ABSTRACT

Contests over the visibility, via photography, of refugee experience and sites of detention within and without Australia continue to define the nation’s character and future. Conceptions of Australian national identity have emphasized the collective youth and innocence of the nation, federated only in 1901. The Australian national anthem reminds its citizens that “our home is girt by sea,” a geographic boundary that naturalizes an imagined entity, rather than acknowledging its contested, provisional, and sometimes fluid status. Persisting anxieties in Australian public debate have been the porosity of national borders and the racial and cultural homogeneity of its citizens. This chapter examines how photography has adjudicated debates regarding postwar migration and late twentieth-century multiculturalism and more recently has shaped ideas about twenty-first-century migration.