Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia

by Jon Stratton

Uncertain Lives is the first book to examine the impact of neoliberal policies on everyday life in Australia. Going beyond the discussions of multiculturalism that dominated the 1980s and 1990s, Uncertain Lives examines the persistence of race and racism in the Australian experience. While the governments of John Howard followed the rhetoric of neoliberalism in suggesting that market forces dominated social relations, in reality the racism that had been founded in the White Australia policy became again increasingly acceptable, and accepted, in a society no longer subject to the values of multiculturalism. Uncertain Lives tracks this racism from its pervasiveness in everyday life to the ways race influenced decisions about who would, and would not, be allowed into Australia. From discussions of asylum seekers to migrants to the ways that thinking about the border itself has been transformed, Uncertain Lives charts the recent history of the Australian experience. Uncertain Lives ranges over events such as the Cronulla Riots of 2005 and the 2006 Beaconsfield mine rescue and uses a variety of recent films to highlight the impact of race in a society where liberal and social democratic values have been replaced by neoliberal ideology.

265 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in the School of Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. He has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of eleven books and has co-edited two. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books included Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), and When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014).

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is at its very best when it is discussing Australian films and how these are influenced by the increasingly large leaps to the right Australian politics has faced since the 1970s. One of the things I hadn’t really thought about before, and this book encouraged me to, was that the kinds of films that become popular in a country reflect something that is going on in the ‘national psyche’ – and the thing that is always going on in the Australian national psyche is the imagined threat of us being overrun by hordes of foreigners pouring over our borders.

Borders are incredibly important to Australians. Not least because we think of ourselves as an island nation. This gives Australia an odd sense of precariousness. You need to remember mainland Australia is about the same size as the USA without Alaska. This isn’t really your standard island, you know, don’t think single palm tree and man with straw hat beside a pile of coconuts. Australia is about 30 times bigger than the UK, I’m not sure the UK really sees itself as an island in quite the same way we do – despite it having much more reason to – you know, 30 times more reason to.

So, we have very strange ideas about threats and this feeds into a savage natural cruelty when it comes to others - particularly non-white, non-Christian others. And these 'threats' haunt our nightmares and so are reflected in our films. But where this book was particularly interesting was around the phenomenon that has taken over much of the world – Zombies. I’d never really thought about zombies very much before, but it is certainly interesting that they seem to have risen from the dead at about the time the world started becoming obsessed with refugees. Refugees being people ‘without lives’ (or with bare life, as the author points out) virtually by definition – hence why they are seeking to come to somewhere where they can finally have a life. He even talks about Sean of the Dead – a film I’ve actually seen, but now can’t remember hardly at all – and how 'the humans' take refuge in an English pub against the zombies who are desperately trying to get in and how the British Army finally rescues them. God, it is all so obvious when someone explains it…

The other reason why you should read this book is the discussion of the ‘two rescues’ – one of a couple of Australian miners (true heroes, obviously - they were white, after all) and another of two Torres Strait Islanders who, at the same time, survived a ship wreck, being lost at sea for a month, losing 20 kilograms and nearly starving to death – but who were accused in the media (without any evidence) of being criminals on the run. Sometimes it is tempting to suspect there might well be a God after all – one who creates mirror like situations this just to show us how stuffed we really are.

This book shines a torch into the dark unconscious of the Australian nightmare.