Manderson, D; van Rijswijk, H --- "Introduction to Littoral Readings: Representation of Land and Sea in Law, Literature and Geography" [2015] UTSLRS 34; (2015) 27(2) Law and Literature 167

Last Updated: 2 June 2017

Littoral Readings: Representations of land and sea in law, literature, and geography

Introduction by Desmond Manderson and Honni van Rijswijk

This collection presents new work in the inter-tidal waters that ebb and flow between law, literature, and geography. We have chosen to organize it around the relationship between land and sea, an opposition that frames the horizons of all three disciplines. We take our lead here from Carl Schmitt, whose Land und Meer was originally published as a short book---somewhere between a fable and a history—for his daughter—.^[1] Schmitt retells world history in terms of the development of political power on a terrestrial, riparian, maritime and finally oceanic basis. This argument received its grandest incarnation in Der Nomos der Erde.^[2] But such an epic vision suffers from its vaulting ambition.^[3] No one can surely get away any longer with the conceptual and jurisprudential Gottesperspektive that Schmitt assumed as his birthright; he was the Sironi or perhaps the Speer of twentieth-century legal thought.^[4] The grand dichotomy he sets up between power that is orientated towards land and towards the sea for example (in light of which even the Reformation is treated as little more than a minor by-product), is as crude and over-determined in its own way as the distinction between, say, ‘friend’ and ‘enemy’.^[5]

In the essays that follow, we enthusiastically adopt an analysis of the relationship between Land und Meer which recognizes the importance of geographic spatial phenomena in the contours of our literature and as these play out in legal concepts. But we also insist on the need to pay attention to the particular contours of this relation, the highly specific—indeed incorrigibly plural—forms and fantasies such a relationship takes in specific places and concerning specific jurisprudential issues. The relationship between land and sea is an exceptional lens through which to understand how geographic experience and literary imagination jointly shape legal issues and responses. Yet the task is not to uncover some ‘globale Zeit’ but instead to burrow deeper into particulars. We need to supplement the telescope, in other words, with the microscope.

The first axis of this project, then, involves recognizing the role of the imaginary in the transformation of social and legal conditions, and in the delineation of legal responsibility. This imaginary—for want of a better word, call it ‘literature’—occupies a critical place in contemporary legal developments: in representing them but also in challenging them and above all in demanding that we take a stand in relation to them.^[6] The second axis invites us to recognize how closely connected are legal structures and practices to the material experience of concrete spaces and environments. This phenomenology—for want of a better word, call it ‘geography’—likewise occupies a critical place in accounting for and interpreting the nomos, not of ‘the earth’ but of each half-acre of it.^[7]

There is therefore an interplay between what we might think of, though only provisionally, as the fictional character of literature, the non-fictional character of geography, and the normative character of law. Each constantly refracts the others. The way to understand law as culture is to see how its modes and strategies pass through literature and the imaginary on the one hand, by way of geography and the material on the other. If the field of law and geography has sometimes had a tendency to stick too closely to notions of the material, and the field of law and literature has sometimes had a tendency to stick too closely to notions of the immaterial, the present collection attempts to bring together these powerful forms of cultural experience in a dynamic fashion, thinking and experiencing each in relation to the other and both in relation to the law. Literature constantly mediates our experience of the physical world, just as the physical world constantly mediates our experience of the imagination. Law is one of the forms taken—sometimes productive, sometimes traumatic—by our immersion in both, but each have a role in co-producing material and discursive realities. The triangulation we are proposing here can be hard to encompass, at least at first. The history of the Jewish people provides a familiar example. Between the razing of the second temple and the founding of the state of Israel, a period of almost two thousand years, the geography of the Holy Land exerted a compelling normative and legal influence, albeit one that was experienced, for the vast majority of Jewish lives, solely in literary terms.

The choice of Australia as the focal point for this project, however, re-orients this standard western cultural history in important ways, as well as re-orienting the position of western legalities. The papers that follow came out of the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Law, Literature and the Humanities, now one of the leading international events in this field.^[8] They reflect the vibrant and diverse role that scholars and archives outside of Europe and North America are now playing in legal theory in general, and law and literature scholarship in particular. But our focus on Australia—the place, the case, and the sign—amounts to more than a happy accident. As emerging scholarship based on archives, histories and problems of ‘the global South’ testify,^[9] critical practices of spatially re-orienting law and literature offer insights that are significant beyond particular regional questions. The essays in this collection ‘place’ Australia in relation to this global south. But they also implicitly ‘place’ and particularise Schmitt’s western imaginary, casting considerable doubt on its hasty extrapolation from a partial European context to a global norm. The essays here contemplate western philosophies and legalities, but do more than offer an Australian supplement to them. Rather, they challenge and deepen our understanding of the rule of law, authority and sovereignty, and the particular assumptions upon which these concepts are based. Their arguments are grounded in rethinking established concepts through the materiality and political contexts of the global south; through the elemental matter of earth and sea; and by encountering the histories through which these materialities are read and imagined.

‘The antipodes’ have long occupied a special place in the western imagination. Australia’s position in the global south, its desert topography, and its status as an island continent, have all loomed large. Laura Joseph reminds us that the antipodes have been significant to European geographic and theological constructions since the thirteenth century, when a southern land mass began to appear in pre-Copernican Christian maps that vertically organized heaven, earth and hell—the medieval imaginary thereby ‘doubling’ the geographic south with the infernal.^[10] In Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the antipodes signify both Lucifer’s fall from heaven, and a point of emergence from hell.^[11] Subsequently, Australia’s convict literature made of the nation a ‘Kingdom of Hell’.^[12] This tradition of reading Australia as ‘hellish’ continues through colonization to modern fiction, including such celebrated examples as Patrick White’s Voss and DH Lawrence’s Kangaroo.^[13] More latterly, Australian cinema, for example, has continued to evoke these central tropes of isolation, annihilation and dystopia. Take the Mad Max trilogy.^[14] It sets out a fully-realized topographic imaginary as a metaphor for environmental and legal collapse. A dystopian vision of a post-apocalyptic, post-technological wasteland is personified in the image of the desert in a place called Anarkie, a shorthand that neatly conveys the complete breakdown of legal and social order by a fusion of geographic and literary signifiers. In the western imaginary of Australia, the landscape signifies and produces anxiety. Typically, as Meghan Morris points out, the response of Mad Max is ‘essentially phobic’ – what he can’t bear, he runs away from.^[15]

In contemporary examples such as Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe and Alexis Wright’s novels Carpentaria and The Swan Book,^[16] however, these dismal tropes are deployed as sites in which the European imaginary is held to account. Especially in Wright’s work, they are subordinated to indigenous imaginaries of law and culture that draw on the same geography, but draw out very different interpretations of it. The topography of the western, colonial imaginary is thereby up-ended by a focus on the materiality of place and the specificity of region and context.

The liminal is also a productive trope through which to trace the significance of readings of land and sea in the western imaginary of Australia.^[17] The literature and law of few countries have been as scarred by the problematic relationship between land and sea. Schmitt argues that Venice was never really an oceanic power. If sea trade was the basis of their prosperity, it was always as an excursion that eventually saw them return home, like Ulysses, to their little lagoon. It was the British, according to Schmitt, who finally embraced the oceanic imagination, breaking their connection to the continent, and treating sea trade and naval power as the basis of a genuinely global empire. For Britain, the sea was the place on which they voyaged in order to explore and conquer the world. The coast was a place of embarkation; the sea, the Empire’s natural element.^[18]

But what then would Schmitt have made of Australia, its largest island? Ironically, despite being a continent located at the crossroads of the great oceans of the world and a country with one of the longest coastlines in the world, colonial and post-colonial Australia has been gripped by ‘an insular imagination.’^[19] The sea has been either the place from which threats came, or the moat that fortifies us against them. The coast is a place of disembarkation; the sea its barrier. The Secretary of the Australian Government Department of Immigration and Border Protection (sic) recently concluded that ‘The border is a strategic national asset.’^[20] Or, as the Australian national anthem puts it, rather prosaically, ‘Our home is girt by sea.’^[21] This is not a rousing chorus of aspiration. It is a strangely limiting and inward-looking description. For the settler population, the beach is Australia’s iconic environment, and 85% of the population lives within fifty kilometres of its coastline—the beach is not the start of the world but the end of the land. This is further complicated by settlers’ relation to the continental centre, with terra nullius functioning as a continuing structuring fantasy. The centre is marked as arid, the north as ‘empty,’ and the ‘bush,’ which encompasses much of the land beyond the urban and coastal borders, is hostile.^[22] For all these reasons, Australia is precisely the emblem of what we term ‘the littoral’, a place of borders and boundaries, on the very edge of the world.^[23]

Other critics would go further, suggesting that Australia’s somewhat beleaguered littoral imagination does not simply portray legal and social responses, but helps constitute them. Of course it goes without saying that this western geography of fear and anxiety is itself determined via a violent colonial history.^[24] The geographic imaginary of Australia’s first peoples tells a very different story of love for and stewardship of the land and sea, and produces a very different reading of the continent’s centre and north, viewing these regions as rich geopolitical sites that generate complex legal relations. These indigenous readings stand in contrast to the settler imaginary, in which Australia’s centre and north are emptied out, and the south is taken for granted as its legal and cultural centre.^[25] This is only to reinforce the point that the topographical imagination is itself contingent and cultural.^[26] Even Carl Schmitt, in this regard, is a far cry from Jared Diamond.^[27] Nonetheless, in the short narrative of Australia’s colonial and post-colonial relationship to the land, survival typically trumps progress, expectations are radically lowered and, as Gibson puts it tellingly, heroism is cast in terms of a tragic and ‘transcendental failure’.^[28] Whether framed in terms of the endless expanse of the ocean or the inhospitability of the inland—against which ‘the beach’ in each case affords only the narrowest sliver of security—this sense of struggle and alienation is ‘an alibi for the powerlessness of the self.’^[29] The word ‘alibi’ is enormously suggestive, indicating not merely a metaphor for a state of mind, but an excuse for it. Some of us might be inclined to see attitudes of pragmatic resignation and hostility to vision as running through Australian law as well as Australian society.

***

By prioritizing regional/specific imaginaries over national and global frameworks, this collection offers ways to think law beyond the tired old framework of centre/periphery, and outside the colonial/global dyads that privilege the western imaginary at these sites. Written onto land and sea, overland and overseas, these readings foreground the competing authorities of past and present, including conflicts with respect to claims to legal authority and to sovereignty.^[30] This re-orientation makes visible the contested claims to material and discursive power, and the ways in which competing imaginaries and dialectical tensions in turn produce material experiences. Law, literature, and geography are co-implicated as cultural forces. The connection between imagination and authority is particularly apparent in the heightened, liminal, contested spaces that are our focus, where historical processes of colonialism meet contemporary refugee claims based on presence upon land or sea. These papers draw on these tropes of land and sea in order to generate new ways of interpreting some of the most urgent political and jurisprudential challenges that face legal scholars around the world—from legacies of slavery and colonialism, to the governance of asylum seekers and indigenous persons. On questions such as these, Australia and Australian law seems emblematic of the crises of our time.

In ‘Law’s Imaginary Life on the Ground,’ the first of the essays that follow, the young Australian socio-legal scholar Shane Chalmers offers us a theoretical framework for its study, using Liberia—not Australia in this case—as his starting point.^[31] The imaginary, Chalmers maintains, is more empirical than the law, not less. As he struggled to understand what the rule of law meant ‘on the ground,’ in an African country facing difficult legal transitions, he began to appreciate how closely legal discourses are connected to cultural narratives on the one hand, and to an embodied experience of social space on the other. Law is never grounded, never made real, without some alchemy between these two chemicals, one imaginary and one bodily. Law is the quickening of imaginary forms as they are shaped out of the clay of a particular place. The rule of law can only be brought to life on the ground, as it were, but—paradoxically—this ground must first be conceived by the imagination.

In ‘A Jurisprudential Tale of a Road, an Office, and a Triangle,’ Olivia Barr employs a similar theoretical framework for thinking through the midwifery of legal forms, focusing on the most concrete of circumstances: the road that connects—or separates—Melbourne and Sydney, Australia’s two largest cities.^[32] Jurisdiction, she argues, is not an abstract term; it joins law to particular places through very specific material practices. From Roman times onwards we have known that the road is the invisible bearer of ideology and empire. In this case, we encounter the workings of the legal imaginary where we least expect it – in a road, the spatial organization of the office of the surveyor, and an abstract sign. These facilitate legal traffic while making other passages and other social relations nigh impossible, like the country towns that the freeway from Melbourne to Sydney - now by-passes. For both Barr and Chalmers, then, jurisprudence is geography, pure and applied.^[33]

Margaret Davies’ ‘The Consciousness of Trees’ takes the encounter between the environment, the imagination, and the law down to the most local of levels.^[34] She shows how, in the modern world—in the suburbs of her own Adelaide, but no less in the suburbs of the United States or Great Britain—the tree is liminal object, part literary muse, part political symbol, part economic anomaly, part living and breathing entity. Legal structures—not to mention commercial structures—have had to adapt to its social, physical, and emotional resonance. In recent times, she argues, the tree has not only gained regulatory muscle. As the meeting point of poetry, politics, and the environment, it has challenged our underlying legal concepts in powerful ways, and forced us to reconsider aspects of the normativity of public space and the law of property.

‘An elegy of land and sovereignty’ might be said to travel in the other direction.^[35] Where Davies begins with a geographic feature which conjures a literature, Honni van Rijswijk begins with The Swan Book—a literary text which conjures a geography.^[36] The ruined and traumatic landscape so compellingly evoked by Alexis Wright, one of Australia’s best-known contemporary writers, functions as both metaphor and metonym for a society sunk in pain and loss. Most significantly, Wright’s novel confronts directly the politics of representation that have underwritten the violent colonial imaginary of Australian sovereignty. This imaginary—legal, literary, and geographic all at once—has produced a self-serving and aggressively destructive dominion which must be unwound. Walter Benjamin names as ‘divine violence’ the urgent work of this unwinding and this wounding.^[37] Those who have wondered what such a radical and yet somehow apolitical action could possibly look like, will find an answer in The Swan Book. Divine violence occurs when the land fights back, annihilating the legal order that has threatened to destroying it, and imposing a dreadful spatial reckoning on the wilful colonial imaginary. In Margaret Davies’ essay, ‘the consciousness of trees’ seems almost a benign corrective to traditional legal categories. But there is nothing benign about the consciousness and agency of the land in van Rijswijk’s reading. Literary geography issues us with a storm warning about the imminent consequences of our treatment of indigenous peoples, and the environment.

The thread of impending catastrophe runs through several of these texts and continues in the contribution by Stewart Motha and Stephanie Jones.^[38] In ‘Islands of Power,’ a very specific relationship between land and sea is mooted. Australia is an island, they argue—not just a physical description, but a state of mind. The littoral arises in significant ways through imaginaries of the island and archipelago, which provide further ways of thinking space and its relation to assertions of (violent) authority, without using the nation state as the point of departure.^[39] Drawing on Daniel Defoe, the island for Motha and Jones evokes an idea of Australia as exclusive and insular, a concept of sovereignty as absolute, and—in a manner akin to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic—a relationship to its colonized non-citizens that is hierarchical, yet at the same time intimate. The moral invisibility of ‘man Friday’—both subject and stranger—is produced by the overwhelming visibility of Robinson Crusoe, his self-proclaimed sovereign lord. The authors connect this imaginary island topology to Australia as a real place, and then to its policies concerning asylum seekers and refugees.^[40] These have, in recent years, hastened the Australian polity and its sovereign executive towards the kind of paranoid and hysterical over-reaction to which Crusoe’s alienated vigil threatened to lead him.

‘Bodies in the Water,’ by Desmond Manderson, takes on similar questions regarding the role of the imaginary of the sea in constituting our legal relations to others, be they on the waters or over them.^[41] In this case, The Slave Ship, a painting by J.M.W. Turner, is treated as emblematic of how we imagine and respond to the plight of others. As with each of the papers in this collection, Manderson deploys aesthetic materials—literature in the broadest sense—in order to illuminate how Australia imagines itself, and with what legal and moral consequences. A topography marked by insularity rather than welcome, separation rather than connection, has a certain history, including not least a certain aesthetic history,. But in contrast to Motha and Jones’s treatment of similar subject matter, Manderson offers a wary optimism. The interpretive ambivalence of images makes possible alternative readings, he argues, that may open new modes of realizing our relationship to the ‘bodies of water’ all around us.

In sum, Littoral Readings employs theory about the new role of the imaginary in order to better understand our present predicament; and the distinct topographies and sites that give that predicament its singular flavour. The imaginary becomes a site of critique as well as of intervention, and must be discussed in ways that are material and specific, rather than transcendental. As to the ramifications of the littoral imagination—as geographic ontology and as literary trope—on legal formations, the dual focus on literature and geography paints a distinctly dystopian picture of a legal system that has become unmoored from its environment, its people, and its history. But this is not just about Australia. The selected papers make important interventions into the histories of narratives, representations and material practices of land and sea—re-orienting the assumptions that lie behind law’s logics and law’s imaginary, and challenging concepts of property, sovereignty, responsibility, and harm. At the very least these essays suggest that the power of land and sea to influence our imagination and to constitute legal forms, reveals new legal possibilities, and new avenues by which to discuss them. They offer ways of thinking through elements of authority—not only authority’s juridical and political guises, but as these manifest in diverse forms of cultural representation—and of course, ultimately, in thinking otherwise.

***

The essays show littoral spaces to be heightened and active, places of contested imaginaries.^[42] Geography is both a metaphorical map for these contestations, and materially produced through them. A small piece of public art adorns the boardwalk that runs alongside the river that runs through the city of Brisbane, Australia. It reads as follows:

We have focused on the image of the littoral as a boundary or limit, a narrow strip squeezed in between the twin perils of land and sea. But there is more to it than that. The littoral is also an environment of flux and change par excellence. If the movement of the tides suggests a cycle of repetition, the eco-system of the shoreline reveals instead a triumph of adaptation, diversity, and restless change. So a littoral reading is not a literal reading. We are not trapped beyond hope of redemption. Elements of geography, legality, and literature are all firmly anchored and intimately connected in our consciousness. But they are not destiny. They can be reimagined, retold, and seen afresh. Aboriginal people across Australia see the law in and on the land, and tell its stories in their art and music and dance.^[43] Such an imagination deftly effaces the distinction between literature, geography, and law. Were we only able to see other legal systems, including our own, in a similar spirit, who would not be in the business of law-making?

REFERENCES

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1. ^[1] Carl Schmitt, Land und Meer: Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Leipzig: Verlag von Philipp. Reclam, 1942); Carl Schmitt, Land and sea (Alexandria, VA: Plutarch Press, 1997).
2. ^[2] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2006).
3. ^[3] Stephen Legg, ed., Spatiality, sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the nomos. (London: Routledge, 2011; Giacomo Marramao, “The Exile of the Nomos: For a Critical Profile of Carl Schmitt,” Cardozo Law Review 21 (1999): 1567.
4. ^[4] See, e.g., Mario Sironi and Claudia Gian Ferrari, Sironi: opere 1919-1959 (Milano: Charta, 2002); Leon Krier, Albert Speer: Architecture, 1932–1942 (Paris: Archives D'Architecture Moderne, 1985); Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York and Toronto: Macmillan, 1970).
5. ^[5] Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
6. ^[6] See for example Melanie Williams, Secrets and Laws (London: Routledge, 2005); Ian Ward, ed., Literature and Human Rights (Wlater de Gruyter, 2015); Wai Chee Dimock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); William MacNeil, Novel Judgments: Legal Theory as Fiction(London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2011).
7. ^[7] Nicholas Blomley, Law Space and the Geographies of Power (London: Guildhall Press, 1984); Iris Bravurman et al, eds., The Expanding Spaces of Law: A Timely Legal Geography (Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2014); Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Richard Ford, eds., The Legal Geographies Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001); David Delaney, The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-making (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2011); Desmond Manderson and Richard Mohr, eds., Legal Spaces, Law Text Culture vol. 5 (2005).
8. ^[8] Interpellations: Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Law, Literature and the Humanities (Canberra: Australian National University, 2012).
9. ^[9] Eve Darian-Smith, Laws and Societies in Global Contexts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Boaventura de Sousa Santos: Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (New York: Paradigm, 2014); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Toward a New Legal Common Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
10. ^[10] Laura Joseph, "Opening the Gates of Hell: Regional Emergences in Carpentaria and Dreamhunter'," Southerly 69.2 (2009): 66-80, at 69-70.
11. ^[11] Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy, vol. 1: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2002): lines 1308-1321.

^[12] Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life (Kensington, NSW: Times House, 1986): 353, in Joseph, 90.

13. ^[13] Patrick White, Voss (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2009); DH Lawrence, Kangaroo (London: Penguin, 1923); see Desmond Manderson, Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law (London: Routledge, 2012).
14. ^[14] Mad Max (dir. George Miller, 1979); Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (dir. George Miller, 1981); Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (dir. George Miller and George Ogilvie, 1985). See Ross Gibson, “Yondering: a reading of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” Art & Text 19 (1985); David Carter, “Crocs in Frocks: Landscape and Nation in the 1990s,” Journal of Australian Studies 20.49 (1996): 89-96; Kieran Tranter, “Mad max: The car and Australian governance,” National Identities 5.1 (2003): 67-81; Katherine Biber, “The threshold moment: Masculinity at home and on the road in Australian cinema,” Limina 7 (2001): 26-46; Meghan Morris, “Fear and the family sedan,” in Brian Massumi, ed., The politics of everyday fear (St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1993): 285-306; Christopher Sharrett, “The Hero as Pastiche: Myth, Male Fantasy, and Simulacra in Mad Max and The Road Warrior,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13.2 (1985): 80-91; Rose Lucas, “Dragging it out: Tales of masculinity in Australian cinema, from Crocodile Dundee to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” Journal of Australian Studies 22.56 (1998): 138-146. It says something of the continuing resonance of this apocalyptic trope that a fourth Mad Max film (Mad Max: Fury Road (dir George Miller)) is said to currently be in post-production, and due to be released in May 2015.
15. ^[15] Morris, “Fear and the Family Sedan”.
16. ^[16] Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe (Sydney: vintage, 2005); Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (New York: Atria Books, 2009); Alexis Wright, The Swan Book (Sydney: Giramondo, 2013).
17. ^[17] Richie Howitt, “Frontiers, borders, edges: liminal challenges to the hegemony of exclusion,” Australian Geographical Studies 39.2 (2001): 233-245; Diana Loxley, Problematic shores: the literature of islands (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
18. ^[18] Schmitt, Land and Sea. See Christopher Connery, “Ideologies of land and sea: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Carl Schmitt, and the shaping of global myth elements,” Boundary 2 28.2 (2001): 173-201; Christopher Connery, “The oceanic feeling and the regional imaginary,” no citation, 1996; see also David Armitage, The ideological origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea (London: Penguin, 1994).
19. ^[19] Suvendrini Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagination(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); see also Frank Broeze, Island Nation: A history of Australians and the Sea (St. Leondards: Allen and Unwin, 1998); Fiona Capp, That Oceanic Feeling (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 2003).
20. ^[20] Michael Pezzullo, Sovereignty in an Age of Global Interdependency: The Role of Borders, 14 December 2014: https://www.immi.gov.au/about/speeches-pres/_pdf/sovereignty-age-interdependency-04122014.pdf (last accessed 16 January 2015). See also Elizabeth McMahon, "Encapsulated Space: The Paradise-Prison of Australia's Island Imaginary." Southerly 65:1, 2005, 20-3, in which McMahon addresses the 'geopolitics of Australian place' as seen through debates relating to border control and asylum seekers.
21. ^[21] Peter Dodds McCormick, Advance Australia Fair (1878); Mungo MacCallum, Girt By Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear (Quarterly Essays Vol. 5) (Sydney: Black Inc., 2002).

^[22] Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation Sydney: University of New South Wales
Press, 2007, 147.

23. ^[23] Philip Drew, The Coast Dwellers: Australians Living on the Edge (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1994); Douglas Booth, Australian Beach Cultures (London: Frank Cass, 2001). For literary reflections, see Tim Winton, Land’s Edge (Sydney: Picador, 1993); David Malouf, A Spirit of Play: The Making of the Australian Consciousness (Sydney: ABC Books, 1998).
24. ^[24] Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
25. ^[25] Irene Watson, Raw Law (Abington: Routledge, 2015); Irene Watson, “Aboriginal Sovereignties: Past, Present and Future (Im)Possibilities,” in Suvendrini Perera, ed., Our Patch, Enacting Australian Sovereignty Post-2001 (Sydney: Network Books, 2007): 23-43; Christine Black, The Land is the Source of the Law: A Dialogic Encounter with an Indigenous Jurisprudence (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2010).
26. ^[26] Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (London: Routledge, 2004).
27. ^[27] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, Steel (New York: Norton, 1999); Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2011).
28. ^[28] Gibson, “Yondering.”
29. ^[29] Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 9.
30. ^[30] Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds. Sovereign bodies: Citizens, migrants, and states in the postcolonial world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
31. ^[31] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
32. ^[32] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
33. ^[33] Blomley, Law Space and the Geographies of Power; Delaney, The Spatial, the Legal and the Pragmatics of World-making.
34. ^[34] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
35. ^[35] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
36. ^[36] Wright, The Swan Book.
37. ^[37] Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 47 (1920/21): 809–32; Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections, trans. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 300-3.
38. ^[38] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
39. ^[39] See Elizabeth McMahon, “Archipelagic Space and the Uncertain Future of National Literatures,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, (2013) Vol 13(2) http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/issue/view/257/showToc (last accessed 5th February 2015); Drew, The Coast Dwellers; Booth, Australian Beach Cultures; Winton, Land’s Edge; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2003).
40. ^[40] See Perera, Australia and the Insular Imagation; Broeze, Island Nation.
41. ^[41] Author: title, page numbers in this collection.
42. ^[42] For a further discussion of this point, see Manderson, Kangaroo Courts, 178-84.
43. ^[43] Howard Morphy, Ancestral connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Howard Morphy, Becoming Art: Exploring cross-cultural categories (Oxford: Berg, 2007); National Museum of Australia, Yiwarra Kuju – The Canning Stock Route (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2010).