Refugees and Asylum-Seekers in Australia: Border-Crossers of the Post-Colonial Imaginary

Refugees and Asylum-seekers within Australia have triggered anxieties that have been translated into policies and practices that actively eject, contain, and place refugees in limbo. The reasons for this treatment are multi-faceted and must be seen against the backdrop of a number of elements, historical and present, local and global. These are elements which have and continue to construct borders for this nation. The protection of national borders became the centrepiece for the 2001 Australian federal elections, and on which point both major political parties concurred. This is the point at which this paper begins, at the point where the discourse of national borders has come to impact heavily on refugees