The Murderous State: The Naturalisation of Violence and Exclusion in the Films of Neoliberal Australia

In common with many other Western countries, neoliberalism has become the dominant political philosophy in Australia since the 1980s. With the election of the John Howard-led Coalition in 1996 this impact has been reinforced. This article explores the neoliberal values appearing in Australian cultural productions through a number of popular Australian films from 2005 and 2006: The Proposition, Kenny, Jindabyne and Suburban Mayhem. The article discusses the nature of the proposition in The Proposition, the serial killers in Wolf Creek and Jindabyne, who remain at large, and the murder in Suburban Mayhem for which the wrong person is convicted and the real perpetrators are able to enjoy the fruits of their crime

Lost in Music: Popular Music, Film and Multiculturalism

Dogs in Space (dir: Richard Lowenstein) was released in 1986, at the height of the Hawke Labor government's concern with implementing the population management policy of multiculturalism. The institutional structures that gave shape to the policy were founded on the recommendations of The Review of Post Arrival Programmes and Services to Migrants, usually known as the Galbally Report after the chair of the committee which provided it, Frank Galbally. The Galbally Report was tabled in Federal Parliament in 1978, the same year in which Dogs in Space is set. However, the idea of multiculturalism in Australia was not new. Al Grassby, then Gough Whitlam's Minister for Immigration, had delivered his speech entitled 'A Multi-Cultural Society for the Future' in 1973.The institutional signs of the breakdown of the Australian incorporatist ideology of assimilation can be found much earlier, in the establishment of the Italian welfare organisation Co.As.It in 1967 and the Greek welfare society in 1969 (Castles et al, 1988: 60). Whitlam's government set up the Australia Assistance Plan which, as Jean Martin describes it in The Migrant Presence (quoted in Castles et al: 61), provided the vehicle by which the scattered groups of migrant and migrant-oriented welfare organisations could move towards the centres of political power and also acted as a catalyst to the development of more integrated and articulate migrant organizations. In 1974 the Ethnic Community Councils of South Australia and Victoria were formed, that of New South Wales came a year later. What has all this to do with a film about a punk household in inner city Melbourne?In this chapter I will be concerned primarily with the diegetic use of popular music, and not with underscored music used for atmosphere and to link scenes. I want to examine how the organisation of popular music, in an Australia dominated by official multicultural policy, is reproduced through the way music is used in films that we might loosely call multicultural--films that have non-Anglo-Celts as their main characters

Writing and the Concept of Law in Ancient Greece

The concept of law is too often treated as an a-historical category; similarly, the impact of writing (when used as a medium of communication) on the conceptual order and on the social structure of a society has been little analyzed. These two problems are brought together in the context of ancient Greece to demonstrate how the concepts "law" and "justice" developed in relation to changes in the social structure of that society. The impact of writing on Greek society not only produced the situation in which these changes took place but also helped form those changes

The Scientists and Grunge: Influence and Globalised Flows

The Scientists, or at least two of the band’s three members, left Perth for Sydney in September, 1981. By this time Kim Salmon was already redefining the sound of the band. In Perth the first version of the Scientists, with James Baker who subsequently joined the Hoodoo Gurus on drums, had produced what, in retrospect, was the quintessential Perth punk album. Released in 1981, the Pink Album as it came to be known for its pink cover was composed of songs that had a powerful combination of English and American influences. Crudely, you could say the sound amalgamated the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls. However, the band’s over-riding influence was the conservative tunefulness of the English power-pop tradition that runs from the Troggs to the Buzzcocks and the Vibrators.The Scientists mrk I had already decided to break up when the Pink Album was recorded. Salmon subsequently formed the short-lived band Louie Louie with the drummer who would later provide the beats for the second version of the Scientists, Brett Rixon. It was during this time that Salmon began to evolve the sound that would characterize the second, and more well-known nationally and internationally, version of the Scientists. ‘Swampland’, a song that will feature prominently in the historical narrative of this chapter, was written at this time with the third member of Louie Louie, Kim Williams. Also written at this time was another staple of the Scientists mrk II, ‘We Had Love’. Evolving this more radical sound, Salmon and Rixon moved to Sydney where the inner city music scene offered more space and encouragement for the more confrontational music that Salmon was beginning to develop. Here, Salmon added Boris Sujdovic with whom Salmon had played before in Perth, on bass and Tony Thewlis on guitarIt is the music from this period onwards, from the definitive reworking of ‘Swampland’ which appeared as the B-side of the ‘This Is My Happy Hour’ single in late 1982 and the Blood Red River six track mini-album of 1983, that forms the basis of the claim that the Scientists precursed, and influenced, the development of that musical form identified with Seattle bands such as the Melvins, Mudhoney and Nirvana, that came to be categorised as grunge. Kim Salmon himself has asserted that: ‘The Scientists were really forging a sound that was later taken up in Seattle’. He goes on to contextualise this, saying, ‘if you think chronologically there was punk in the Sex Pistols, and then the guitar action went to Australia…I always say that Australian music was the premier exporter of grunge’. This is by no means an idiosyncratic opinion. Greta Moon of Au Go Go Records has stated clearly that: “ The Scientists and Lubricated Goat were most definitely big influences on bands like Mudhoney in particular. The Scientists were the first grunge band. They were in existence before any of those US Sub Pop bands came along. It was US Sub Pop bands like Nirvana and Mudhoney that were openly avowed fans of the Scientists.” And, indeed, the singer of Mudhoney, Mark Arm, has himself stated that: ‘By the time Mudhoney began two of our most influential bands were feedtime and the Scientists, along with the Stooges and Neil Young

Borderline anxieties: what whitening the Irish has to do with keeping out asylum seekers

It has become practically a cliche that Australia has the most penalising regulations for those now described as 'asylum seekers' of any first or second world country. The Department of Immigration's Fact Sheet on 'Border Control' tells us in stern rhetoric that: 'The Australian Government is firmly committed to ensuring the integrity of Australia's borders and to the effective control and management of the movement of people to and from Australia'. The origins of the present bipartisan policy of detention of asylum seekers go back to 1992. Among the reasons given for the implementation of this policy, the Department of Immigration's Fact Sheet on 'Immigration Detention' tells us that it ensures 'unauthorised arrivals do not enter the Australian community until their identity and status has been properly assessed and they have been granted a visa'. Here we find clearly illustrated the Australian government, in its role as executive of the Australian state, concerned with regulating as tightly as possible all access to the Australian national community.Central to this preoccupation has been the claim that settler Australia has always been overwhelmingly white. Historically, there was one white race which, in England, and in the first half of the nineteenth century in Australia, was considered so very different, and so inferior, that it was often not thought of as white at all. The Catholic Irish were considered to be so un-white that, using marriageability as our scale here, John Beddoe, the English proto-social anthropologist, could write in The Races of Britain (1885) that, 'Englishwomen very rarely marry Irish, or at least Catholic Irish, men'. What we will find is that, as the notion of an Australian nation takes hold towards the end of the nineteenth century, so the Irish, previously racialised and, to all intents and purposes, excluded from whiteness both in England and Australia, become reconstituted within Australia as acceptably white, helping to produce a claimed homogeneous white nation

Uncertain lives: migration, the border and neoliberalism in Australia

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nationstate with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism

Not Just Another Multicultural Story: The English, From 'Fitting In' to Self-Ethnicisation

It would be usual, these days, to argue that the experience of British migrants in Australia is the norm against which the reception of non-British migrants has always been articulated. I will argue that the understanding of how British migrants were expected to experience Australia, and were, and are, experienced by Australians has been ideologically driven, at first, by a need to see the Australian society, and the culture that evolved, as a version of British society and culture and, later, during the era of official multiculturalism, by the desire to assert this culture as the naturalised, core culture of Australia. John Docker writes that the emphasis on Anglo-conformity, which laid the basis for the present-day core culture, became pervasive in the period between the two world wars. Since this period also, and corresponding to the emphasis on Anglo-conformity, there has developed an assumption that migrants from the United Kingdom and Ireland, and, indeed, all English-speaking migrants, would simply 'fit in' to Australian society. By 'fitting in' I do not mean that they would assimilate, assimilation in its classical definition entails the expectation that the person's behaviour and ideas would change to be more congruent with those of the host country. Rather, I mean that there was the assumption, no matter how obviously it was contradicted by actual experiences, that English-speaking migrants would simply merge with the general population. I will argue that such an assumption has continued during the era of official multiculturalism

The Beastie Boys: Jews in whiteface

The Beastie Boys are usually described as the white hip hop group who helped break rap to a broad-based white audience. Rarely is it acknowledged that the Beasties all came from Jewish backgrounds. This article examines the implications of the Beastie Boys’ Jewishness. The Beasties can be placed in a long history of Jewish entertainers reworking black music for white American audiences. By the 1980s, Jews in the United States had been assimilated into whiteness, yet it is clear that the memory of discrimination lived on. The members of the Beasties played with whiteness – performed in whiteface – while being very aware of their own Jewishness and the implications of this. With the advice and mentoring of African American Russell Simmons and the Jewish Rick Rubin, the group gained respect in the black community as legitimate rappers and then set out to perform as uncivil rock performers for white audiences. This article argues that the Beasties’ Jewishness was central to their success as the group that brought rap to a mainstream white American audience

Two rescues, one History: everyday racism in Australia

On the same day, at different ends of Australia, two extraordinary rescues of men from extreme hardship took place. The two miners, both white and of Anglo-Celtic origin, were feted, appeared on television chat shows and became celebrities so sought after that they had to employ an agent. The three Torres Strait Islanders, members of a grouping identified as 'indigenous' in the Australian social order, who had survived 22 days at sea in an open dinghy, were, to all intents and purposes, ignored by the mainstream Australian media. They would appear to have simply gone back to their families and got on with their lives. This article tracks the discursive histories in which each event was embedded to examine how this distinction could happen and how it could be so naturalised that hardly anybody commented on the disparity of treatment. It is this taken-for-granted disparity that I am describing here as everyday racism