because Australia did not have to
deal with two deeply entrenched different national cultures, however,
multiculturalism would never have the same traction here’. In 1988 the
Canadian parliament passed the Canadian Multiculturalism Act which is
described in its long title as: ‘An act for the preservation and enhancement
of multiculturalism in Canada’. It could be argued that multiculturalism
in Canada functions as a strategy of exclusion. While Canada is offi-
cially bilingual, French-Canadian culture is placed on the same level as
every other culture in Canada; that is, it does not have the privileged
status that might be accorded it as one of the two founding, settler
cultures. Neither, of course, does Anglo culture have this status but
Anglo-Canadian culture, like the English language, is more pervasive
across Canada. Together, as Haque argues, they privilege whiteness.
In Canada multiculturalism is a way of managing the impossibility of
homogeneity. In Australia multiculturalism might be understood as a way
of emphasising homogeneity. In Australia multiculturalism appeared to
be inclusive. It began as a strategy for supporting the diverse linguistic
and cultural groups, identified in terms of national origin, members of
which had migrated to Australia in that post-war period. Australian multi-
culturalism functioned in terms of whiteness and with an assumption of
common values based on the various versions of Christianity that were a
common feature of the migrants allowed into the country. It was taken
for granted that whiteness, Christianity and common values were corre-
lated. I discuss the importance of Christianity in relation to whiteness in
Australia in Chapter 3.
It is now generally accepted to think of Australian multiculturalism
in terms of a core/periphery model where what was called Anglo-Celtic
culture was the core and the minority cultures and languages of ethnic
groups were the periphery. The inclusivity of Australian multicultur-
alism ensured that the nation-state remained homogeneous in spite of
the perception of those who later would call for its dismantlement on
the grounds that it encouraged a loss of Australian identity and a frag-
mentation of the Australian nation-state. This fear accounts for, in the
years of John Howard’s prime ministership 1996–2007, the emphasis on
Australian values and citizenship. In 2007, as a result of these anxieties,
Howard’s government made it more difficult to gain citizenship. The
residency eligibility period was increased from two years to four years,
competency in English became mandatory and an Australian citizenship
test was introduced. As Farida Fozdar and Brian Spittles (2009, p. 499)
explain: ‘Ostensibly the Howard Government’s initiatives were designed
to use citizenship as a tool of social inclusion by restricting access to it and
by more clearly articulating what it means to be “Australian”’. Fozdar and
Spittles note that the test became a focus for right-wing attempts to influ-
ence immigration. In 2017 the prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, trying
to manage the right-wing rump in the coalition party room, went further.
Prospective citizens would have to sign a values statement which would
indicate that they knew and accepted Australian values and the citizenship
12 J. STRATTON
test would be expanded to include questions related to Australian values.

After the election of 2019 these changes were set aside (see Crowe 2019).
Nevertheless what they show is the renewed emphasis on shared values as
the basis of the Australian community and the logic of exclusion which it
enforces.
Official multiculturalism, born during the last years of the White
Australia policy, assumed race as a limiting factor. It may be for this reason
that Indigenous Australians were not included in multiculturalism until
around 1994. Anne Curthoys has explained how throughout Australia’s
existence as a nation-state the discussion about immigrants has been kept
quite separate from the discussion about Aborigines. She argues that:
In the 1980s, as multicultural discourse became ever more powerful, paral-

lels between indigenous and multicultural issues were at last drawn in
official, intellectual and public arenas. The two sets of concerns were now
seen to be connected by a national ideal of cultural diversity. (Curthoys
2000, p. 28)
In this process Aborigines lost their special status as the first people on
the continent settlers call Australia. What we see here is an extreme
example of what Billig calls the flattening of differences, something which
characterised the practice of Australian multiculturalism. Writing in 2000
Curthoys (p. 34) notes that, ‘multicultural discourse at large remains
remarkably inattentive to the colonial features of current Australian life’.
That lack of attention reflects the homogenising, nation-building concern
of official multiculturalism.
The Short History of Official Multiculturalism

and the Persistence of White Australia
We are now in the time beyond official multiculturalism. Certainly there
remain elements of the policy in place. However, where once the emphasis
was on diversity and a celebration of the differences that various groups
brought which enriched Australia, though as we have seen this diver-
sity functioned within a claim to shared values, now the concern is
with integration. In 1987 the Labor government under Bob Hawke
set up the Office of Multicultural Affairs within the Department of
the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Its purpose was to offer advice to
the prime minister on matters relating to multiculturalism within the
Australian community and to act as a liaison between representatives of

ethnic groups and government. This time was the high point of official
multiculturalism.
Already in 1995, before the election of John Howard’s coalition
government, the Office of Multicultural Affairs was absorbed into the
Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. After Howard’s elec-
tion the governmental rhetoric around multiculturalism changed radically.
To take one example, the 1989 National Agenda for a Multicultural
Australia, formulated during Hawke’s prime ministership, identified the
meaning of multicultural as describing ‘the cultural and ethnic diversity
of contemporary Australia’ and went on with the programmatic assertion:
‘We are, and will remain, a multicultural society’ (Office of Multicultural
Affairs 1989, p. ix). By 2003 in Multicultural Australia: United in Diver-
sity the basic tenets of multiculturalism, especially the recognition of the
importance of diversity, were still being affirmed but, overriding this, was
a new claim: ‘The freedom of all Australians to express and share their
cultural values is dependent on their abiding by mutual civic obligations’
(Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs
2003, p. 6). What this meant was then spelt out: ‘These civic obligations
reflect the unifying values of Australian Citizenship. Australian Citizenship
involves reciprocal responsibilities and privileges and enables individuals
to become fully contributing members of the Australian community’
(Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs
2003, p. 6). In official policy multiculturalism was now subordinate to the
unifying force of state citizenship and a claim about mutual responsibility.
At the same time ethnic groups were being replaced by individuals.
In December 2017 Multicultural Affairs was incorporated into the
new Department of Home Affairs about which more will be said later
but what we can note here is that in combining the intelligence services
with border security and immigration the department transformed what
was left of the policy of official multiculturalism into a top-down surveil-
lance technology for managing a population not yet fully integrated. On
the webpage for Multicultural Affairs, the preoccupation is no longer
with ethnic groups and with the establishment of an Australia which is
stronger because of its diversity. Rather: ‘The Australian government is
funding AUD$71 million package of social cohesion initiatives to create
a stronger, more cohesive Australia’. This is an Australia which is the
product of Howard’s neoliberal displacement of government support for
diversity into a preoccupation with mutual obligation, a society based on
14 J. STRATTON
contract and individual worth measured by Australia’s economic require-

ments. This is the substitution of an official multiculturalism established
in the service of a rapidly expanding and culturally diversifying population
created to reconstruct Australia as a society driven by industrial capitalism,
by a neoliberal social order in which the individual’s productive relation
with the state is paramount over all social differences.
Official multiculturalism had been deployed in Australia as a mecha-
nism for integrating ethnic groups which, while Christian and white, in
an extended definition of that term, had ways of life that varied consid-
erably from the Anglo-Celtic norm as that term was used to define the
group that held hegemonic power. Official multiculturalism tended to
group people into ethnic categories based first on national origin and
then on language. English has never been the formal, legislated language
of Australia, unlike the joint status of English and French in Canada,
but its connection with the English as the primary historical settlers has
given it a naturalised and unquestioned status relegating migrants from
outside the United Kingdom to being people of Non-English-Speaking
Background. Thus the linguistic distinction English/NESB parallels, and
helps compose, the core/periphery divide which has organised Australian
multiculturalism.
Australian multiculturalism looked backwards at the time when the
White Australia policy was being fully dismantled. This dismantling is
often characterised as the Whitlam government recognising the inherent
worth of all individuals regardless of the colour of their skin. Again
though, as it happens, Australia was following the lead of Canada. As
Ronald Skeldon (1996, p. 138) writes:
Canada effectively removed racial discrimination as a major feature of its

policy in its Immigration Regulations tabled in January 1962. The main
reason for the change was not parliamentary or public demand but because
some senior officials realized that Canada ‘could not operate effectively
within the United Nations, or in the multiracial Commonwealth, with the
millstone of a racially discriminatory immigration policy round her neck.’
[Freda Hawkins Critical Years in Immigration, p. 39]
During the 1950s and 1960s the composition of the United Nations
changed radically:
Within one generation, ninety ex-colonial states joined the United Nations.
By 1961, African and Asian countries had gained a majority in the General
Assembly.
With this majority these countries were able to push back against white
racism:
In 1963, a Declaration on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrim-

ination was accepted in the General Assembly with eighty nine votes in
favour and seventeen abstentions. (Reynolds and Lake 2008, p. 349)
The Declaration specifically identified apartheid as a form of racism. By

the time the South African rugby union team, the Springboks, toured
Australia in 1971 to a groundswell of protests, it was clear that the White
Australia policy, even in the limited form in which it still existed, was
no longer tenable. The Whitlam government formally ended the policy
in 1973. South Africa became increasingly isolated. Sanctions that had
begun in the early 1960s reached a peak in 1986 when the United States
Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act.
With the ending of the White Australia policy people of much more
diverse backgrounds, skin colour, religious affiliation, started entering
Australia. It is now that the limits of official multiculturalism’s inclusivity
began to become apparent. Mandisi Manjavu, in an article published in
2016 titled ‘The Whiteness Regime of Multiculturalism’ explains:
The dominant discourse portrays Africans in Australia in the context of

the problems it is assumed they create for the government and ordinary
Australians. In the past Africans have been spoken of as not fitting in
socially, and through the media as deviant and criminogenic. Neighbour-
hoods that are predominantly African are characterised in the mainstream
press as ‘no-go-zones’ and ‘hotspots’ for youth violence. (p. 188)
Here we see exclusion in operation. These no-go-zones and hotspots

can be thought of as informal sites of confinement. Joel Windle (2008,
pp. 556–557) remarks:
Geographically, the suburbs where migrants live are portrayed as besieged

by outsiders and cut off from the city. They are ‘no go zones’ ‘African,
Asian or Polynesian strongholds’, ‘hotspots’ and ‘hotbeds’ for ‘youth
violence and ethnic tensions’.
16 J. STRATTON
Windle (2008, p. 557) goes on to quote from an article in the Herald-

Sun in 2007 where a woman described as a 75-year-old widow, a local,
‘laments that before the invasion, “the area used to be ‘lovely’”’. Invasion
suggests that there is now unauthorised occupation. This occupation is a
site of confinement within an Australia that for this journalist, and the
widow, remains predominantly, and preferably, white. Official multicul-
turalism was white. It was designed to integrate the broadened category
of white people into the Australian nation. Its limits became increas-
ingly apparent after the ending of the White Australia policy. These limits
were expressed geographically, in terms of particular spaces such as certain
suburbs as non-white, as well as discursively.
Finex Ndhlovu (2014, p. 101) theorises the way black Africans are
culturally constructed in Australia:
the extensive media coverage of dark-skinned Africans (particularly those

originally from Sudan), typifying them as a ‘problematic’ and unwanted
‘other’, has generated stereotyped perceptions of all African people. In
particular, black-African immigration to Australia appears to have brought
back memories about representations of race and the social construction
of ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ which were popular in colonial Australia and
were commonly used in oppositional relationship.
Those beyond multicultural whiteness, and now after official multicul-

turalism simply beyond the whiteness constructed through that multi-
culturalism, form the excluded Other within the border of Australia. As
Ndhlovu (2014, p. 32) notes elsewhere, ‘African migrants in Australia
are often seen as a homogeneous group of people with very little, if
any, difference between them’. This homogenisation is a function of the
Othering of black people. Muslims suffer a similar fate, that is Islam
is viewed as a homogeneous entity and all people who are identified
as Muslims are assumed to have the same beliefs and values. White-
ness, and Christianity, or at least the values claimed to be Christian, are
constructed and affirmed against these Others. All sects of Christianity are
also assumed to have the same values but in this case the homogenisation
of belief functions positively for membership of the Australian nation.
In 2006 Ien Ang and colleagues published the results of research
they had conducted on cultural diversity on behalf of the multiculturally
aligned television broadcaster, Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). One
of their findings concerned attitudes to reconciliation with Indigenous
Australians:
Interestingly in all five NESB samples a higher percentage … from 73%

of Vietnamese to almost 93% of Somalis considered reconciliation impor-
tant to very important. In addition a significantly larger percentage of the
national sample deemed this issue ‘not important’ or ‘not very impor-
tant’ (19%) than any of the five NESB groupings (the highest being 10%
of Lebanese and 9% of Greek, and the lowest 3% of Somalis). In other
words NESB migrants tend to consider reconciliation a much more impor-
tant issue than the national population—a sign of strong awareness of the
special place of Indigenous Australians in society. (p. 12)
Such an interpretation presumes that all ethnicised groups were equally

accepted within the Australian polity. Rather, what the findings show is
that the more excluded a group is the more it identifies with the issues
faced by Indigenous Australians. The groups who had been whitened, the
Greeks and the Lebanese, were less interested in reconciliation though
the figures for these groups still signal significantly more interest in
reconciliation than the national sample, for which we can read the
white mainstream. Affirming the importance of reconciliation by Somali-
Australians suggests the extent to which these respondents felt similarly
excluded to Indigenous Australians. In other words, in post-official multi-
culturalism, in an Australia dominated by neoliberalism, the limited
inclusiveness of official multiculturalism has been replaced by a hierarchy
of exclusion running from those identified as most white to those iden-
tified as most black, and from Church of England Christians through to
Muslims. Precarity increases in concert with the experience of exclusion.
The Australian State and the State of Emergency

In order to understand the functioning of exclusion in the late-modern
state, in this case the Australian state in the time when neoliberal ideology
has been driving policy, we need to theorise the state in the terms of
the state of exception, or rather, as we shall see, the state of emergency.
Giorgio Agamben (1998, p. 1) has argued that: ‘World War One (and
the years following it) appear as a laboratory for testing and honing
the functional mechanisms and apparatuses of the state of exception as
a paradigm of government’. In arguing this Agamben was following
Walter Benjamin who in Theses on the Philosophy of History noted that:
‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency”
in which we live is not the exception but the rule (1940, sect. VIII)’.
18 J. STRATTON
Benjamin was here critiquing the ideas of Carl Schmitt. Fascism, for its
apologist Schmitt, was founded on the creation of a state of exception.
Benjamin’s point is that unless we understand that there is nothing
exceptional about fascism we cannot successfully oppose it. In making
this point Benjamin distinguished between emergency and exception.
Amy O’Donoghue (2015), glossing Agamben, is more explicit than
him on the historicity of the state of exception: ‘Under modern liberal
democracy, the state of exception, once a temporary suspension of law,
became a stable, generalised condition’. Here we need to go back to
Schmitt’s discussion of the way the state of exception is produced.
However, before we do this we have to recognise that Schmitt, too,
thought that the political organisation of modern states, grounded in
ideas that can be found in rudimentary form in the Peace of Westphalia,
had broken down in World War One. For Schmitt, the ideal Westphalian
war took place between friends and enemies, those within a state and
those outside, in another state, and took place on the borders between
the states. Such wars could be carried out according to a set of rules
laid down in international law (see Schotel 2011). With the USinterven-
tion in World War One, the old European-based system was replaced by
a global system in which the nature of war and the violence associated
with it were fundamentally altered. Markus Gunneflo (2015, pp. 52–53)
puts it like this: ‘This transformation can be seen in the guilt placed with
the German Kaiser after the war for the jus ad bellum “crime of war”, as
distinct from jus in bello “war crimes”’. The very nature of war was called
into question in this new order, and as the new system evolved, the role
of constitutional sovereignty was steadily diminished. With the decline
in constitutional sovereignty the importance of exclusion as a normalised
practice within the state has increased.
Schmitt argued that sovereignty always exists in states, even in those
where it has apparently been ceded to a constitution. Indeed, his defini-
tion of sovereignty, which he places at the beginning of his 1922 book
Politische Theologoe (Political Theology), is a practical one. The sovereign
is the person who can suspend the constitution in favour of a state of
exception. For Schmitt the sovereign can only legitimately do this in the
name of the people. From this point of view the declaration of a state
of exception is fundamentally democratic. Agamben (2005, p. 1) writes
at the beginning of his discussion of the state of exception that: ‘It is
difficult even to arrive at a definition of the term given its position at
the limit between politics and law’. The definition of the sovereign is the
person who stands both inside the legal system and outside it, who can
therefore declare the legal system in abeyance thus creating the state of
exception. Agamben (2005, p. 2) develops this point with reference to
Hitler’s suspension of the parts of the Weimar constitution concerned
with personal liberties and elaborates:
In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment,

by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the
physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories
of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political
system. Since then, the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emer-
gency (though perhaps not declared in the technical sense) has become
one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including so-called
democratic ones.
The idea of a legal civil war draws attention away from the combatants
in this war; the people and the sovereign. This is, as Benjamin might
have recognised, a war of oppression. As we shall see later in a discussion
of Georges Bataille’s thoughts on abjection, it is also a war of exclu-
sion. The sovereign has access to the power embedded in the forces of
the state expressed ultimately in violence. This structure becomes more
deeply seated in states organised along neoliberal principles. Imogen Tyler
(2013, p. 6) remarks that:
As governments have come to govern for the markets they have also come
to govern against the people. The protections and freedoms which post-
Second World War liberal democracies once ostensibly offered citizens in
return for their loyalty and labour have been incrementally eroded.
Agamben writes about the physical elimination of categories of citizens,

we can be more explicit and refer to the Holocaust and the destruc-
tion of German Jewry. However, more than this, Agamben’s point can
be illustrated by reference to the Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge who
murdered, it is estimated, almost a quarter of Cambodia’s population in
the mid-1970s when they held power.
The more general point is that in today’s neoliberal nation-states,
while entire groups may not be murdered, life for individuals and for
population groups becomes more precarious, the exclusion is more and
more a possibility. In Australia we can refer to the increasing numbers of
individuals who find themselves deported to countries they may not have
20 J. STRATTON
lived in since they were babies. In 2018 Patrick Keyzer and Dave Martin
wrote that:
Deportations of foreigners on temporary visas have been on the rise in

Australia since the government amended its immigration law in 2014 to
give the Minister for Home Affairs the power to expel people they view as
a risk to Australian society.
Kezyer and Martin inform us that in the two years prior to their article
more than 1000 New Zealanders had been sent back. In 2019 Rosemary
Bolger wrote that: ‘Having already deported 4700 foreign criminals from
Australia in the last six years, the government wants to extend its crack-
down to offenders who haven’t served jail time’. Bolger points out that
Australia’s deportation laws are among the strictest in the western world.
We must return to Agamben’s point in our discussion of the state of
emergency. Schmitt was concerned with the legitimacy of the state of
exception as a function of the political order. The implication of Benjam-
in’s position is that the state of exception is more fundamental. Here, the
state of exception functions rather like Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature,
and we should remember Schmitt’s great interest in Hobbes’s theory of
social order (see Schmidt 2008 [1938]), that is, the state of exception,
with its lack of law, is the hypothetical primitive state out of which the
modern state has evolved. The difference, and it is crucial, is the exis-
tence of the sovereign and the unfettered power the sovereign wields.
For Hobbes, the sovereign is justified in using any means to preserve
their power. It is the sovereign who stands between order and the chaotic
state of nature. In order to clarify what is at stake here we need to distin-
guish between the state of emergency and the state of exception. Schmitt
writes about the state of exception as the circumstance when the sovereign
suspends all or part of the constitution. However, enacting the suspension
brings into effect the state of emergency.
It is normal for constitutions to identify under what circumstances
the constitution may be suspended. Agamben traces the political idea
of the state of exception back to the French Revolution, specifically to
the Constituent Assembly’s decree of 8 July 1791. We can note that this
was the same year that Bentham published his pamphlet arguing for a
panoptic prison rather than transportation for those to be excluded from
the state. Both of these developments were crucial aspects of the evolu-
tion of the Westphalian confinement state. In his brief history Agamben
then discusses the general states of exception promulgated by the warring

states in World War One. He writes that:
Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative

sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is significant that
military emergency now ceded its place to economic emergency (with an
implicit assimilation between war and economics). (Agamben 2005, p. 13)
Agamben sees an increasing acceptance of the powers associated with the

state of exception. There is, though, a terminological confusion between
the state of emergency and the state of exception. The state of emergency
is what can be legally prescribed by the sovereign. It is a situation in
which the law of the state has been suspended. This is what Agamben is
describing.3
Ellen Kennedy (2011, p. 536) notes the ‘confusion of emergency and
exception in current political theory’ and argues that much of it origi-
nates in a misreading of Schmitt’s Political Theology. It is a confusion that
is a consequence of conflation. Discussing Nomi Claire Lazar’s States of
Emergency in Liberal Democracies Kennedy (2011, p. 538) writes that:
Lazar sees a continuum in the rule of law during an emergency and in

a normally functioning state, a ‘shift not a sea change’ as she puts it.
‘The goal is to normalise emergencies by refusing them the status of
“exceptional” events’.
The state of emergency can be legally declared. It can, but does not have
to, lead to a state of exception:
Emergency, depending on its intensity, can be the precursor of exception.

What begins as an exercise of legal powers can end in a chaos of a world
without rules, norms and procedures. (Kennedy 2011, p. 546)
The state of emergency can be a legally declared state. It is not the same
as the state of exception, but can be a precursor of it.
The state of exception may perhaps be best understood as the ghostly
Other, indeed a version of the Hobbesian state of nature where there
might be war of all against all, where no law exists, and where the
sovereign exerts unrestricted power. As is now well understood the
Hobbesian state of nature can be thought of as an extrapolation of society
founded on possessive individualism when regulatory power, law, is absent
22 J. STRATTON
(Macpherson 1962). Similarly, the state of exception may be thought of

as the philosophical, logical development when the law of the Westphalian
state, based in the constitution, is suspended. Indeed, the state of excep-
tion in this sense is prior to the state founded on law. At the same time
the state of emergency is declarable by the political leader of a state, the
one who embodies sovereignty. In the sense that the sovereign is both
governed by the laws of the state but is also external to them we may
be reminded of the medieval doctrine of the king’s two bodies, the one
corporeal the other the body politic which incorporated God’s worldly
influence (see Kantorowicz 2016 [1957]; Kahn 2009). The state of emer-
gency suspends all or part of the constitution and introduces, for example,
martial law. The point here is the state of emergency is a political move
that can be understood in philosophical terms by its relation to the state
of exception which is the Other of the state governed by law.
Bare life is the experience of living in the state of exception. Agamben
(1998, p. 4) understands the politicisation of bare life, its entry into the
modern state, as ‘the decisive event of modernity’. He writes that: ‘In
Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose
exclusion founds the city of men’ (Agamben 1998, p. 7). Put simply, in
the modern state bare life is existence when a person is not subject to
the rule of law which is the expression of state power. Bare life refers to
people excluded from the state. Anthony Downey (2009, p. 109) lists
examples of those forced to live as bare life:
Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and

geographical borders are lives half lived. Denied access to legal, economic
and political redress, these lives exist in a limbo-like state that is largely
preoccupied with acquiring and sustaining the essentials of life. The
refugee, the political prisoner, the disappeared, the victim of torture, the
dispossessed—all have been excluded, to different degrees, from the frater-
nity of the social sphere, appeal to the safety net of the nation-state and
recourse to international law.
We should note here the importance of borders. Those who are bare
life are those excluded, most fundamentally, from the law of the state,
either beyond the legal border within the state or outside of the state’s
border. In neoliberal states such as Australia where law and economy are
imbricated as the state’s foundation bare life is the experience of those
who fall outside of the economic contract. It is these people who are
identified as the underclass, remembering here the list of those confined

by the state given by Porter, and who, in Australia, were portrayed in the
series Housos , discussed in Chapter 8.
It was Paul Keating, who followed Bob Hawke as Labor prime minister
in 1991, who, in 1992 along with his immigration minister Gerry Hand,
who was responsible for strengthening exclusion at the state’s border by
introducing indefinite mandatory detention for asylum seekers. Indefinite
mandatory detention, a part of the Migration Reform Bill 1992, came
into effect in 1994.4 Howard, who built on Keating’s exclusionary tech-
nologies, became prime minister two years later. Perera, writing in 2002,
about the onshore detention camps that held asylum seekers, argued that:
In the political and juridical order of the nation, they constitute the mate-
rialization of the state of exception that in Agamben’s words, places us
‘virtually in the presence of a camp every time such a structure is created’.
(Perera 2002b, p. 113)
This was before Howard established offshore detention facilities on

Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru as part of the Pacific
Solution in late 2001. Offshore detention decreased the rights of asylum
seekers even further. Referring to Agamben’s description of the state of
exception, Michelle Peterie (2018, p. 61) writes:
While these facilities are funded by Australia, they are located outside of
Australia’s legal system and have thus seen asylum seekers denied access
to the legal rights that would be afforded to them were they processed in
Australia. … [There have been high levels of physical and sexual violence]
Given the limited legal recourse to those affected, Agamben’s model may
well be instructive here.
For Agamben the limit case of the state of exception is the death camps
established by the Nazi regime in World War Two. As Peterie signals, the
offshore detention facilities are not so lawless. They are supposedly under
the law of the countries in which they were established. However, the
high levels of abuse and the lack of access to human rights mean that these
camps, outside the border of Australia yet remaining Australia’s responsi-
bility, approach the criteria that would make them zones of exception and
those confined within them as bare life.
24 J. STRATTON
Bare life is the reductio ad absurdum of life in the modern state, or

life excluded from the modern state. It is an always present possibility
within the state brought closer by the state of emergency. The state of
emergency allows a state to operate legally outside of its own constitu-
tional law. We have already noted Agamben remarking that after World
War One the combatant states tended to preserve elements of the state
of emergency, increasing the power of the executive at the cost of the
legislative, and he connected this with the existence of an economic emer-
gency. John Reynolds (2012, p. 86) has explained that: ‘The premise of
an economic state of emergency is analogous to that presented to justify
the invocation and entrenchment of extraordinary powers in relation to
national security threats and political conflict’. Indeed increasingly, and
most obviously in states that have espoused neoliberalism, issues with the
capitalist economy are presented overlapping with security threats. Tyler
(2013, p. 9) notes that in neoliberal states: ‘This state of insecurity is
continuously fuelled and orchestrated through the proliferation of fears
about border controls and terror threats, as well as economic insecurity
and labour precariousness’. In the United States the Patriot Act of 2001,
a reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, was, as Kennedy (2011, p. 535)
reminds us, ‘legislation that broadly enlarged surveillance by the Federal
government, created new powers intended to foil money-laundering by
foreign terrorists and their domestic partners, revised immigration proce-
dures, and expanded police powers over immigrants’. Kennedy (2011,
p. 535) remarks that: ‘Academic legal opinion now commonly regards
those expanded powers and the real possibility of other attacks as having
created a domestic and international state of emergency’. What we do not
know is the extent to which the shocking events of 9/11 were a pretext
for the expansion of state powers in the context of the American neolib-
eral state.5 In Australia in the wake of those attacks in the United States
what became common government rhetoric united the two concerns of
asylum seekers and terrorism in the suggestion that terrorists might try to
enter the country disguised as asylum seekers (see Johnston and Callender
2002). This was used to support the strengthening of exclusionary border
protection.
The invocation of terrorism as a justification for more emergency
powers to be given to the executive is also used as a means of shoring
up the state’s economic infrastructure. Reynolds (2012, pp. 128–129)
again:
The overriding and inescapable conclusion, however, is the centrality of the

state of emergency to the entrenchment of capitalist doctrine and institu-
tions in modern political life. As such, emergency economic regulation is
the normal and permanent state of affairs in the contemporary state.
Banks cannot fail or the state’s resources to protect its citizens will be
weakened. This lesson from the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 has been
repeated in Australia in the outcomes of the Royal Commission into
the Banking, Superannuation, and Financial Services Industry which was
established in December 2017 and presented its final report in February
2019. This combination of state of emergency and economic concerns
becomes most emotive in an order where the economic is worked into
the very fabric of the existence of the state. In such a situation the state
sacrifices its citizens to protect the economic order which has become the
foundation and expression of the state itself.
Surveillance, Authoritarianism and Exclusion

We need to remember that Bentham’s new prison was panoptic. Its
surveillance was disciplinary. If the modern state is founded on prac-
tices of control and exclusion, these are reinforced in the state where the
economic has become the organising principle of the state’s existence. It
is in this context that we need to understand the Hawke and Keating
Labor governments in Australia from 1983 simultaneously developing
the apparently inclusive policy of official multiculturalism while restruc-
turing the Australian economy by increasing its integration into the global
order and at the same time extending control over the Australian popula-
tion and reinforcing exclusionary practices at the border. It was Hawke’s
government which in 1986 attempted to introduce an identity card, to be
called the Australia Card. This would have been a national identification
system. More, as Graham Greenleaf (1987) argued at the time,
the system to be established under the Australia Card Bill 1986, will go
beyond being a mere identification system, which the government claims
it is, and will establish the most powerful location system in Australia, and
a prototype data surveillance system.
26 J. STRATTON
In the end, after much opposition, instead of the Australia Card, Keating,
at that time the Treasurer, deployed an enhanced version of the Tax
File Number (TFN) system used by the Australian Tax Office. Over the
decades, with advances in computer systems and their increasing inte-
gration the TFN has become linked to bank accounts and the social
security system, medical benefit funds and indeed it can be linked with
any provider that asks for a person’s TFN.
Howard replaced the idea of a social contract with the economy,
placing economic contracts on the basis of the relationship between
government and the people in Australia. Perhaps the best example of
this was the introduction of Australian Workplace Agreements in 1996
which enabled individual workers to make employment contracts with
their employers. I use the awkward phrase ‘people in Australia’ because
under Howard there was a decrease in the number of people in Australia
who were citizens. In raw figures: ‘The later part of the decade [the
1990s] … saw a drop in the number of those becoming citizens with
only 70,836 grants of naturalisation in 1999-2000, down from 128,554
in 1992-93’ (Klapdor et al. 2009). By 2016 10.7 per cent of those living
in Australia were non-citizens. In one commentary from 2020: ‘While
net migration to Australia continues to increase, the numbers of people
applying to become citizens has dropped to its lowest levels since at
least 2014’ (Bolger 2020). There are two major implications of these
figures relevant here. First, only Australian citizens, and British subjects
with permanent residency before the Hawke government changed the
law in 1984 (Australian Electoral Commission 2015), are allowed to
vote in elections. Thus a significant percentage of residents in Australia
cannot vote and are therefore outside the democratic structure. Second,
the decline in the numbers taking out citizenship suggests an increasingly
mobile population, people resident in Australia but prepared to move
back to their country of origin, or to another country, if circumstances
change, if, for example, there are better job prospects elsewhere or if they
feel discriminated against.
Signalling the increased connection between the economy and migra-
tion, the Howard government introduced the 457 visa in 1996. This
visa category enabled close monitoring of the entry of skilled labour.
Broadly, the visa enabled skilled migrants to stay in Australia for four years
provided that their skill matched a skill among a long list of those consid-
ered required by the government and they were sponsored by a firm
requiring their skill. There was also a pathway to permanent residency.
In its first year of operation 25,786,457 visas were granted. By 2012–

2013 this number had increased to 126,348 visas. From the election of
the Hawke government onwards the border has become simultaneously
more and less permeable. Joshua Kurz (2012, p. 31) has commented that,
human mobility is often perceived as a danger to states yet essential for the
functioning of capital; the question has become one of modulation: how
do states encourage ‘acceptable’ flows while discouraging ‘unacceptable’
ones? In other words, the target is not primarily the subject, but is instead
the regulation of a flow of mobile bodies.
Kurz (2012, p. 32) goes on to suggest that these changes, ‘indicate

a shifting logic of governance away from the sole provenance of the
internal/external logic of border enforcement and toward the blurring
of the external and the internal within a logic of population modulation’.
As governments, in this case the Australian government, move to regulate
not only who can and cannot enter the country but what they can do in
terms of employment while they are in the country so the internal limit
of the border becomes fuzzy.
Perhaps the best example of this is the creation of the Department
of Home Affairs in December 2017. Sometimes described as a super
ministry, Spencer Zifcak (2017) tells us that,
This amalgamation is huge. It will bring together in one department the

following agencies: ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian
Criminal Intelligence Commission, the Australian Transaction Reports and
Analysis Centre and the Office of Transport Security. The Australian
Border Force and Department of Immigration are rolled in on top. All
these governmental agencies will report to one minister, the Minister for
Home Affairs.
What we can easily see here is the combination of security services, both
those concerned with goings-on within Australia and those concerned
with people and events outside of Australia along with immigration and
the service whose particular role is the policing of the border. The border
is both a part of this system of what Kurz calls population modulation
and a special instance where exclusion takes place. Those whom the state
does not want are stopped at the border. In the neoliberal state such
literal exclusion as broadcast in the reality television programme Border
Security: Australia’s Frontline, shown on Channel Seven since 2004,
28 J. STRATTON
reassuring the Australian population of the security measures being taken

to keep Australia safe, disguises the complex modulations of exclusion
made by decisions as to which applicants for visas would be of economic
benefit to Australia. In the Department of Home Affairs we find surveil-
lance combined with the securitisation of the border. The border is no
longer simply the focus of, as Kurz puts it, the internal/external logic
of border enforcement but rather a site of control and surveillance in
a system that runs across the state and tapers off into the wider world.
The Home Affairs department is a conclusion of the process of Australia
becoming a state of emergency with a population mired to a greater or
less extent in precarity. The claim, as always in modern states, is that this
is about national security, about patrolling the literal and metaphorical
borders of the state. It is actually about policing the population.
The first minister of the Department of Home Affairs is Peter Dutton.
It is revealing to look at him a little closer. It was Dutton, and his far-right
faction in the Liberal Party who conspired to depose Malcolm Turnbull
as leader, and therefore prime minister, in August 2018. Dutton had been
a Queensland police officer for nine years from 1990 after he graduated
from the Queensland Police Academy. He was born in 1970. He left
St. Paul’s Anglican School in 1987 and went to the Queensland Police
Academy. He was voted into parliament in 2001. Dutton’s youth was
spent in Brisbane when Queensland was governed by the National Party
led by Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Bjelke-Petersen had been elected premier
in 1968. Queensland during the 1970s and early 1980s was notorious
for Bjelke-Petersen’s authoritarian government (see Condon 2013, 2014;
Wear 2002). To take just one example, in September 1977 the govern-
ment banned all protest street marches. Surveillance of those thought
to be a threat to the Queensland government was common, constant
and often intrusive. During this time Queensland was well-known for
having a corrupt police force. In May 1987 the ABC Four Corners
programme aired an investigation by Chris Masters called ‘The Moonlight
State’. The consequence was a Commission of Inquiry chaired by Tony
Fitzgerald QC. Fitzgerald reported his findings in 1989. Among these
was that the police Special Branch had become an arm of the state govern-
ment. It was disbanded. The police commissioner, Terry Lewis, who was
Bjelke-Petersen’s choice for the position, was convicted of bribery and
sentenced to fourteen years in prison. Bjelke-Petersen himself resigned
on 1 December 1987. He was charged with perjury but there was a hung
jury.
I should emphasise that I am not suggesting that Dutton is corrupt.

Rather, what is important is how in Queensland during the Bjelke-
Petersen era the executive turned the police into an arm of government.
Here we are returned to Agamben’s point about the encroachment of
the executive into the legislative. For Dutton the creation of the Depart-
ment of Home Affairs was not something new, it was a federal expression
of a development with which he had grown up at state level. At the
same time it continues the drift towards authoritarianism characteristic
of democracies in neoliberal capitalism.
Social Abjection, the Border and Exclusion

How can we think about those excluded in this increasingly authoritarian
state? Imogen Tyler (2013, p. 4) has developed the concept of social
abjection which she describes as
a theoretical resource that enables us to consider states of exclusion from

multiple perspectives, including those who are ‘obliged to inhabit the
impossible edges of modernity,’ those border zones within the state, in
which the overall imperative is not transgression, but survival. (Quoting
Anne McClintock Imperial Leather, p. 72)
Here we are immediately returned to the border, both literal and

metaphorical. For Anne McClintock (1995, p. 72) those impossible edges
include: ‘the slum, the ghetto, the garret, the brothel, the convent, the
colonial bantustan and so on’. We can think back here to Foucault’s
notion of the great confinement, and to Bentham arguing that a panoptic
prison would be more disciplinary than transportation to New South
Wales.
The abject is that which is excluded, which is forced to exist in
an ambiguous relation to the border. Tyler (undated) reworks Georges
Bataille’s thinking about abjection as a foundational aspect of the modern
state: ‘Bataille argued that abjection is the imperative force of sovereignty,
a founding exclusion which constitutes a part of the population as moral
outcasts’. She expands on this:
To summarise Bataille’s argument, the disciplinary forces of sovereignty, its

processes of inclusion and exclusion, produce waste populations: an excess
which threatens from within, but which the system cannot fully expel as it
30 J. STRATTON
requires this surplus to both constitute the boundaries of the state and to
legitimate the prevailing order of power. … Waste populations are in this
way included through their exclusion, and it is this paradoxical logic which
the concept of abjection describes. (Tyler undated)
Here is a different way of thinking about those groups within the popu-
lation that Agamben discusses as being eliminated in a civil war between
the sovereign and the people. We can refer to Majavu’s (2016, p. 195)
point about the experience of young males of black African descent
when he argues that, ‘since the image of uncommodified blackness is
synonymous with crime and deviance, white racists conclude that Africans
deserve to be subjected to police surveillance, racial profiling, harassment
and sometimes police brutality’. For Majavu (2016, p. 190) the idea of
uncommodified blackness is an image of blackness in the western imagi-
nary that ‘equals ugliness, darkness and immorality’. Bataille’s point is that
‘waste populations’ are an inevitable result of the formation of the modern
state. They are a function of the constitution of the border. Tyler expands
on this argument by suggesting that neoliberal states, states organised in
terms of the economic rather than the social, articulate this characteristic
in an even more extreme fashion, ‘a major aspect of neoliberal “democra-
cies” is that they function through the generation of consent via fear and
anxiety, rather than fidelity to national identity’ (Tyler 2013, p. 8). This is
the development we have already noticed in the drift towards authoritari-
anism and, specifically in relation to Australia, in the history of surveillance
that has culminated in the establishment of the Department of Home
Affairs.
Within the Australian neoliberal state the most excluded, and most
surveilled, are those identified as members of the underclass. The under-
class is disproportionately composed of those I have identified as the
most excluded, Indigenous Australians, people of black African descent,
Muslims and, of course, the unemployed including, for example, people
on various benefits such as the disabled and single mothers. We can
think here of the example of what has come to be called robodebt. The
official name is Online Compliance Intervention. Set up in 2017, the
purpose of the computer program was to compare the information a client
told Centrelink with what they told their employer and other govern-
ment agencies including the Australian Tax Office. If the programme
worked out that a welfare recipient was claiming more benefit than what
it thought they were entitled to a letter was sent out asking for an expla-
nation of the discrepancy. If no satisfactory explanation was forthcoming a
further letter demanding repayment of the alleged debt was sent out (see
Pett and Cosier 2017). In November 2019 the scheme was halted because
of a public outcry and legal challenge over mistaken debt claims. What the
robodebt program shows is the extent of government surveillance and the
use of administrative power, particularly over marginalised and powerless
people. The more excluded the members of a group are, the more abject
they are and the more they live in fear and anxiety, precarity. Those caught
in the toils of the robodebt program, asked to pay back money they often
did not owe and did not have, testify to this. Julia Kristeva theorised the
abject in terms of the individual. For her, the body signified the border
and, in one example, ‘dung signifies the other side of the border’ (Kristeva
1982, p. 3). However, expulsion is not the end of the matter:
It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions,
rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. … Abjection is
immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred
that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter, instead of inflaming it.
(Kristeva 1982, p. 4)
The experience of abjection comes from this ambiguity, the fear that the
border is permeable, that what has been rejected remains a part of us. For
those who are situated as abject the border extends across the national
space of the country. In Australia it is the Border Force who appre-
hends foreigners working illegally. Kristeva links the abject with barter,
the economic. In the neoliberal Australian state those who fall outside
the economic order, the housos, the underclass, those exposed as bare
life, are abject.
McClintock (1995, p. 71) writes that: ‘This is Kristeva’s brilliant
insight: the expelled abject haunts the subject as its inner constitutive
boundary; that which is repudiated forms the self’s internal limit’. In a
time when the inclusiveness of official multiculturalism has been eroded
and the state functions through graduated exclusion, the abject is revealed
as much as the founding experience of the state as is the state of excep-
tion. Commenting on the originating construction of meaning for the
individual Kristeva (1982, pp. 1–2) argues that:
If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile
texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me
32 J. STRATTON
ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary,

the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place
where meaning collapses.
Meaning is legitimated by the power of the state—we should be reminded

of Foucault’s argument that truth is a function of power.6 The great
fear people living within the state have of the abject is that through its
ambiguous status in relation to the border it can destroy the meaning
on which is built the legitimacy of the state. Here we have a way of
understanding the terror evoked by asylum seekers in Australia. Their
presence challenges the impermeability of the border. They unsettle settler
Australians. Perera recognises the pervasiveness of the arrival of boats in
the Australian psyche. Having discussed a cartoon of an Indigenous man
shouting a warning as the ships of the first fleet arrived off the coast, she
goes on:
Whether as oppositional, satiric counterpoint in indigenous retellings or in

the testimony of migrant communities, the boat story, in forms as diverse as
the media release, the personal essay or performance art, makes its appear-
ance again and again as a means of reaching out to the newest asylum
seekers. (Perera 2002a, p. 35)
Abject boat people, calling to mind the criminalised outcasts, those other
abjects excluded from Britain, who arrived in 1788 on the landmass
Matthew Flinders named Australia in 1804, threaten the meaning of
settler Australia as a legitimate state.
Referencing Bauman, Tyler (2013, p. 7) remarks that: ‘What charac-
terizes neoliberal states is the creation of “wasted humans” within and
at the borders of sovereign territories’. In 2001 in his election campaign
launch speech John Howard asserted ‘we will decide who comes to this
country and the circumstances in which they come’. It was meant as
an expression of strength but we can now hear it better as a manifesta-
tion of fear. In May 2013 the Australian government excised the entirety
of the Australian mainland including Tasmania from the migration zone
having previously excised various offshore islands (Phillips 2013). After
this, there was nowhere in Australia that asylum seekers could land and
make a claim for a visa. At the same time the territory of settled Australia
became uncanny. There was, in a legal sense, no longer a border. In
the neoliberal state inclusion is a lost dream of modernity. Exclusion is

pervasive.
Conclusion
This introduction has provided a broad historical and theoretical context
for the chapters that follow. Chapter 2, written with Panizza Allmark,
considers how the policy of official multiculturalism worked with the
pragmatics of everyday multiculturalism in the context of Perth’s night-
club scene of the 1980s, that is during the high point of official
multiculturalism. Chapter 3 looks at the relationship between Christianity
and race in Australia. In Australia Christianity has always meshed with
whiteness producing in the twenty-first century a confusion among some
Australians as to whether Islam was a religion or a race or some combi-
nation of the two. This chapter begins a consideration of the limits
of official multiculturalism in an environment where the ending of the
White Australia policy has brought to Australia a more diverse range of
migrants both in terms of race and religion. While the ending of offi-
cial multiculturalism is usually identified with John Howard’s conservative
government of the 1990s it would be fair to say that by then the basis
of the policy, its presumption of inclusivity founded on shared values,
was already being called into question by Australia’s increasingly diverse
population, diverse in race, religion, language and cultural practices.
In 2007, working out of the UK, Stephen Vertovec (2007, p. 1025)
coined the term superdiversity:
By invoking ‘super-diversity’ I wish, firstly, to underscore the fact that

in addition to more people migrating from more places, significant new
conjunctions and interactions of variables have arisen through patterns of
immigration to the UK over the past decade; their outcomes surpass the
ways … that we usually understand diversity in Britain.
The shock of this varied migrant intake to a modern state used to seeing
itself as predominantly homogeneous can be clearly felt in Vertovec’s
term, and the enthusiasm with which it was taken up. In Australia by
contrast, according to the 2016 census, 49 per cent of the population had
either been born overseas or had one or both parents born overseas and
while England and New Zealand were the most common countries for
those born overseas the next three were China, India and the Philippines
34 J. STRATTON
(Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016). In a settler country like Australia

what the British, and members of other European nation-states, worry
about as superdiversity is taken for granted. It is a consequence of rapid
population growth founded on immigration coupled with the ending of
the White Australia policy nearly forty years ago. Having said this it is
certainly the case that whiteness remains privileged in Australia and that
a greater number of migrants are from England than from China, India
and the Philippines combined.
The remaining five chapters are all concerned in different ways with
exclusion. Chapter 4 is an analysis of The Sapphires , a film about an
Indigenous girl group composed of singers from a reserve who went
to Vietnam to entertain the troops during the Vietnam War. Chapter 5
examines the song career of ‘My Island Home’, a track written by Neil
Murray, whose ancestors migrated from Scotland, for his bandmate in the
Warumpi Band George Burarrwanga, who had moved from Elcho Island
off the coast of Arnhem Land to Yuendumu in central Australia. The song
has subsequently been recorded by a number of artists and was sung at
the 2000 Olympics by Christine Anu who has a Torres Strait background.
Chapter 6 is concerned with blackface in Australia. It focuses on the
reception given to a group of men in blackface who performed on a tele-
vision entertainment show as the Jackson Jive. The chapter also includes a
discussion of Aboriginal blackface related to the sports commentator Sam
Newman on Channel Nine’s high rating Footy Show in 1999 who put on
blackface to perform as the Indigenous Australian Rules football player
Nicky Winmar.
Chapter 7 discusses the television show Here Come the Habibs! in terms
of the problematics of representation and the demise of official multicul-
turalism. Chapter 8 discusses the shows Pizza and Housos , both written
and produced Paul Fenech, through the lens of neoliberalism and the
exclusion of those people, unemployed or in dead-end cash economy jobs,
and often single parents, and racially outside of whiteness, who together
form the Australian version of the underclass.
Notes
1. A useful chapter on the debates surrounding an attempt to pass legislation
in 1858 in New South Wales is ‘An Act to Regulate Chinese Immigration
(1858): Celestial Migrations’ (Offord et al. 2014, pp. 47–61).
2. For an historical comparison of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia
see Jatinder Mann’s ‘The Introduction of Multiculturalism in Canada and
Australia, 1960s-1970s’ (2012).
3. It is instructive to read part of a lecture Agamben gave in 2002 at the
Centre Roland-Barthes in Universite Paris VIII. This is titled ‘The state
of emergency’. Much of the lecture is similar to the early pages of the
book published in 2003 as Stato di eccezione and translated as State of
Exception. The difference in terminology does not appear to be an effect of
translation though the French translation is titled ‘L’etat d’exception’. We
find, for example, ‘if the sovereign exception is the original set-up through
which law relates to life in order to include it in the very same gesture that
suspends its own exercise, then a theory of the state of emergency would
be a preliminary condition for an understanding of the bond between the
living being and law.’
4. Perera (2009, p. 97) notes that only those asylum seekers arriving by boat
were placed into mandatory detention, not those who flew into the country.
5. Agamben (2005, p. 3) discusses the Patriot Act and the subsequent military
order issued by the president in terms of the state of exception.
6. Michel Foucault (1980, p. 131) says: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it
is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And I include
regular effects of power.’
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dress.
“Do you remember,” she said, “how the blinds used to flap at
Bourton?”
“They did,” he said; and he remembered breakfasting alone, very
awkwardly, with her father; who had died; and he had not written to
Clarissa. But he had never got on well with old Parry, that querulous,
weak-kneed old man, Clarissa’s father, Justin Parry.
“I often wish I’d got on better with your father,” he said.
“But he never liked any one who—our friends,” said Clarissa; and
could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had
wanted to marry her.
Of course I did, thought Peter; it almost broke my heart too, he
thought; and was overcome with his own grief, which rose like a
moon looked at from a terrace, ghastly beautiful with light from the
sunken day. I was more unhappy than I’ve ever been since, he
thought. And as if in truth he were sitting there on the terrace he
edged a little towards Clarissa; put his hand out; raised it; let it fall.
There above them it hung, that moon. She too seemed to be sitting
with him on the terrace, in the moonlight.
“Herbert has it now,” she said. “I never go there now,” she said.
Then, just as happens on a terrace in the moonlight, when one
person begins to feel ashamed that he is already bored, and yet as
the other sits silent, very quiet, sadly looking at the moon, does not
like to speak, moves his foot, clears his throat, notices some iron
scroll on a table leg, stirs a leaf, but says nothing—so Peter Walsh
did now. For why go back like this to the past? he thought. Why
make him think of it again? Why make him suffer, when she had
tortured him so infernally? Why?
“Do you remember the lake?” she said, in an abrupt voice, under the
pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of
her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.”
For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her
parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents
who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she
neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a
whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said,
“This is what I have made of it! This!” And what had she made of it?
What, indeed? sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.
She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time
and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully;
and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises
and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said, as if she drew up to the
surface something which positively hurt him as it rose. Stop! Stop! he
wanted to cry. For he was not old; his life was not over; not by any
means. He was only just past fifty. Shall I tell her, he thought, or not?
He would like to make a clean breast of it all. But she is too cold, he
thought; sewing, with her scissors; Daisy would look ordinary beside
Clarissa. And she would think me a failure, which I am in their sense,
he thought; in the Dalloways’ sense. Oh yes, he had no doubt about
that; he was a failure, compared with all this—the inlaid table, the
mounted paper-knife, the dolphin and the candlesticks, the chair-
covers and the old valuable English tinted prints—he was a failure! I
detest the smugness of the whole affair he thought; Richard’s doing,
not Clarissa’s; save that she married him. (Here Lucy came into the
room, carrying silver, more silver, but charming, slender, graceful she
looked, he thought, as she stooped to put it down.) And this has
been going on all the time! he thought; week after week; Clarissa’s
life; while I—he thought; and at once everything seemed to radiate
from him; journeys; rides; quarrels; adventures; bridge parties; love
affairs; work; work, work! and he took out his knife quite openly—his
old horn-handled knife which Clarissa could swear he had had these
thirty years—and clenched his fist upon it.
What an extraordinary habit that was, Clarissa thought; always
playing with a knife. Always making one feel, too, frivolous; empty-
minded; a mere silly chatterbox, as he used. But I too, she thought,
and, taking up her needle, summoned, like a Queen whose guards
have fallen asleep and left her unprotected (she had been quite
taken aback by this visit—it had upset her) so that any one can stroll
in and have a look at her where she lies with the brambles curving
over her, summoned to her help the things she did; the things she
liked; her husband; Elizabeth; her self, in short, which Peter hardly
knew now, all to come about her and beat off the enemy.
“Well, and what’s happened to you?” she said. So before a battle
begins, the horses paw the ground; toss their heads; the light shines
on their flanks; their necks curve. So Peter Walsh and Clarissa,
sitting side by side on the blue sofa, challenged each other. His
powers chafed and tossed in him. He assembled from different
quarters all sorts of things; praise; his career at Oxford; his marriage,
which she knew nothing whatever about; how he had loved; and
altogether done his job.
“Millions of things!” he exclaimed, and, urged by the assembly of
powers which were now charging this way and that and giving him
the feeling at once frightening and extremely exhilarating of being
rushed through the air on the shoulders of people he could no longer
see, he raised his hands to his forehead.
Clarissa sat very upright; drew in her breath.
“I am in love,” he said, not to her however, but to some one raised up
in the dark so that you could not touch her but must lay your garland
down on the grass in the dark.
“In love,” he repeated, now speaking rather dryly to Clarissa
Dalloway; “in love with a girl in India.” He had deposited his garland.
Clarissa could make what she would of it.
“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his
little bow-tie by that monster! And there’s no flesh on his neck; his
hands are red; and he’s six months older than I am! her eye flashed
back to her; but in her heart she felt, all the same, he is in love. He
has that, she felt; he is in love.
But the indomitable egotism which for ever rides down the hosts
opposed to it, the river which says on, on, on; even though, it admits,
there may be no goal for us whatever, still on, on; this indomitable
egotism charged her cheeks with colour; made her look very young;
very pink; very bright-eyed as she sat with her dress upon her knee,
and her needle held to the end of green silk, trembling a little. He
was in love! Not with her. With some younger woman, of course.
“And who is she?” she asked.
Now this statue must be brought from its height and set down
between them.
“A married woman, unfortunately,” he said; “the wife of a Major in the
Indian Army.”
And with a curious ironical sweetness he smiled as he placed her in
this ridiculous way before Clarissa.
(All the same, he is in love, thought Clarissa.)
“She has,” he continued, very reasonably, “two small children; a boy
and a girl; and I have come over to see my lawyers about the
divorce.”
There they are! he thought. Do what you like with them, Clarissa!
There they are! And second by second it seemed to him that the wife
of the Major in the Indian Army (his Daisy) and her two small children
became more and more lovely as Clarissa looked at them; as if he
had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a
lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy (for in some
ways no one understood him, felt with him, as Clarissa did)—their
exquisite intimacy.
She flattered him; she fooled him, thought Clarissa; shaping the
woman, the wife of the Major in the Indian Army, with three strokes
of a knife. What a waste! What a folly! All his life long Peter had been
fooled like that; first getting sent down from Oxford; next marrying
the girl on the boat going out to India; now the wife of a Major in the
Indian Army—thank Heaven she had refused to marry him! Still, he
was in love; her old friend, her dear Peter, he was in love.
“But what are you going to do?” she asked him. Oh the lawyers and
solicitors, Messrs. Hooper and Grateley of Lincoln’s Inn, they were
going to do it, he said. And he actually pared his nails with his
pocket-knife.
For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in
irrepressible irritation; it was his silly unconventionality, his
weakness; his lack of the ghost of a notion what any one else was
feeling that annoyed her, had always annoyed her; and now at his
age, how silly!
I know all that, Peter thought; I know what I’m up against, he
thought, running his finger along the blade of his knife, Clarissa and
Dalloway and all the rest of them; but I’ll show Clarissa—and then to
his utter surprise, suddenly thrown by those uncontrollable forces
thrown through the air, he burst into tears; wept; wept without the
least shame, sitting on the sofa, the tears running down his cheeks.
And Clarissa had leant forward, taken his hand, drawn him to her,
kissed him,—actually had felt his face on hers before she could
down the brandishing of silver flashing—plumes like pampas grass
in a tropic gale in her breast, which, subsiding, left her holding his
hand, patting his knee and, feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at
her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I
had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!
It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed narrow.
She had gone up into the tower alone and left them blackberrying in
the sun. The door had shut, and there among the dust of fallen
plaster and the litter of birds’ nests how distant the view had looked,
and the sounds came thin and chill (once on Leith Hill, she
remembered), and Richard, Richard! she cried, as a sleeper in the
night starts and stretches a hand in the dark for help. Lunching with
Lady Bruton, it came back to her. He has left me; I am alone for ever,
she thought, folding her hands upon her knee.
Peter Walsh had got up and crossed to the window and stood with
his back to her, flicking a bandanna handkerchief from side to side.
Masterly and dry and desolate he looked, his thin shoulder-blades
lifting his coat slightly; blowing his nose violently. Take me with you,
Clarissa thought impulsively, as if he were starting directly upon
some great voyage; and then, next moment, it was as if the five acts
of a play that had been very exciting and moving were now over and
she had lived a lifetime in them and had run away, had lived with
Peter, and it was now over.
Now it was time to move, and, as a woman gathers her things
together, her cloak, her gloves, her opera-glasses, and gets up to go
out of the theatre into the street, she rose from the sofa and went to
Peter.
And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power,
as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came
across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at
Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.
“Tell me,” he said, seizing her by the shoulders. “Are you happy,
Clarissa? Does Richard—”
The door opened.
“Here is my Elizabeth,” said Clarissa, emotionally, histrionically,
perhaps.
“How d’y do?” said Elizabeth coming forward.
The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them
with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent,
inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that.
“Hullo, Elizabeth!” cried Peter, stuffing his handkerchief into his
pocket, going quickly to her, saying “Good-bye, Clarissa” without
looking at her, leaving the room quickly, and running downstairs and
opening the hall door.
“Peter! Peter!” cried Clarissa, following him out on to the landing. “My
party to-night! Remember my party to-night!” she cried, having to
raise her voice against the roar of the open air, and, overwhelmed by
the traffic and the sound of all the clocks striking, her voice crying
“Remember my party to-night!” sounded frail and thin and very far
away as Peter Walsh shut the door.
Remember my party, remember my party, said Peter Walsh as he
stepped down the street, speaking to himself rhythmically, in time
with the flow of the sound, the direct downright sound of Big Ben
striking the half-hour. (The leaden circles dissolved in the air.) Oh
these parties, he thought; Clarissa’s parties. Why does she give
these parties, he thought. Not that he blamed her or this effigy of a
man in a tail-coat with a carnation in his buttonhole coming towards
him. Only one person in the world could be as he was, in love. And
there he was, this fortunate man, himself, reflected in the plate-glass
window of a motor-car manufacturer in Victoria Street. All India lay
behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice
as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone—he, Peter Walsh;
who was now really for the first time in his life, in love. Clarissa had
grown hard, he thought; and a trifle sentimental into the bargain, he
suspected, looking at the great motor-cars capable of doing—how
many miles on how many gallons? For he had a turn for mechanics;
had invented a plough in his district, had ordered wheel-barrows
from England, but the coolies wouldn’t use them, all of which
Clarissa knew nothing whatever about.
The way she said “Here is my Elizabeth!”—that annoyed him. Why
not “Here’s Elizabeth” simply? It was insincere. And Elizabeth didn’t
like it either. (Still the last tremors of the great booming voice shook
the air round him; the half-hour; still early; only half-past eleven still.)
For he understood young people; he liked them. There was always
something cold in Clarissa, he thought. She had always, even as a
girl, a sort of timidity, which in middle age becomes conventionality,
and then it’s all up, it’s all up, he thought, looking rather drearily into
the glassy depths, and wondering whether by calling at that hour he
had annoyed her; overcome with shame suddenly at having been a
fool; wept; been emotional; told her everything, as usual, as usual.
As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the
mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we
stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Where there is nothing, Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hollowed
out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought. He stood
there thinking, Clarissa refused me.
Ah, said St. Margaret’s, like a hostess who comes into her drawing-
room on the very stroke of the hour and finds her guests there
already. I am not late. No, it is precisely half-past eleven, she says.
Yet, though she is perfectly right, her voice, being the voice of the
hostess, is reluctant to inflict its individuality. Some grief for the past
holds it back; some concern for the present. It is half-past eleven,
she says, and the sound of St. Margaret’s glides into the recesses of
the heart and buries itself in ring after ring of sound, like something
alive which wants to confide itself, to disperse itself, to be, with a
tremor of delight, at rest—like Clarissa herself, thought Peter Walsh,
coming down the stairs on the stroke of the hour in white. It is
Clarissa herself, he thought, with a deep emotion, and an
extraordinarily clear, yet puzzling, recollection of her, as if this bell
had come into the room years ago, where they sat at some moment
of great intimacy, and had gone from one to the other and had left,
like a bee with honey, laden with the moment. But what room? What
moment? And why had he been so profoundly happy when the clock
was striking? Then, as the sound of St. Margaret’s languished, he
thought, She has been ill, and the sound expressed languor and
suffering. It was her heart, he remembered; and the sudden
loudness of the final stroke tolled for death that surprised in the midst
of life, Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room. No! No!
he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried, and marched up
Whitehall, as if there rolled down to him, vigorous, unending, his
future.
He was not old, or set, or dried in the least. As for caring what they
said of him—the Dalloways, the Whitbreads, and their set, he cared
not a straw—not a straw (though it was true he would have, some
time or other, to see whether Richard couldn’t help him to some job).
Striding, staring, he glared at the statue of the Duke of Cambridge.
He had been sent down from Oxford—true. He had been a Socialist,
in some sense a failure—true. Still the future of civilisation lies, he
thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as
he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting
books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the
Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in
the hands of young men like that, he thought.
A patter like the patter of leaves in a wood came from behind, and
with it a rustling, regular thudding sound, which as it overtook him
drummed his thoughts, strict in step, up Whitehall, without his doing.
Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of
them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like
the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising
duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.
It is, thought Peter Walsh, beginning to keep step with them, a very
fine training. But they did not look robust. They were weedy for the
most part, boys of sixteen, who might, to-morrow, stand behind
bowls of rice, cakes of soap on counters. Now they wore on them
unmixed with sensual pleasure or daily preoccupations the solemnity
of the wreath which they had fetched from Finsbury Pavement to the
empty tomb. They had taken their vow. The traffic respected it; vans
were stopped.
I can’t keep up with them, Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up
Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past every
one, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms
uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its irreticences, had been laid
under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a
stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might
laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought
Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the
exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the
spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as
if they too had made the same renunciation (Peter Walsh felt he too
had made it, the great renunciation), trampled under the same
temptations, and achieved at length a marble stare. But the stare
Peter Walsh did not want for himself in the least; though he could
respect it in others. He could respect it in boys. They don’t know the
troubles of the flesh yet, he thought, as the marching boys
disappeared in the direction of the Strand—all that I’ve been through,
he thought, crossing the road, and standing under Gordon’s statue,
Gordon whom as a boy he had worshipped; Gordon standing lonely
with one leg raised and his arms crossed,—poor Gordon, he
thought.
And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except
Clarissa, and the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to
him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past
eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him. What is it? Where am I?
And why, after all, does one do it? he thought, the divorce seeming
all moonshine. And down his mind went flat as a marsh, and three
great emotions bowled over him; understanding; a vast philanthropy;
and finally, as if the result of the others, an irrepressible, exquisite
delight; as if inside his brain by another hand strings were pulled,
shutters moved, and he, having nothing to do with it, yet stood at the
opening of endless avenues, down which if he chose he might
wander. He had not felt so young for years.
He had escaped! was utterly free—as happens in the downfall of
habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and
seems about to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for
years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so)
from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs
out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong
window. But she’s extraordinarily attractive, he thought, as, walking
across Trafalgar Square in the direction of the Haymarket, came a
young woman who, as she passed Gordon’s statue, seemed, Peter
Walsh thought (susceptible as he was), to shed veil after veil, until
she became the very woman he had always had in mind; young, but
stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting.
Straightening himself and stealthily fingering his pocket-knife he
started after her to follow this woman, this excitement, which seemed
even with its back turned to shed on him a light which connected
them, which singled him out, as if the random uproar of the traffic
had whispered through hollowed hands his name, not Peter, but his
private name which he called himself in his own thoughts. “You,” she
said, only “you,” saying it with her white gloves and her shoulders.
Then the thin long cloak which the wind stirred as she walked past
Dent’s shop in Cockspur Street blew out with an enveloping
kindness, a mournful tenderness, as of arms that would open and
take the tired—
But she’s not married; she’s young; quite young, thought Peter, the
red carnation he had seen her wear as she came across Trafalgar
Square burning again in his eyes and making her lips red. But she
waited at the kerbstone. There was a dignity about her. She was not
worldly, like Clarissa; not rich, like Clarissa. Was she, he wondered
as she moved, respectable? Witty, with a lizard’s flickering tongue,
he thought (for one must invent, must allow oneself a little diversion),
a cool waiting wit, a darting wit; not noisy.
She moved; she crossed; he followed her. To embarrass her was the
last thing he wished. Still if she stopped he would say “Come and
have an ice,” he would say, and she would answer, perfectly simply,
“Oh yes.”
But other people got between them in the street, obstructing him,
blotting her out. He pursued; she changed. There was colour in her
cheeks; mockery in her eyes; he was an adventurer, reckless, he
thought, swift, daring, indeed (landed as he was last night from India)
a romantic buccaneer, careless of all these damned proprieties,
yellow dressing-gowns, pipes, fishing-rods, in the shop windows; and
respectability and evening parties and spruce old men wearing white
slips beneath their waistcoats. He was a buccaneer. On and on she
went, across Piccadilly, and up Regent Street, ahead of him, her
cloak, her gloves, her shoulders combining with the fringes and the
laces and the feather boas in the windows to make the spirit of finery
and whimsy which dwindled out of the shops on to the pavement, as
the light of a lamp goes wavering at night over hedges in the
darkness.
Laughing and delightful, she had crossed Oxford Street and Great
Portland Street and turned down one of the little streets, and now,
and now, the great moment was approaching, for now she
slackened, opened her bag, and with one look in his direction, but
not at him, one look that bade farewell, summed up the whole
situation and dismissed it triumphantly, for ever, had fitted her key,
opened the door, and gone! Clarissa’s voice saying, Remember my
party, Remember my party, sang in his ears. The house was one of
those flat red houses with hanging flower-baskets of vague
impropriety. It was over.
Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the
swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—
his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this
escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of
life, he thought—making oneself up; making her up; creating an
exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and
quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.
He turned; went up the street, thinking to find somewhere to sit, till it
was time for Lincoln’s Inn—for Messrs. Hooper and Grateley. Where
should he go? No matter. Up the street, then, towards Regent’s
Park. His boots on the pavement struck out “no matter”; for it was
early, still very early.
It was a splendid morning too. Like the pulse of a perfect heart, life
struck straight through the streets. There was no fumbling—no
hesitation. Sweeping and swerving, accurately, punctually,
noiselessly, there, precisely at the right instant, the motor-car
stopped at the door. The girl, silk-stockinged, feathered, evanescent,
but not to him particularly attractive (for he had had his fling),
alighted. Admirable butlers, tawny chow dogs, halls laid in black and
white lozenges with white blinds blowing, Peter saw through the
opened door and approved of. A splendid achievement in its own
way, after all, London; the season; civilisation. Coming as he did
from a respectable Anglo-Indian family which for at least three
generations had administered the affairs of a continent (it’s strange,
he thought, what a sentiment I have about that, disliking India, and
empire, and army as he did), there were moments when civilisation,
even of this sort, seemed dear to him as a personal possession;
moments of pride in England; in butlers; chow dogs; girls in their
security. Ridiculous enough, still there it is, he thought. And the
doctors and men of business and capable women all going about
their business, punctual, alert, robust, seemed to him wholly
admirable, good fellows, to whom one would entrust one’s life,
companions in the art of living, who would see one through. What
with one thing and another, the show was really very tolerable; and
he would sit down in the shade and smoke.
There was Regent’s Park. Yes. As a child he had walked in Regent’s
Park—odd, he thought, how the thought of childhood keeps coming
back to me—the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live
much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach
themselves to places; and their fathers—a woman’s always proud of
her father. Bourton was a nice place, a very nice place, but I could
never get on with the old man, he thought. There was quite a scene
one night—an argument about something or other, what, he could
not remember. Politics presumably.
Yes, he remembered Regent’s Park; the long straight walk; the little
house where one bought air-balls to the left; an absurd statue with
an inscription somewhere or other. He looked for an empty seat. He
did not want to be bothered (feeling a little drowsy as he did) by
people asking him the time. An elderly grey nurse, with a baby
asleep in its perambulator—that was the best he could do for
himself; sit down at the far end of the seat by that nurse.
She’s a queer-looking girl, he thought, suddenly remembering
Elizabeth as she came into the room and stood by her mother.
Grown big; quite grown-up, not exactly pretty; handsome rather; and
she can’t be more than eighteen. Probably she doesn’t get on with
Clarissa. “There’s my Elizabeth”—that sort of thing—why not “Here’s
Elizabeth” simply?—trying to make out, like most mothers, that
things are what they’re not. She trusts to her charm too much, he
thought. She overdoes it.
The rich benignant cigar smoke eddied coolly down his throat; he
puffed it out again in rings which breasted the air bravely for a
moment; blue, circular—I shall try and get a word alone with
Elizabeth to-night, he thought—then began to wobble into hour-glass
shapes and taper away; odd shapes they take, he thought. Suddenly
he closed his eyes, raised his hand with an effort, and threw away
the heavy end of his cigar. A great brush swept smooth across his
mind, sweeping across it moving branches, children’s voices, the
shuffle of feet, and people passing, and humming traffic, rising and
falling traffic. Down, down he sank into the plumes and feathers of
sleep, sank, and was muffled over.
The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat
beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands
indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights
of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight
in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveller, haunter of
lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of great hemlock plants,
looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride.
By conviction an atheist perhaps, he is taken by surprise with
moments of extraordinary exaltation. Nothing exists outside us
except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for
something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly,
these craven men and women. But if he can conceive of her, then in
some sort she exists, he thinks, and advancing down the path with
his eyes upon sky and branches he rapidly endows them with
womanhood; sees with amazement how grave they become; how
majestically, as the breeze stirs them, they dispense with a dark
flutter of the leaves charity, comprehension, absolution, and then,
flinging themselves suddenly aloft, confound the piety of their aspect
with a wild carouse.
Such are the visions which proffer great cornucopias full of fruit to
the solitary traveller, or murmur in his ear like sirens lolloping away
on the green sea waves, or are dashed in his face like bunches of
roses, or rise to the surface like pale faces which fishermen flounder
through floods to embrace.
Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put
their faces in front of, the actual thing; often overpowering the
solitary traveller and taking away from him the sense of the earth,
the wish to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace, as if
(so he thinks as he advances down the forest ride) all this fever of
living were simplicity itself; and myriads of things merged in one
thing; and this figure, made of sky and branches as it is, had risen
from the troubled sea (he is elderly, past fifty now) as a shape might
be sucked up out of the waves to shower down from her magnificent
hands compassion, comprehension, absolution. So, he thinks, may I
never go back to the lamplight; to the sitting-room; never finish my
book; never knock out my pipe; never ring for Mrs. Turner to clear
away; rather let me walk straight on to this great figure, who will, with
a toss of her head, mount me on her streamers and let me blow to
nothingness with the rest.
Such are the visions. The solitary traveller is soon beyond the wood;
and there, coming to the door with shaded eyes, possibly to look for
his return, with hands raised, with white apron blowing, is an elderly
woman who seems (so powerful is this infirmity) to seek, over a
desert, a lost son; to search for a rider destroyed; to be the figure of
the mother whose sons have been killed in the battles of the world.
So, as the solitary traveller advances down the village street where
the women stand knitting and the men dig in the garden, the evening
seems ominous; the figures still; as if some august fate, known to
them, awaited without fear, were about to sweep them into complete
annihilation.
Indoors among ordinary things, the cupboard, the table, the window-
sill with its geraniums, suddenly the outline of the landlady, bending
to remove the cloth, becomes soft with light, an adorable emblem
which only the recollection of cold human contacts forbids us to
embrace. She takes the marmalade; she shuts it in the cupboard.
“There is nothing more to-night, sir?”
But to whom does the solitary traveller make reply?
So the elderly nurse knitted over the sleeping baby in Regent’s Park.
So Peter Walsh snored.
He woke with extreme suddenness, saying to himself, “The death of
the soul.”
“Lord, Lord!” he said to himself out loud, stretching and opening his
eyes. “The death of the soul.” The words attached themselves to
some scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of.
It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past he had been
dreaming of.
It was at Bourton that summer, early in the ’nineties, when he was so
passionately in love with Clarissa. There were a great many people
there, laughing and talking, sitting round a table after tea and the
room was bathed in yellow light and full of cigarette smoke. They
were talking about a man who had married his housemaid, one of
the neighbouring squires, he had forgotten his name. He had
married his housemaid, and she had been brought to Bourton to call
—an awful visit it had been. She was absurdly over-dressed, “like a
cockatoo,” Clarissa had said, imitating her, and she never stopped
talking. On and on she went, on and on. Clarissa imitated her. Then
somebody said—Sally Seton it was—did it make any real difference
to one’s feelings to know that before they’d married she had had a
baby? (In those days, in mixed company, it was a bold thing to say.)
He could see Clarissa now, turning bright pink; somehow
contracting; and saying, “Oh, I shall never be able to speak to her
again!” Whereupon the whole party sitting round the tea-table
seemed to wobble. It was very uncomfortable.
He hadn’t blamed her for minding the fact, since in those days a girl
brought up as she was, knew nothing, but it was her manner that
annoyed him; timid; hard; something arrogant; unimaginative;
prudish. “The death of the soul.” He had said that instinctively,
ticketing the moment as he used to do—the death of her soul.
Every one wobbled; every one seemed to bow, as she spoke, and
then to stand up different. He could see Sally Seton, like a child who
has been in mischief, leaning forward, rather flushed, wanting to talk,
but afraid, and Clarissa did frighten people. (She was Clarissa’s
greatest friend, always about the place, totally unlike her, an
attractive creature, handsome, dark, with the reputation in those
days of great daring and he used to give her cigars, which she
smoked in her bedroom. She had either been engaged to somebody
or quarrelled with her family and old Parry disliked them both equally,
which was a great bond.) Then Clarissa, still with an air of being
offended with them all, got up, made some excuse, and went off,
alone. As she opened the door, in came that great shaggy dog which
ran after sheep. She flung herself upon him, went into raptures. It
was as if she said to Peter—it was all aimed at him, he knew—“I
know you thought me absurd about that woman just now; but see
how extraordinarily sympathetic I am; see how I love my Rob!”
They had always this queer power of communicating without words.
She knew directly he criticised her. Then she would do something
quite obvious to defend herself, like this fuss with the dog—but it
never took him in, he always saw through Clarissa. Not that he said
anything, of course; just sat looking glum. It was the way their
quarrels often began.
She shut the door. At once he became extremely depressed. It all
seemed useless—going on being in love; going on quarrelling; going
on making it up, and he wandered off alone, among outhouses,
stables, looking at the horses. (The place was quite a humble one;
the Parrys were never very well off; but there were always grooms
and stable-boys about—Clarissa loved riding—and an old coachman
—what was his name?—an old nurse, old Moody, old Goody, some
such name they called her, whom one was taken to visit in a little
room with lots of photographs, lots of bird-cages.)
It was an awful evening! He grew more and more gloomy, not about
that only; about everything. And he couldn’t see her; couldn’t explain
to her; couldn’t have it out. There were always people about—she’d
go on as if nothing had happened. That was the devilish part of her
—this coldness, this woodenness, something very profound in her,
which he had felt again this morning talking to her; an
impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her. She had some
queer power of fiddling on one’s nerves, turning one’s nerves to
fiddle-strings, yes.
He had gone in to dinner rather late, from some idiotic idea of
making himself felt, and had sat down by old Miss Parry—Aunt
Helena—Mr. Parry’s sister, who was supposed to preside. There she
sat in her white Cashmere shawl, with her head against the window
—a formidable old lady, but kind to him, for he had found her some
rare flower, and she was a great botanist, marching off in thick boots
with a black collecting-box slung between her shoulders. He sat
down beside her, and couldn’t speak. Everything seemed to race
past him; he just sat there, eating. And then half-way through dinner
he made himself look across at Clarissa for the first time. She was
talking to a young man on her right. He had a sudden revelation.
“She will marry that man,” he said to himself. He didn’t even know
his name.
For of course it was that afternoon, that very afternoon, that
Dalloway had come over; and Clarissa called him “Wickham”; that
was the beginning of it all. Somebody had brought him over; and
Clarissa got his name wrong. She introduced him to everybody as
Wickham. At last he said “My name is Dalloway!”—that was his first
view of Richard—a fair young man, rather awkward, sitting on a
deck-chair, and blurting out “My name is Dalloway!” Sally got hold of
it; always after that she called him “My name is Dalloway!”
He was a prey to revelations at that time. This one—that she would
marry Dalloway—was blinding—overwhelming at the moment. There
was a sort of—how could he put it?—a sort of ease in her manner to
him; something maternal; something gentle. They were talking about
politics. All through dinner he tried to hear what they were saying.
Afterwards he could remember standing by old Miss Parry’s chair in
the drawing-room. Clarissa came up, with her perfect manners, like a
real hostess, and wanted to introduce him to some one—spoke as if
they had never met before, which enraged him. Yet even then he
admired her for it. He admired her courage; her social instinct; he
admired her power of carrying things through. “The perfect hostess,”
he said to her, whereupon she winced all over. But he meant her to
feel it. He would have done anything to hurt her after seeing her with
Dalloway. So she left him. And he had a feeling that they were all
gathered together in a conspiracy against him—laughing and talking
—behind his back. There he stood by Miss Parry’s chair as though
he had been cut out of wood, he talking about wild flowers. Never,
never had he suffered so infernally! He must have forgotten even to
pretend to listen; at last he woke up; he saw Miss Parry looking
rather disturbed, rather indignant, with her prominent eyes fixed. He
almost cried out that he couldn’t attend because he was in Hell!
People began going out of the room. He heard them talking about
fetching cloaks; about its being cold on the water, and so on. They
were going boating on the lake by moonlight—one of Sally’s mad
ideas. He could hear her describing the moon. And they all went out.
He was left quite alone.
“Don’t you want to go with them?” said Aunt Helena—old Miss Parry!
—she had guessed. And he turned round and there was Clarissa
again. She had come back to fetch him. He was overcome by her
generosity—her goodness.
“Come along,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
He had never felt so happy in the whole of his life! Without a word
they made it up. They walked down to the lake. He had twenty
minutes of perfect happiness. Her voice, her laugh, her dress
(something floating, white, crimson), her spirit, her adventurousness;
she made them all disembark and explore the island; she startled a
hen; she laughed; she sang. And all the time, he knew perfectly well,
Dalloway was falling in love with her; she was falling in love with
Dalloway; but it didn’t seem to matter. Nothing mattered. They sat on
the ground and talked—he and Clarissa. They went in and out of
each other’s minds without any effort. And then in a second it was
over. He said to himself as they were getting into the boat, “She will
marry that man,” dully, without any resentment; but it was an obvious
thing. Dalloway would marry Clarissa.
Dalloway rowed them in. He said nothing. But somehow as they
watched him start, jumping on to his bicycle to ride twenty miles
through the woods, wobbling off down the drive, waving his hand
and disappearing, he obviously did feel, instinctively, tremendously,
strongly, all that; the night; the romance; Clarissa. He deserved to
have her.
For himself, he was absurd. His demands upon Clarissa (he could
see it now) were absurd. He asked impossible things. He made
terrible scenes. She would have accepted him still, perhaps, if he
had been less absurd. Sally thought so. She wrote him all that
summer long letters; how they had talked of him; how she had
praised him, how Clarissa burst into tears! It was an extraordinary
summer—all letters, scenes, telegrams—arriving at Bourton early in
the morning, hanging about till the servants were up; appalling tête-
à-têtes with old Mr. Parry at breakfast; Aunt Helena formidable but
kind; Sally sweeping him off for talks in the vegetable garden;
Clarissa in bed with headaches.
The final scene, the terrible scene which he believed had mattered
more than anything in the whole of his life (it might be an
exaggeration—but still so it did seem now) happened at three o’clock
in the afternoon of a very hot day. It was a trifle that led up to it—
Sally at lunch saying something about Dalloway, and calling him “My
name is Dalloway”; whereupon Clarissa suddenly stiffened,
coloured, in a way she had, and rapped out sharply, “We’ve had
enough of that feeble joke.” That was all; but for him it was precisely
as if she had said, “I’m only amusing myself with you; I’ve an
understanding with Richard Dalloway.” So he took it. He had not
slept for nights. “It’s got to be finished one way or the other,” he said
to himself. He sent a note to her by Sally asking her to meet him by
the fountain at three. “Something very important has happened,” he
scribbled at the end of it.
The fountain was in the middle of a little shrubbery, far from the
house, with shrubs and trees all round it. There she came, even
before the time, and they stood with the fountain between them, the
spout (it was broken) dribbling water incessantly. How sights fix
themselves upon the mind! For example, the vivid green moss.
She did not move. “Tell me the truth, tell me the truth,” he kept on
saying. He felt as if his forehead would burst. She seemed
contracted, petrified. She did not move. “Tell me the truth,” he
repeated, when suddenly that old man Breitkopf popped his head in
carrying the Times; stared at them; gaped; and went away. They
neither of them moved. “Tell me the truth,” he repeated. He felt that
he was grinding against something physically hard; she was
unyielding. She was like iron, like flint, rigid up the backbone. And
when she said, “It’s no use. It’s no use. This is the end”—after he
had spoken for hours, it seemed, with the tears running down his
cheeks—it was as if she had hit him in the face. She turned, she left
him, went away.

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Multiculturalism, Whiteness and

Otherness in Australia 1st ed. Edition

ISBN 978-3-030-50078-8 ISBN 978-3-030-50079-5 (eBook)

These days I am attached as an adjunct professor in UniSA Creative at

Christianity in Australia’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 37, no.

1 Introduction: Logics of Exclusion 1

2 Expression, Ethnicity and the Perth Nightclub Scene

3 With God on Our Side: The Unholy Mixture

4 The Sapphires Were Not the Australian Supremes:

5 Whose Home; Which Island?: Displacement

6 The Jackson Jive: Blackface Today and the Limits

7 Whatever Happened to Multiculturalism?: Here Come

8 Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive

9 Afterword: And then Novel Coronavirus Happened … 261

Introduction: Logics of Exclusion

The guiding theme of this book is the importance of exclusion in the

© The Author(s) 2020 1

multiculturalism is different again from what has passed for multicultur-

multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The

In Europe, as Lentin and Tilley (2011, p. 13) go on to write: ‘In what

Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut … by neoliberal rationality,

The State and Exclusion

Those whose lives affronted bourgeois rationality—beggars, petty crim-

We should note here the genealogy of the category Porter constructs

It should come as no surprise that much of the Immigration Restriction

dominant, competing settler cultures in addition to the cultures of smaller

The State, Homogeneity and Multiculturalism

The settler states were not immune to this imperative. In Australia,

The lexicographic revolution in Europe [from the second half of the

As settler colonies transformed into states so the privileging of a single

The demise of Gaelic as an everyday spoken language by around the time

to increase the total Australian population from just under 8,000,000 to

In Canada, the privileging of two languages both tied to national groups

Trudeau acknowledged that Canada has two languages but diminished

test would be expanded to include questions related to Australian values.

In the 1980s, as multicultural discourse became ever more powerful, paral-

The Short History of Official Multiculturalism

Australian community and to act as a liaison between representatives of

contract and individual worth measured by Australia’s economic require-

Canada effectively removed racial discrimination as a major feature of its

In 1963, a Declaration on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrim-

The Declaration specifically identified apartheid as a form of racism. By

The dominant discourse portrays Africans in Australia in the context of

Here we see exclusion in operation. These no-go-zones and hotspots

Geographically, the suburbs where migrants live are portrayed as besieged

Windle (2008, p. 557) goes on to quote from an article in the Herald-

the extensive media coverage of dark-skinned Africans (particularly those

Those beyond multicultural whiteness, and now after official multicul-

Interestingly in all five NESB samples a higher percentage … from 73%

Such an interpretation presumes that all ethnicised groups were equally

The Australian State and the State of Emergency

In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment,

Agamben writes about the physical elimination of categories of citizens,

Deportations of foreigners on temporary visas have been on the rise in

then discusses the general states of exception promulgated by the warring

Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative

Agamben sees an increasing acceptance of the powers associated with the

Lazar sees a continuum in the rule of law during an emergency and in

Emergency, depending on its intensity, can be the precursor of exception.

(Macpherson 1962). Similarly, the state of exception may be thought of

Lives lived on the margins of social, political, cultural, economic and

identified as the underclass, remembering here the list of those confined

This was before Howard established offshore detention facilities on