Performing the Border: Australia’s Judgment of ‘Unauthorised Arrivals’ at the airport

This paper examines the process of interviewing unauthorised arrivals at Australian

airports to determine whether they have a prima facie claim for asylum. Through focusing on

this initial inclusion or exclusion, attention is drawn to the processes of maintaining a border.

As a judgment is performed on an interviewee, so the border is augured into being. From within

a postcolonial approach to the national border as a liminal enaction, the paper addresses the

place of law in securing exclusion, and the place of exclusion in securing national identity.

These two related tropes are considered through the language of universality which, it is shown,

is an assimilative technology leaving no room for the ethics of alterity which could enable an

ethical legal engagement between Australia and those who arrive at its borders in need of

asylum.