ABSTRACT

In 2005, Australians were witness to revelations about the treatment of two women caught up in the ‘border disorder’ around refugees and migrants, security and insecurity, citizenship and social inclusion in Australia. Receiving prominent coverage in the media, these are cases that alert us in particularly stark form to the existence of insecure migrant belonging in Australia, and the partiality and differential quality of integration for some, especially at a time of heightened ‘national security’. Specifically, I draw attention here to the manner in which facing up to these women's stories provides insight into processes of national remembering and forgetting — revelation and concealment — of the ‘public secret’ of migrant melancholy in Australia. Having first assembled an ‘archive of feeling’ and considered how forms of migrant sadness may question integration and security, I address the circumstances of these women's cases and highlight findings of two major inquiries in order to introduce questions of culture and sadness. I then examine how representations of these two women (de)faced the nation and performed but also masked shameful (auto)biographies. By coming face-to-face with sadness, however masked or concealed, considerable meaning emerges, as well as new ethical possibilities for migrant hospitality and belonging in Australia. These are in part contingent on the embodied presence of a melancholic migrant subject in Australia and the capacity to be touched by the memories that could thread us together to form new and affective communities.