ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses two short-form documentary comics online, “At Work Inside Our Detention Centres: A Guard’s Story” (2014) and “Villawood” (2015), both of which portray the damaging impacts of the Australian detention system on individuals seeking asylum. The chapter examines the visual strategies employed in the respective texts, and how each of them recovers the marginalised figure of the asylum seeker whose presence is mostly neglected in the official channels of Australian national discourse. The narrator of “A Guard’s Story” remains anonymous, as they describe their experience working at an undisclosed detention centre. The analysis of this work focusses on the use of white space and its multiple significations, as well as the way that the comic represents the tensions that circle the lived spaces of the detainees, thus communicating a partial recovery from the ‘exclusion zone’ within the space of the text. In “Villawood”, Safdar Ahmed includes not only his drawings as a visitor to the eponymous detention centre, but those made by the asylum seekers themselves. Here, the discussion concentrates on the inclusion of these artworks as an indexical trace of the ‘other’, arguing that this instantiates a vitalising form of testimony and memories from the exclusion zone. The thematic concerns in this chapter speak back to the formation of migrant memories discussed in Chapter 1, bringing the discussion full circle.
