milk and ID

I'm home drinking milk before I go to bed, after a great night out at a pub quiz in Erskineville and a quick trip to another bar afterwards... it's my last nite in Australia, and so a bit of a farewell of sorts... and the evening has involved a few beers which means my head is gently spinning while I type tonite.

The thing I wanted to blog about is something that happened today when I was at Macquarie Uni for the last time before I head off - and this actually happened, depsite it sounding like a funny joke. After watching the fabulous Aboriginal dance troupe 'Descendance' perform on campus, I had coffee with Susan who's head of Indigenous Studies and Michelle who's a lecturer in the same dept. We talked about all kinds of things - insitutional, personal, literary - and before parting ways Susan suggested we go to the university bookstore so we could pick up a copy of a book she'd been telling me about. Off we walked, the three of us, in the direction of the student bookshop; when we got there we found a number of students patiently waiting in line and a security guy standing at the door.

We went to walk in and were stopped "excuse me are you staff or students?" "Staff" we replied, of course, because we are. "I wil lneed to see you staff ID - and if you don't have it you're going to need to wait over there" the guy said, gesturing to the gaggle of students. Well, funnily enough Susan and Michelle - who are both permanent Macquarie staff - did not have ID but I had, in a moment of inspiration, decided to pack my Macquarie staff ID from when I was here in 2009. I produced the card, and said "these guys are with me" and the three of us walked inside.

We all laughed about how funny it was that the Macquarie staff members didn't have ID (and therefore would not be granted admittance to the bookstore) but the girl who'd been here for 3 months a couple of years ago had ID which established her right to assert a specific and privileged position in the univerisity. And yet, through the afternoon I started to think about the layers to that 'funny' moment.

Here I was, neither legally nor functionally a member of the Macquarie staff and yet able to vouch not only for my own status but also those of the people with me. The people who are *from* the university have less status and privilege than the one who happens to have a legible and acceptable ID card.

Surely this parallels the position of Indigenous people in the settler state, with regard to immigration and alliance building and citizenship. Those who have technical and legal proof of connection to the state have rights which override (and perhaps in a generous mood) those who have ongoing, lived, fiuctional connection (however marginal or compromised that might be at times).

And surely, to follow this parallel, this speaks to the position but also the responsibility of people like myself on the land of other Indigenous people. Surely the question of whether to use the power enscribed (me producing the required document for admittance) or to ally oneself with the local people (and bring them with me into any place to which I have access) is important here.

I've had too much beer to extend this metaphor further, and it deserves careful consideration in teh clear light of day.

In the meantime, I am grateful for the opportunity to reflect, recharge and - yes - attend quiz nites at a fun pub like 'normal' people do. And, on that note, it's off to bed for this girl. Good night.


***

And: good morning. I'm awake and have read through my post from last night and just wanted to take a moment to extend the metaphor in the way I'd actually been thinking about it yesterday afternoon. Here I was, the person with a recognised 'right' (which becomes a form of power) to enter the space despite being least connected. Not only could my ID enable my own entry, but it enabled me the opportunity to generously (from the point of view of the guy at the door) bring with me the two people I was with.

Later in the afternoon yesterday I heard that Australia's new "people-swapping" immigration policy had been initiated for the first time. A number of people who arrive in Australia seeking asylum will be 'swapped' with 'genuine' refugees in Malaysia. (Various other places around this part of the Pacific - Nauru, Christmas Island, PNG, East Timor - have been used or tagged as dumping grounds for Australia's immigration 'problem'.) According to the PM Julia Gillard, the people who are handed to Malaysia will be treated with dignity and respect - which, whether or not it is true, is a slightly odd comment to come from her because she isn't actually the PM of Malaysia so can't really speak on behalf of what will happen there, and also because clearly treating these people with dignity and respect is hardly the underpinning value of the Australian 'solution.'

But the biggest irony and tragedy from my perspective is the question of legitimacy raised by the case of the ID at the bookstore: an arbitrary decision that rights to enter will be determined by a specific piece of documentation. In that moment, standing in front of the security guard (who incidentally was a Pacific guy - yes, the metaphor just keeps unfurling), none of the actual position of Susan and Michelle in the context of the university mattered. Although it was expected that the documentation I produced proved precisely the kind of status in the university which Susan and Michelle actually have (and indeed which I don't have), the details of history (why a Macquarie ID was in my purse, the swipe cards the other two had with them which were not accepted as appropriate evidence of their status, and so on) were irrelevant in the face of a simplistic policy about documentation. Indeed, to put this all another way, the symbol of 'being Macquarie staff' was more important than the practice of 'being Macquarie staff' to the extent that the symbol (ID) proved my right to enter despite there being no substance to my symbolic claim of being Macquarie staff whereas the inability to produce such recognised symbolic proof put Susan and Michelle into the category of 'not staff and therefore to be treated like students and made to wait.'

Although a strict parallel is possible here, the moment of my producing ID sufficient for the entry of Susan and Michelle is most helpful, I think, for raises questions about legitimacy and power. Who is 'Australia' to decide that these people cannot come in, when the historical and mythical basis of Australia (I'm talking about the state of Australia here; obviously Indigenous people have other origins) is the arrival of people from across the ocean seeking a better life in a new country? What difference is there between the 'people smugglers' of today and the people who brought the 'convicts' to Australia? Yes, there is a difference - I'm not saying there's not, and I'm not being naive about contemporary human trafficking - but what is the nature of that difference?

When we start to think about questions of recognition and legality and rights to seal off borders, an historical perspective can put the contemporary situation in a slightly different light. Because, aye, it's not like the people arriving in Australia (or NZ or the US or Canada or...) over the past two centuries have been busily paying attention to the immigration policies of the existing nations who had already been operating here for many thousands of years.