The melancholic torturer: How Australia became a nation that tortures refugees

Abstract

Australia’s treatment of refugees and asylum seekers has been found to constitute a regime of cruelty and neglect that amounts to torture. This article seeks to answer the question: how did Australia become a state that uses torture on refugees? It uses Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia to suggest the majority of the Australian electorate made a decision to forgo the work of mourning in 1996, to deny the need to bury the myth of the kindly coloniser. This stillborn mourning became melancholia. As a consequence of denying the need to bury the myth of the kindly coloniser, a majority of the electorate reverted to the primitive and defensive split position to create a ‘good’ compassionate and generous Australia to the ‘bad’ manipulative refugees. Isolation, propaganda, law as tactic and privatising detention then led to an operationalising of this defensive melancholia, which ultimately culminated in torture.

Boulding’s Psychic Capital: The Linking of Individual and Collective Identities

“…Collective depression is often found in detained communities, such as ghettos, asylum-seeker camps, concentration camps or other places where all prospects of release are extremely improbable and is recognizable by a high incidence of suicide (Macken, 2019).…”

Client States: Australia's Offshore Detainees and the Limits of Therapy

“…One former detainee on Nauru attests that “every single element in the centre was designed to torture the inmates” (Zivardar and Tofighian, 2021). Independent scholars and watchdogs have affirmed that Australia's treatment of refugees amounts to torture (Amnesty International, 2016; Macken, 2020; Méndez, 2015). Conditions at the facilities are notoriously inhumane: Exposure to scorching temperatures, rotten food, restricted drinking water, unsanitary living conditions, and verbal and physical abuse have been reported as common occurrences (Farrell et al., 2016; Lovejoy, 2017).…”