By Tess Lawrence
CONGRATULATIONS Australia. It’s a baby boy!
Delivered to unknown parents only months ago, the baby’s legal guardian, Australia’s Minister for Immigration Tony Burke – http://www.tonyburke.com.au/ – has been coy about the bub’s weight, ethnicity, name and his ranking in line of succession to the British throne.
The Minister has yet to release pictures of his ward.
The water baby was found apparently drowned in turbulent political seas after the asylum seeker boat he was on, capsized.
His body was later despatched to nearby Christmas Island and pronounced D.O.A.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_on_arrival – before or about or after July 14th.
For the time being, he’s been swaddled in industrial plastic wrap and plonked into an expanded fridge that doubles as the island’s morgue.
We could take a stab at his body weight, but much depends on whether he was snap frozen and drained of seawater beforehand.
He was put at the back of the shelf, because he is already well past his ‘use-by’ date.
The little tacker might be of Iranian, Afghanistani, Sri Lankan or human origin, so it is likely his birth was accompanied by gunfire, though not in any salutary way and the bells of hell may well have been pealing at the time.
A phalanx of breathless media is gathered around the gates of Buckingham Palace and any minute the Queen of Australia is expected to announce the baby’s name.
This protocol has been implemented because recently Australia has both excised
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54103
and excused itself from global geographical and moral existence.
Once again, we are Terra Nullius and Nullius Terra. So for Mother England it is like old times.
It may be that if the biological parents of ‘Baby Atticus Stanhope Gondwana’ (a temporary name I have given the baby) cannot be found, or it is proven that they deliberately drowned themselves, that parentage and ownership of the corpse automatically reverts to the Queen for burial; perhaps in Westminster Abbey, as a Commonwealth symbol of the universal tomb of the ‘unknown refugee’ cast in similar spirit and deference to the universal tomb of the ‘Unknown Soldier.’
On the other hand, ‘Baby X’ (morgue home brand name) would prove an excellent bottled artefact and curio for any offshore and outsourced Asylum Seekers of Australia Museum; the remains kept in perpetuity so future generations can see how nobly and compassionately Australia unflinchingly adhered to the spirit of the The 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.
Such a project lends itself to sub-contracted custodians sadly in need of civilising by us, like the wilfully evasive and probably unbaptised heathen Sentinelese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples.
In the meantime, perhaps Minister Burke could take his cue from Jon Stanhope, the Christmas Island Administrator who was unafraid of revealing his personal pain to the ABC’s Peter Lloyd on PM:
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2013/s3804593.htm last Wednesday.
From the ABC transcript:
JOHN (sic) STANHOPE: We now have mortuary facilities that will cater for 50 bodies and, you know, that’s a statement in itself, is that within the last year we have increased our mortuary capacity from about five to about 50.
PETER LLOYD: Jon Stanhope’s only been in the administrator’s job since October but he’s become all too aware that the people of Christmas Island carry a heavy burden from living at the nation’s front door.
JOHN STANHOPE: I sometimes wish that perhaps some of the debate and some of the commentary and some of the discourse, that each of us would perhaps look at asylum seekers not as a bulk, anonymous grouping of individuals but as individual human beings that, you know, have hopes and aspirations and dreams and feel the same pain and suffer the same grief as each of us.
… you know, we have a one year old baby in our mortuary, the child of an asylum seeker family.
And I wish we named – that’s one of the things I’ve sought to pursue is that even then we don’t name the deceased or we don’t name them publicly…and I wish we did. I wish we humanised them.
I wish we gave them that respect in death that we were prepared to name those that die.
And I think it would be nice if we did that.
It would be wonderful if Jon Stanhope was prepared to exercise his official perogative and do
just that; to at least name Baby X. It could also be a special compassionate act for Ramadan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan, if the baby is from a Muslim family, as is rumoured.
I suspect we can better rely on Administrator Stanhope rather than Minister Burke to inform Australians of the autopsy results and notify us on how long the baby had been dead in the water before its corpse was recovered.
Will the body be repatriated to the country of origin?
Or will it be transported to our latest ‘asylum seeker folly’ and squabbling ally, Papua New Guinea http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2013/s3808537.htm in an Esky, where the little tacker and other wannabe asylum seekers are no longer our problem?
Has PNG learned nothing from the period of enlightenment when we were their colonial masters?
* Illustration by: the devil made me do it
Earlier, on Independent Australia, here
Join us to voice your anger
at ‘our’ federal government’s new ‘policy’ to ship asylum seekers to Papua New Guinea!
• Saturday, July 27, Civic Square Launceston, Noon: Rally for Asylum Seeker Rights
Where: Civic Square Launceston
When: Saturday 27th July at 12pm
Who: Everyone who believes that human rights are for everyone, and are everyone’s business!
• Dr Ian Broinowski, in Comments: Two babies: unnamed, each cherished, nurtured and loved by their parents. One lies in the chilled darkness of the Christmas Island mortuary waiting to be buried by strangers, unknown, unloved and soon forgotten. All our Gods appear indifferent to the plight of the desperate and displaced, our politicians helpless. The other lies in a Palace with loving parents and an enraptured World where Gods are traditionally monarchists and politicians smitten. Two baby boys: one may prick our Nation’s conscience, if only for a fraction of time, the other will, one day, be Australia’s Head of State and our King.
• Ann O’Connor, Germany, in Comments: … My response to them? I hang my head in shame. I have no justifiable explanation. I can’t say, it’s a conservative government with little understanding of, or commitment to social responsibility. I can’t say, Australia is a poor country. I can’t say, Australia has more than its fair share of asylum seekers. We are eleventh on the list, taking 3% of the world’s homeless and disenfranchised. This argument is not likely to convince my Swedish clients whose country is currently fourth on the list taking 9%. Nor will it satisfy my German colleagues, with Germany in second position at 13%. There is no defensible excuse …
