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ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN
The 'We are all Boat People' campaign is concerned in the broadest sense with the mental health of Australia. In our analysis, what we are facing is not so much a refugee problem as a crisis of xenophobia, a terrible and contagious national sickness. The border panic policies of our government are clearly designed to spread fear and hatred, disseminated through brilliant manipulation of the unspeakable psychoses of an occupying nation secretly uncertain of its own legitimacy.
As anthropologist Ghassan Hage suggests, we are willing to fear the threat of strangers because we know this land has ALREADY been stolen."This", he says, " is the sensitivity of thieves".
The Government, ably assisted by talkback radio hosts, has worked to incite irrational hatred of 'boat people' and 'queue jumpers'. The terms are rhetorical flourishes some rabid genius speechwriter devised to simultaneously obviate the urgency of refugees' need to flee, and to conjure an orderly process (a polite line of people waiting at an Australian consulate somewhere) out of thin air.
This relates strongly to WHERE in culture we situate the engagement/contest of our campaign, because seething under that insidious catch-phrase is the completely different truth - there are no queues to join, no consulates to attend.
We seek to reveal both the reality, and the lies obscuring it.
We seek to operate very specifically, with intense focus on countering border panic rhetoric in the broad infoscape. We work with tropes already extant in public discourse, with shared archetypes, language & imagery, to make new connections and ideas available to mass audiences. The cross-cultural communication we are most concerned with, is how to make sense to Howard's claimed 70-something percent of the population who support his governmentis policies on asylum seekers. Although we care passionately about many intersecting issues, we are focused precisely on this. On becoming viral, making the 'We are all Boat People' idea infectious.
During our inception, September-October 2001, the threat attributed to 'Boat People' was being massively flogged in the campaigns for the November national election. Aboriginal activist Rebecca Bear Wingfield, speaking at dLux Media's TILT conference, kept calling the non-indigenous audience BOAT PEOPLE. Given the context, the realisation forced by this name calling; the accusation, rang like a bell.
Of course! pretty well everyone in this country who's not indigenous is a boat person, or atleast their ancestors were. We have been working since then to keep ringing that bell. Remember who we are?! How we got here... what our ancestors fled... We are all Boat People. It's not a solidarity metaphor, it's lived history. So, we are trying to be a kind of antidote to amnesia.
The 'We are all Boat People' campaign uses this multi-function website as our primary organising tool, and we also make embodied, realtime media spectacles to contest the idea of 'otherness', the demonisation, of people seeking refuge here. On this website you can find an activist toolkit and many other goodies to download and spread the idea. We have received nearly 3,000 visits a month this year, and the Boat People image/text has spread to every city, and many regional centres. 'We are all Boat People' offline events have occurred to date in Sydney, Adelaide and Perth, and received mainstream and indymedia attention, though we would like to increase this significantly. Stay tuned. Or better still, tune in and join us.
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