ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the writings of asylum-seeker witnesses—their testimony to the experience of secondary witnessing—particularly the texts collected in the anthology Acting from the Heart, and those included as a part of the People's Inquiry into Detention. It aims to trace the work of those Australians whose voices, though small in number, sought to counter this collective roar. The chapter demonstrates that the process of witnessing to the experiences of asylum seekers had a profound impact on the lives of many Australians. It shows the problematics of settler witnessing more broadly as a mode of (re)building the liberal-multicultural nation that elides the specificities of "minority" testimony. The chapter then examines the emergence of a discrete discourse on witnessing to asylum seekers in the wake of the Tampa incident. It explores enmeshment of discourses on asylum-seeker and Indigenous testimony with the promulgation of ideologies of national goodness.
