Migrant

To invoke the 'Tampa incident' here is not to identify a historical turning point, nor is it to draw attention to a merely local or parochial event subordinated to a global war on terror.1 On the contrary, it was and continues to be a moment that recrystalised politics and culture; it reconfigured paranoia about borders, it recultivated fear of terrorism, renewed state bureaucratic and privatised brutality, made possible a newly xenophobic and militant assertion of Australianness, and produced space in which to vilify, collectively punish, humiliate and crush powerless and desperate people seeking help.