INTO THE VOID Stop the Boats and Refugee Activism on Screen
‘The boats have not stopped,’ wrote The Guardian journalist Ben Doherty of Australia’s controversial asylum-seeker policies back in 2014.
As the world urges closer cooperation on the issue of mass and irregular migrations, Australia grows ever more isolationist. Moving the problem over the horizon is not the same as addressing it.1
If we look back on this quote from our increasingly disillusioned 2019 standpoint, Doherty’s reflections feel almost too small-scale. We now know that the Australian politicians who instituted the legislation collected under the slogan ‘stop the boats’2 never had any intention of addressing any problem other than voter discontent at who was crossing our borders and the colour of their skin.
Doherty, who continues to cover Australia’s draconian refugee policies at The Guardian, features prominently in a series of talking-head interviews woven through Stop the Boats, Simon V Kurian’s 2018 documentary about Australia’s deteriorating contributions to the global refugee crisis and the impact of that infamous three-word phrase. Doherty is one of several local voices who contextualise the intense, at times shocking footage that was smuggled on USB drives out of Australia’s offshore detention centres on the islands of Nauru and Manus for use in Kurian’s film.
Stop the Boats is certainly aiming for shock value – and for controversy. Its title alone would to former and current refugees (and the advocates who seek to help them) who consider the slogan an emblem of fear and cruelty; reportedly, this title was even controversial during Kurian’s research for and filming of the project. But the filmmaker is adamant that Australians should not forget the rhetoric anytime soon: ‘These are the three words that we need to keep reminding ourselves of, for a very, very long time,’ he told The Australian’s Philippa Hawker.
