ABSTRACT
In October 2009, the then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd telephoned the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to request that a boat carrying 255 Sri Lankan Tamils, heading for Australia’s Christmas Island, be intercepted and escorted to the port of Merak on the north-western tip of Java. The Indonesians obliged, but a six-month long stand-off ensued when the asylum seekers refused to disembark at Merak until they had been assured passage to Australia. At a refugee support rally in the city of Melbourne on 1 May 2010, Aboriginal Australian activists responded to the stand-off by producing Original Nation Passports for the Merak asylum seekers. This was a defiant rejoinder to the Australian government’s decision a fortnight prior to freeze all Afghan and Sri Lankan refugee claims until further notice. Aboriginal activist Robbie Thorpe, flanked by other activists publicly signing stacks of passports outside the neo-classical facade of Melbourne’s Trades Hall, announced: ‘we want to make it clear that the Aboriginal people, the true sovereigns of this land, are offering them a passport to enter into our territorial waters, and our land’, adding, ‘we’re the colonised refugees’ (Juice Media 2010). A few months earlier, in June 2009, the New Zealand Police had charged Maori activist Gerrard Otimi with deception causing loss and giving immigration advice without a licence after he sold visas to around 100 Pacific island (mainly Samoan) immigrants desperate to remain in Aotearoa–New Zealand after the expiry of their work visas. Otimi charged nZ$500 per visa, which consisted of a certificate and passport sticker stating that the holder was a ‘whangaied’ (adopted) member of Otimi’s hapu (a sub-tribal grouping) and had permission to remain.
