Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Domestic belongings: Intimate security and the racial politics of scale

Gilbert Caluya
The Centre for Postcolonial and Globalization Studies, The Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Australia, SA 5000

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This article aims to explore the phenomenon of White ressentiment in recent Australian politics by
Received 24 December 2009 tracing the affective mobilization of ‘home’ in the political backlash against multiculturalism through
Received in revised form government and media discourse. Beginning with the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, the first
13 September 2010
section draws on Lauren Berlant’s work in order to recast Hansonism as an intimate public that utilized
Accepted 1 November 2010
‘home’ as a means of fostering affective identification with White belonging in a multicultural context.
The following section explores how Hansonism centred the national imaginary upon a White domes-
Keywords:
ticity, which functioned to create a correspondence between the White family home and the Australian
Belonging
Home
nation. In doing so, Hansonism refashioned migrant (particularly Asian) homes as being unheimlich to the
Hansonism nation. The third section traces how this ‘homely nation’ continued to affect race politics under John
Intimacy Howard’s national security agenda. The conclusion reflects on two arguments that emerge through the
Security article, which give the article its subtitle. The first concerns what I term ‘intimate security’ by which I
Nationalism signal the ways in which domains of security and intimacy converge. I argue that the stability, comfort
Australian politics and intimacy associated with the family home and family values become emblematic of the secure
nation such that public insecurity is often felt as a nostalgia for a lost home. However, this intimate
security is founded upon a White domesticity, such that non-White migrants are rendered unheimlich to
the nation. The term ‘racial politics of scale’ is used to render the ways in which scalar imaginaries are
used to secure particular configurations of race.
Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

White belonging in Western liberal democracies has been
articulated forcefully in the last two decades through a backlash
against multiculturalism (Hewitt, 2005; Stratton, 1998). Growing
recriminations against multiculturalism in America, UK, Australia
and Europe as a failed project of utopian leftist thinking are coupled
with claims that White identities, culture and values are the new
oppressed (see Gilroy, 2004; Hewitt, 2005). Undeterred by actual
statistics of gross racial inequality in health, education and
employment, this new racist discourse portrays White belonging as
being in crisis. White belonging is recast as vulnerable and fragile
by co-opting the rhetoric of the oppressed in what Brown (1993)
has identified as a politics of ressentiment.
In the Australian context, this backlash against multiculturalism
was exemplified by the rise of the One Nation party during the
1990s. On 10 September 1996 Pauline Hanson, leader of the One
Nation party, delivered her maiden speech as a new member of the
House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament. While the
speech marked Hanson’s entrance into the federal political stage it
also importantly indexed a shift in the racial politics of Australia’s
public sphere. She accused an intellectual and political elite e “the
E-mail address: gilbert.caluya@unisa.edu.au.
fat cats, bureaucrats and the do-gooders” e of dividing the country
through Aboriginal welfare and multiculturalism. She argued
that Aboriginal Australians were not disadvantaged but were rather
privileged by welfare programs that were not available to non-
Aboriginal Australians. On the other hand, she raised deep-seated
fears of the ‘yellow peril’, claiming that “we are in danger of being
swamped by Asians”. Multiculturalism, in her view, encouraged
migrants to remain aloof from the rest of Australia. Her speech
thus launched a two-pronged attack on Australia’s twenty-year
multicultural policy, in which she maintained “mainstream
Australians” were suffering from “reverse racism” (House of
Representatives, 1996: 3860e2).
The resentment underlying Hanson’s politics highlights the
fact that White national belonging is an emotionally charged
landscape. Several authors have already explored these “affective
dimensions of nationalism” (Hage, 1998: 73). For example, Ahmed
(2004) shows how White pride organisations draw upon a rhet-
oric of love e love of the nation, love of the White race e as a way of
reconfiguring (and making palatable) their anger as arising from
love. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Hage (1998, 2003) reads
White Australian nationalism as a paranoid fantasy, in which the
patriot feels that the racial ‘Other’ will take away their object of
pleasure, their nation.

1755-4586/$ e see front matter Ó 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2010.11.001
204 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210
The ‘home’, as both figure and place, is a privileged space for
affectively articulating this politics of White ressentiment. At the
centre of Hanson’s argument against Asian immigration stood the
metaphor of the home. In her words:
I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically
reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we
are in danger of being swamped by Asians . They have their
own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.
Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want
into my home, then I should have a say in who comes into my
country. (House of Representatives, 1996: 3862).
The association between ‘country’ and ‘home’ was reinforced
again in her speech to the Victorian branch of the Australian Reform
Party on October 12, 1996: “I can invite who I like into my home,
but I have no say in who comes into my country. This situation
must change” (Hanson, 1997: 17). As Phil Cohen has argued ‘home’
is often used to create an analogy between private household and
public order, which lends itself to processes of racial nationalism.
Home articulates “a myth of origin which evokes a structure of
feeling and fantasy belonging” (Cohen, 1993: 12). Hage makes
a similar point when he reads Hanson’s statements through his
conception of the “homely nation”. As Hage explains, “When the
nationalist feels that he or she can no longer operate in or recognize
the national space in which he or she operates, the nation appears
to be losing its homely character” (Hage, 1998: 40). ‘Home’ in this
sense refers less to a physical house than to a collection of frag-
mented images structured around feelings of familiarity, security
and community (Hage, 1998: 40). The ‘home’ here is an emotional
space (Rubenstein, 2001) or a structure of feeling (Hage, 1998;
Probyn, 1996) that allows it to become a privileged figure for
articulating senses of national belonging.
This article aims to explore the phenomenon of White ressen-
timent in the specific case of recent Australian politics, focusing
on the affective mobilization of the ‘home’ in government and
media discourse as a way of articulating racialised national
belonging. As Ahmed et al. argue, we should question the terms
which delimit the home “as an accomplished site of belonging and
governance”. Homes, they argue, are “always made and remade as
grounds and conditions (of work, of family, of political climate, etc.)
change” (Ahmed et al., 2003: 9). In other words, homes are cultural
sites of political contestation that refers to more than just a physical
house. ‘Home’ may come to signify the nation, the neighbourhood
or just one’s street and can thus occupy multiple scalar levels
simultaneously (Blunt and Dowling, 2006: 27e9). While I recognize
that the notion of ‘scale’ has recently become contentious
among human geographers (Marston et al., 2005), I follow Jones
(1998: 28) in viewing geographical scales as epistemologies e “a
way of knowing or apprehending” e rather than ontologies. In this
sense, ‘home’, ‘nation’, ‘neighbourhood’ or ‘street’ can be consid-
ered different ways of apprehending spatial belonging. However, in
this article I hope to show how the ‘home’ functions as a privileged
form of representational space in Australian nationalism, which at
times co-opts other forms of knowing and apprehending
belonging. In other words, ‘home’ unlike some other scalar epis-
temologies exhibits a certain plastic tendency that enables its
boundaries to expand and shrink, which allows it to signify other
geographical scales. Thus, the home as a multi-scalar imaginary
becomes a fruitful site for analyzing the sociopolitical and affective
construction of racialised belonging.
This article draws on media research and archival research of
the last two decades, bringing together newspaper articles, docu-
mentaries, advertisements, government publications and campaign
material, in order to explore the role of ‘home’ in re-articulating
White national belonging in post-multicultural Australia. I focus in
particular on the decade beginning in 1996 with the election of
Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation party, to the Australian
Parliament because One Nation was a clear instance of the back-
lash against multiculturalism. Despite Hanson’s clumsy entry into
federal politics (she is better known these days as a ‘television
personality’ on shows like Dancing with the Stars), I suggest that
Hansonism’s domestic rendering of White national belonging
continues to haunt contemporary Australian multiculturalism.
The first section contextualizes Hanson within Australia’s history
of race politics in order to show how Hansonism emerges as
a response to multiculturalism. I draw on Lauren Berlant’s work
in order to recast Hansonism as an intimate public that utilized
‘home’ as a means of fostering affective identification with White
belonging. The following section explores how Hansonism centred
the national imaginary upon a White domesticity, which functioned
to create a correspondence between the White family home and
the Australian nation. In doing so, Hansonism refashioned migrant
(particularly Asian) homes as being unheimlich to the nation. The
third section traces how this ‘homely nation’ continued to affect
race politics under John Howard’s national security agenda.
I conclude by reflecting on the two key arguments that are
threaded throughout the essay and which give this article its
subtitle. The first concerns what I term ‘intimate security’, by which
I signify the ways in which domains of security and domains of
intimacy converge. I try to show how the stability, comfort and
intimacy associated with the ‘family home’ and ‘family values’
become emblematic of the secure nation, while insecurity in public
space (such as fear of crime or terrorism) are deeply felt as a loss of
homely feelings. However, in the context of recent Australian
politics this intimate conception of security is grounded upon
White domesticity, in such a way that non-White migrants and
their homes become emblematic of the national unheimlich. I use
the term ‘racial politics of scale’ to refer to the ways in which scale
is used to secure a particular configuration of race relations. In
particular, I explore how the multi-scalar properties of ‘home’ as an
affective space are mobilized to re-privilege White national
belonging within a multicultural context.
1. Domestic commonsense: Hansonism as an intimate public
In order to fully understand the ‘home’ as it functions in Han-
sonism, it is important to gain an appreciation of the historical
significance of Hanson in the political history of race relations in
Australia. The formation of the Australian Federation in 1901 was
fostered by anxieties of coloured labour in the northern states of
Australia, particularly Chinese and Indian labour (Evans et al., 1988;
Markus, 1979, 1994).1 This was evidenced by one of the first acts
of the newly formed parliament, the Immigration Restriction Act
of 1901, which in practice specifically discriminated against non-
British applicants (Yarwood, 1964). Coupled with a suite of legis-
lation that effectively refused basic citizenship rights to Aboriginal
Australians (Reynolds, 1987), this racist policy became known as
the White Australia Policy (Markus, 1994; Tavan, 2005). The White
Australia Policy lasted for over half a century until it was slowly
whittled away between 1966 and 1978 through various policies
and legislations. Policy reforms in 1966 under Harold Holt’s
government extended immigration to non-Europeans, but such
immigrants were unable to qualify for citizenship until 1973 when
1
More recently Reynolds (2003) has questioned the stereotyping of Northern
Australia as racist by detailing the numerous interracial relationships that existed in
Australia’s northern parts. Nevertheless, my point remains that at an ideological
level, fears of cheap coloured labour fueled political debate and was codified
through legislation specifically discriminating against non-White immigrants.
 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210
the Australian Citizenship Act removed British privileges in relation
to citizenship, voting and visas. It was not until the Galbally Report
on migrant services and programs in 1978 that Australia really
turned towards a multicultural policy (Tavan, 2005).
Throughout many of these immigration debates Asians were
often singled out for comment. Several organisations formed in
reaction to this changed immigration policy. One reactionary group,
the Immigration Control Association, had been active from the early
1970s. Further extremist groups surfaced in the following decades
such as the National Front of Australia, the Australian National
Alliance (which eventually became National Action), Australians
Against Further Immigration, the Australian Nationalist Movement
and Asians out! (a Sydney based group). In Perth, the Australian
Nationalist Movement terrorized Asian communities in the late
1980s by fire bombing Asian restaurants. Australians Against
Further Immigration was a single-issue political party formed in
1990 and eventually merged with Pauline Hanson’s One Nation
Party in 2001 (Tavan, 2005: 173, 218e9; see also Hage, 1998).
What we can glean from this admittedly brief historical
description is that Pauline Hanson’s political campaign, which
stood on the twin pillars of anti-Asian and anti-Aboriginal racism,
harked back to the colonial racism that established Australian
Federation in 1901. As Scalmer (1999) notes, claims that Hanson’s
maiden speech instantiated a new racism tend to understate the
existence of racism prior to Hanson. Hanson’s call to reassert an
assimilationist policy for migrants and to repeal affirmative action
welfare programs for Aboriginal Australians to access housing,
education and work can be seen as an attempt to reestablish the
White Australia policy. What was new, however, was the political
landscape in which Hanson intervened, namely, multiculturalism.
As Stratton (1998) adeptly shows, Hanson was not ‘racist’ in the
typical sense of that term. She asserted time and again that she
did not believe that any race was superior to another. Her concern
was not with the Asian race but with Asian culture, which in her
argument is incompatible with Australian culture and did not allow
migrants to fully participate in Australian society. Her argument
was that everyone should be treated equally. Thus, Hanson’s rhet-
oric was ensconced in the liberal notion of equality and the
conception of ethnicity as culturally homogenous, both of which
underpinned Australian multiculturalism (see Stratton, 1998:
53e65).
I suggest that Hansons’ popularity was grounded in her ability
to articulate White Australia as an ‘intimate public’, which re-
centred Whiteness in the context of multiculturalism. In Lauren
Berlant’s terms, an intimate public is “a porous, affective scene of
identification among strangers that promises a certain experience
of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation,
discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x” (Berlant, 2008:
viii). Hanson was an affective scene of identification for White
Australians who felt their sense of belonging threatened by Asian
migrants. She echoed the sentiments of struggling White workers
who were growing tired of ‘the Aboriginal issue’. She resonated
with White Australians that felt they could no longer voice their
concerns for fear of being called racist. In short, she articulated
a form of racism that appealed to the commonsense of the White
Australian public sphere.
Thus, Hansonism was not simply a reversion to the White
Australia Policy era, but was a way of making White racism palat-
able within a multicultural context. It achieved this by occupying
the space of the ‘ordinary’. It is important to note that Hanson
hardly used the term ‘White’, although she does reference ‘Anglo-
Celtic’ culture as the ‘mainstream’ culture (see Stratton, 1998). More
often than not, terms like ‘ordinary Australian’ and ‘mainstream
Australia’ were circulated by Hanson, her supporters and the media.
As Povinelli (1999: 24) argued, “In hailing what she often referred
205
to as ‘ordinary Australians’ Hanson constituted a political space
for all who desired to be such and to have such define the motor
of Australian settler modernity”. In the context of Australian
multiculturalism where mention of race was discouraged, terms
like ‘ordinary’ and ‘mainstream’ opened up a new space of identi-
fication for White Australians, which appeared on the surface at
least to be stripped of race. When asked to define ‘mainstream
Australia’, John Pasquerelli, Hanson’s advisor, said, “I think you see
mainstream Australia every time you go to the football, to the race,
to the beach, to the outback . mainstream Australia. I think it’s
fairly self-evident” (cited in Curro, 1996). Pasquerelli’s definition of
‘mainstream Australia’ does not define a particular group but offers
instead a montage of nationalistic images, which many Australians
would readily recognize. The lack of rigour is unimportant since
what Pasquerelli achieves is to set a stage for the affective identi-
fication with Hansonism as a new mode of national belonging.
This is the significance of Hansonism as opposed to Hanson. The
appeal of “belonging to One Nation involved entering into a fantasy
of reassuming and reordering a harmonious and homogenous
social space; a seamless space in which the presence of otherness
would be kept at bay” (Rutherford, 2001: 196).
This is where the ‘home’ becomes significant for Hansonism. The
imaginary home in Hanson’s speech is the harmonious, homoge-
nous, seamless social space par excellence. The intimate public
sphere renders citizenship as “a condition of social membership
produced by acts and values . originating in or directed towards
the family sphere” (Berlant, 1997: 5). Hansonism’s commonsense,
its ordinary, mainstream quality was recognizable through the
affective immediacy offered by the figure of the family home. In
popular imagination the home is the space of seamless biological,
social and affective kinship ties, which produces and glues together
the ‘we’: ‘we’ may fight occasionally but ‘we’ are still family. The
home is “configured through a positive sense of attachment, as
a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood”
(Gorman-Murray and Dowling, 2007: n.p.). Hansonism romanti-
cizes the nation in terms of the certainty and security of relation-
ships the home protects, but also the intimacy and ease of
communication it fosters. In other words, the ontological security of
the family home comes to signify the security (social and political)
one ought to have in the nation. The ‘home’ becomes a nostalgic
promise of an easier life before multiculturalism: when jobs were
more numerous and easier to obtain; when you knew who your
neighbours were; when Whiteness, heterosexuality and masculin-
ity were not questioned.
Indeed the politics of Hansonism was often seen to emerge from
the home. As reporter Tracey Curro put it in her famous 60 Minutes
interview with Hanson, Hansonism offered “simple homespun
solutions learned at the dinner table” (Curro, 1996). In the partic-
ular scene when Curro makes this comment, she interviews Hanson
as she pours tea for her family around the dinner table. Indeed,
Hanson’s mother claimed that the idea for national service for
teenagers was actually her idea. When asked whether the family
agreed with Pauline Hanson’s comments about Asians, her mother
chimes in: “Well if you go back to when I was young, I was always
taught the yellow race will rule the world and if we don’t do
something now . until we catch up a little bit . I’m afraid, yes, the
yellow race will rule the world” (Curro, 1996). While the White
domestic scene evokes the comfort of family relations it also
underscores the home as a space for learning racism. The White
family home can become a site for the production of racism as
a form of domestic commonsense.
Hansonism functioned to bring this homely racism to public
debate. As tabloid journalist, Mike Gibson, commented at the time,
there are two types of issues: those publicly debated and
“those that people talk about privately. Over the dinner table on
206 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210
Saturday night, around the barbecue on Sunday or up at the pub”
(Gibson, 1996: 10). In Gibson’s portrayal, Hanson becomes a bridge
between the public and private:
What Pauline Hanson chooses to do is to talk about those things
that are discussed privately. Those things that you can’t talk
about because someone will call you a bigot or a racist. Those
things that you know people are talking about because you
hear them privately debated so often, but publicly discussed
so rarely for fear of ridicule and scorn. (Gibson, 1996: 10)
The private is here associated with ‘ordinary’ Australia, typified
by the domestic settings of the family dinner table or barbecue,
while the public is the space of ‘political correctness’ where
domestic commonsense is ‘ridiculed’. Hanson cultivated this image
of commonsense being driven into the private sphere in order to
solidify her difference from the two larger political parties of
Australia, which in her view were ruled by political correctness. As
she said in an interview, “I’ve spoken about something that people
had spoken about behind closed doors for fear of being called
a racist” (cited in Trioli, 1997: 19). While the statement is used to
justify her comments as a right to political expression, it also
functions to turn any critique of Hansonism into an attack on
domestic commonsense, on ‘ordinary’ Australia. Hanson was thus
able to draw attention away from the anger and fear that drove its
racism, by focusing instead on the fear and shame of intellectual
ridicule. Indeed, it turned this shame into a badge of working-class
pride and thus refashioned White resentment of multiculturalism
as a classed resentment against intellectual and political elites.
Thus, Hansonism provided a place of recognition for its members,
allowing them to see their dreams, hopes, aspirations and fears
reflected and thus, reinforcing their fantasy of a seamless social space
that was in fact constituted by the illusion of affective immediacy
offered by the White family home. We can hear this in Barbara
Hazelton’s explanation of why she became Hanson’s secretary:
every time I came home [to Australia] I could see how demo-
ralized people were becoming due in no small way to the effects
of the multicultural policy, the abuses of our immigration system
and the Aboriginal industry . It was as if grassroots Australians
had become second-class citizens. Listening to Pauline was like
hearing my own thoughts. (cited in Symons, 1998: 11)
Hazelton’s explanation equates ‘grassroots Australians’ with the
sense of displacement that comes from the loss of privileged
belonging that Whiteness once held in the nation, without naming
it as a White feeling. As we shall see in the following section, the
figure of the ‘lost home’, which Hazelton alludes to, becomes
a central trope in Hansonism to evoke a sense of crisis in White
belonging within a multicultural context.
2. Intimate security: Unheimlich migrants and the lost home
As I argued above, White national belonging in Hansonism
produced an intimate public as a shared affective configuration,
recognizable through the immediate feelings of familiarity, comfort
and security associated with the family home. By anchoring itself in
the commonsense of the White domestic sphere, Hansonism was
able to occupy the space of the ‘ordinary’ and associate this with
Whiteness without importantly naming it as such. In this instance,
‘home’ functions as a “multi-scalar spatial imaginary”, which allows
it to extend the “intimate material and affective links between
home, self and identity” into other sociopolitical arenas (emphasis
in original, Gorman-Murray and Dowling, 2007: n.p.). It fuels the
assumption that one should feel ‘at home’ among fellow citizens
through a presumed shared intimacy of feeling.
If we recall Hanson’s invocation of the nation as a home, we can
see that it appears in the form of an argument: “If I can invite whom
I want into my home, then I should have a say in who comes into
my country” (House of Representatives, 1996: 3862). That is, the
right to determine the ethnic make-up of the country is premised
on our right to determine who lives in our houses. Immigration
policy is merely an extension of the sovereignty we enjoy over our
own domestic space. While the argument makes sense, what
Hanson achieves is to re-centre the nation as emerging, not from
any home, but her home, that is a White home. Indeed, Hanson
went so far as to imagine herself as “the mother of the nation”:
I care so passionately about this country, it’s like I’m a mother ..
Australia is my home and the Australian people are my children
and I have to look after my home if it is in the interests of my
children. (cited in Anon, 1998: 4)
This maternal metaphor elides the fact that the nation is made
of many homes, including Aboriginal and Asian Australian homes.
By premising its conception of the nation upon a White domestic
phenomenology, Hansonism functions to reconfigure the nation as
a White home.
In this homely imaginary of White national belonging, the col-
oured migrant appears only as a guest in opposition to the White
family. Others may enter the intimate space of the family home
and, depending on their intentions, they are either intruders or
guests, but it never becomes their home. As one Hanson supporter
wrote in a letter to the editor:
I don’t think multiculturalism has served us well. I am one of
those who enjoy meeting people from overseas, and try to help
them cope in their new country and to feel at home. Someone
like me finds it hard to understand why, if Australia and, by
inference, Australian culture, is so desirable, people are coming
in from overseas are encouraged to remain aloof from it.
(Williams, 1996: 3)
A good host will make you feel at home, indeed, they may even
exhort you to make yourself feel at home. But a good guest knows
when to leave and of course never complains about the food or the
cutlery. A good guest, like the good migrant, is eternally thankful
for the hospitality by always appearing grateful and commenting
politely on the furnishings (“I love Australia, it’s such a beautiful
country and the people are friendly”).
Under this domestic metaphor the migrant can never accumu-
late political capital because their claims are never considered
legitimate complaints by concerned citizens over the living condi-
tions of their home. The family may complain about conditions by
right, in fact they might change the order of the house, but the
migrant’s complaints are never considered legitimate (“If you don’t
like it here, why don’t you go back to your own country”). They are
merely guests ungrateful for the kindness of having ‘taken them in’.
They are guests who have too literally made themselves ‘feel at
home’ and ‘overstayed their welcome’. In this context, we should
recall Hanson’s policy of giving refugees temporary visas so that
they could be sent back to their own countries once the political
upheavals had died down. It is the host that remains the arbiter
of good guests (who show the proper gratitude) versus bad guests
(who overstay their welcome).
In order to sustain this national fantasy of the White family
home, Hansonism makes Asian homes extra-ordinary to the nation.
As one Hanson supporter commented of ‘typical oriental suburbs’
in Australia:
There are tiny little houses on tiny bits of ground with funny
little doovers on the roofs, and you drive through it and you
could be back in Old Shangai. At the moment they’re new and
 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210 207

clean but you can see what they’re going to become. (cited in sense of belonging generated by this slippage installs White
Rutherford, 2001: 196) domesticity at the heart of the nation such that Asian homes
become unheimlich to the nation, literally making the nation both
From Valery’s “English” perspective these Asian homes are
uncanny and unhomely. This racial politics of scale is important
“untidy” and in contrast she argues Australians “like our backyards
for contemporary forms of Australian racism since it re-privileges
with trees in ‘em” (Rutherford, 2001: 196). It would be too easy to
White belonging in the nation without naming it as White.
question this strange interpretation of Australian domestic
aesthetics, but this would miss the affective impetus of her claims.
3. Homegrown terrorism: Homeland security under John
Asian homes here are signifiers of White alienation. They index
Howard
White Australian feelings of displacement, of not feeling ‘at home’
in their own country. As Hanson put it, “I don’t want Australia to
Despite Hanson’s brief appearance in Australian federal politics,
become Asian-ised. Australians are feeling like foreigners in their
Hansonism’s articulation of the ‘home’ continued to influence
own country” (cited in Vass, 1998: 13).
Australian politics under Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s rule.
This nostalgia for the ontological security of home should be
Indeed, part of Howard’s success relied on his ability to re-occupy
resituated in the media context of growing fears of ‘ethnic crime’.
the space of ‘ordinary or mainstream Australia’ by investing in
For example, in 1990 there were only five mentions of ‘Asian/ethnic
the myth of ‘lost family values’ espoused by Hansonism. This was
gang/crime’ in major Australian newspapers.2 By 1994 it jumped to
evidenced by a series of public information campaigns targeting
58 mentions and averaging approximately 70 mentions between
the family home from 2001 to 2007. In March 2001, the Howard
1996 (the year of Hanson’s election) and 1999. This metonymic
government launched its National Illicit Drugs Campaign. Family
association between ethnicity and crime explains the ‘newness’ of
households were also sent an information booklet titled Talking
crimes as a result of the ‘new’ immigration policy and the changing
with your kids about drugs, which claimed “One of the most effective
ethnic and racial composition of suburbs this produced. In this
deterrents to drug use amongst young people is a parent who is
association, migrant homes are configured as breeding grounds
devoted to spending time with them” (Department of Health and
for new crime waves, which directly threaten the White family
Ageing, 2001: 5). In 2007, the Department of Communications,
home. For example, media reports on home invasions often linked
Information Technology and the Arts launched a $189 million
the phenomenon to Asian gangs. One article claimed that “Asian
internet safety campaign targeting family homes, following
gangs have perfected the raiding techniques” used in home
increased public concern over paedophilia. The information
robberies and was part of a wider “invasion trend . common in
booklet distributed to households, NetAlert: Protecting Australian
overseas cities boasting large Asian communities” (Allison, 1994:
Families Online, carried ominous messages from the Prime Minister:
27). Unsurprisingly then, during One Nation’s campaign, David
“Offensive materials are just a few mouse clicks away and not
Oldfield, Hanson’s senior advisor, claimed that ‘home invasion’ was
everyone your children meets online can be trusted” (DCITA, 2007:
“an ethnic-related crime . a recent import to Australia and it is not
3). It urged parents to educate their children about potential
home-grown” (cited in Mallabone, 1998: 11).
dangers in cyberspace and to supervise their internet usage.
These feelings of displacement coincide with nostalgia for
Both campaigns fostered a paranoid imaginary in which the
a perceived lost ontological security attached to ‘family values’. In
family home was portrayed as a vulnerable space under attack
a chapter on the gun debate, Hanson asked “Why have serial kill-
from paedophiles and drug dealers. Both campaigns suggested
ings . become more evident in recent years? Why has thoughtless,
that the best line of defence was to ‘talk to your kids’. The
brutal violence spread into our streets and homes?” (Hanson, 1997:
underlying assumption in these campaigns is that youth drug
30). The answer, according to Hanson, is the spread of media
abuse and sexual abuse results from lost ‘family values’, which
violence into the family home, unemployment and the “erosion of
must be recovered through reestablishing domestic intimacy. By
family values” (Hanson, 1997: 30). Hanson’s solution was to make
configuring the family home as the space of intimate security,
guns more available to ordinary citizens for protection: “When you
such campaigns cannot recognize the fact that child sexual abuse
become the victim of the new crime of home invasion perhaps
is often perpetrated by family members, that families may be the
you can ask the invaders why they didn’t hand in their guns when
cause of drug abuse nor that the majority of women who are
you did” (Hanson cited in Sweetman, 1997: 9). Thus Hansonism
killed are killed by intimate partners. The campaigns were thus
evoked a besieged White family home that metonymically relates
designed to elicit public fear over the fragility of the domestic
a doubled loss of ontological security e lost national belonging
sphere, calling upon the homeowner citizen-soldier to protect the
and family values.
family.
Thus, ‘home’ under Hansonism becomes a space of intimate
Yet the paranoid imaginary of the family home cannot be occu-
security, by which I mean to gesture to the ways in which domains
pied by just anybody. For example, following debates in America
of intimacy and domains of security begin to converge. On the one
and the UK about ‘gay marriages’, Howard intervened to ensure that
hand, growing feelings of personal insecurity, such as fear of crime,
marriage would not be extended to same-sex couples. He claimed
were expressed as a loss of feeling ‘at home’, that is the loss of
that to “treat a gay union the same way as you treat a union between
feelings of familiarity, security, belonging and intimacy associated
a man and a woman is, in my view, to misunderstand the funda-
with the family home. Conversely, ‘lost family values’ were often
mental bedrock character of marriage”. In Howard’s view the debate
cited as causes of other social malaise. ‘Home’ in the instances cited
was “about the survival of the species” (cited in Bita, 2003: 1)
above becomes a vehicle for articulating intimacy and security
alluding to the infertility of such relationships. However, Howard
between different geographical scales (between the family home
also moved to change the Anti-Discrimination Act in order to
and the nation). In the specific case of Hansonism, however, the
stop single women and lesbians from accessing IVF reproduction
technology. This was a direct response to the Federal Court’s deci-
sion that the Victorian Infertility Act did not comply with the
2
The figures are taken from a media content analysis using the Factiva search Federal Anti-Discrimination Act (see Meldrum, 2000). Thus, under
engine. ‘Asian/ethnic gang/crime’ includes ‘Asian gang(s)’, ‘Asian crime/criminals’,
‘ethnic gang(s)’ and ‘ethnic crime/criminals’. ‘Major Australian newspapers’
the Howard government the domestic sphere was governed by
includes all Australian capital city newspapers, national newspapers and national conservative conceptions of the heteronormative nuclear family,
magazines. which excluded single mothers, gay men and lesbians.
208 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210
The intimate space of the family home also excluded migrant
homes. That the private has increasingly become further privatized
as a privilege affordable only by some is most obvious in the
discourse around homegrown terrorism. Raids on Muslim homes
were conducted following the October 2002 Bali bombings, which
killed 80 Australians and significantly impacted Australian’s
perception of the War on Terror. While some Australians were
reluctant at first to be involved in the War on Terror (since it was
considered to be an American problem) the 2002 Bali bombings
were portrayed by the media and the Australian government as
‘bringing the terror home’. Following these attacks, armed federal
police and ASIO agents (Australian Security Intelligence Organisa-
tion) “with sledgehammers and sub machine guns” raided several
Muslim homes in Sydney and Perth, which were believed to be
connected to Jemaah Islamiah (the group that claimed responsi-
bility for the Bali attacks) (Morris and Rowlands, 2002: 1). The raids
were part of a “nationwide telephone-tapping operation” (Horan
and Watson, 2002: 1).
Such home raids and telephone-tapping operations deny
ontological security to immigrant family homes. A teenage female
who was home alone when it was raided was traumatized by the
incident: “I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything since . I
feel insecure e as if I’m being watched” (Horan and Watson, 2002:
1). In another incidence, two children were left “petrified ever since
ASIO officers raided their house”. The children, aged 8 and 10, “still
scream every time someone knocks on the door” (Horan and
Watson, 2002: 1). Media reporting of the events contributed to
rising fears within the Muslim Australian community of their homes
being targeted. One letter to a newspaper editor describes a Mus-
lim family woken in the middle of the night by a knock on the door.
when the bell chimed, their first feeling was one of fear. They
woke their son and daughter, rushed them to the back room
and told them to hide. Not to come out for anyone. Then
together, the husband and wife cautiously opened their front
door. (Haywood, 2002: 14)
In such cases we see that the ontological security of domestic
space, which was assumed in the previous drug and internet safety
campaigns, is effectively denied to Muslim immigrants. As Puar
astutely points out such raids challenge “the stabilization of
nuclear heterosexual and extended kinship intimacies”. While her
argument is made with regard to the American government’s ‘hold
until clear’ policy, her conclusion that for immigrants “the private is
a spatialized configuration of the elusive and aspired to affects of
national belonging”, which are denied to some migrants, is relevant
here (Puar, 2007: 145e6).
A few months after these raids on Muslim homes, fear of
homegrown terrorism was further cultivated by the Australian
National Security Public Information campaign. In early 2003 the
Australian government sent an ‘anti-terror kit’ to all Australian
households, which relied on similar marketing strategies to the
drug and internet safety campaigns. The kit contained an intro-
ductory letter from the then Liberal Prime Minister John Howard,
a booklet titled Let’s look out for Australia: protecting our way of life
from a possible terrorist threat (Abetz, 2003) and a fridge magnet
with the number of a national security hotline. The kits were part
of the first phase of the National Security Public Information
Campaign3 and were preceded by a television and newspaper
3
All the posters, newspaper advertisements and television advertisements can
be downloaded from the Australian National Security website, see http://www.
nationalsecurity.gov.au/agd/www/nationalsecurity.nsf/Page/Information_for_
IndividualsNational_Security_Public_Information_Campaign (accessed 20/02/
2008).
advertisement campaigns. One television advertisement featuring
Steve Lieberman, a morning television and radio host, called on
Australians “to work together to protect our way of life from the
threat of terrorism.” The advertisement advised the Australian
public that they will be sent a booklet, “so we can all be informed
and play a part.” It calls on an active sense of citizenship, asking
ordinary Australians to take up an active role in the fight against
terrorism. Again evoking a sense of community, the advertisement
ends with the phrase: “Together let’s look out for Australia.”
While the advertisement seems to reinvigorate a sense of
community it does so by mobilizing suspicion. Here ‘we’ become
citizens through our vigilance against terrorist threats. In the
television advertisement, Lieberman explained that the booklet
“has examples of the sorts of things to be alert for” as well as
“advice from leading counter-terrorism experts”. The press adver-
tisement likewise claimed that “all of us can play a part by keeping
an eye out for anything suspicious”. The fear of ‘homegrown’
terrorism continued in Australian media, particularly following the
London bombings in 2005 (see Kearney and O’Brien, 2005;
Pearlman, 2009; Seyit, 2005). By September 2005, ASIO had
increased the number of Australians considered security risks from
70 to between 700 and 800 individuals (see Kerin and King, 2005;
Walters, 2005).
Such information campaigns fashion the family home into
a space for the cultivation of a suspicious citizenship, in which
families are called upon to spy on their neighbours. Far from
fostering a sense of community, neighbour’s homes become sites of
anxiety. Yet the raids on Muslim homes and the media panic
surrounding Muslim terrorists clearly directed suspicion onto
certain bodies and homes. One article reporting on homegrown
terrorism, titled ‘So, how well do you think you really know your
neighbours?’ (McIlveen and McPhedran, 2005: 1), draws on the
unheimlich in order to represent this sense of lost security. The
article uses seemingly banal details to paint innocuous portraits of
ordinary men e “loving father”, “professional spray painter”,
“gifted Australian rules footballer” e before exposing their
extremist tendencies. We are told the suspected terrorists “had
a distinctive Australian flavour”: they live ordinary lives, have
wives and children, play sport, work in everyday honest labour
and “all of them spoke English”. And yet this very ordinariness must
be taken as a façade as if their work, their lives, their children were
just a ‘cover’: “His job as an electrician, it seemed, was only to fill
in time between taking revenge against Australia” (McIlveen and
McPhedran, 2005: 2).
The article laments the loss of the innocence of the ordinary
Australian suburb, “neighbourhoods where honest working men
once raised their families”. At the same time, it throws the
mundane into terrifying relief as it reveals that “normal household
chemicals you could expect to find in any Australian backyard shed”
could be used to create explosives. It describes two wives posing
for photographers in their backyard, noting the national icon,
a “traditional gas barbeque”, in the background. “They could have
been two ordinary women living the great Australian dream of the
quarter-acre block, except each was covered from head to toe by
a burkha and married to men accused of planning mass murder”
(McIlveen and McPhedran, 2005: 2, 28). The article shows how
the great Australian dream of owning your own home has been
twisted uncannily to hide the criminal intentions of malevolent
others. The home and the sovereignty over our own private space is
now viewed as a privilege perverted by terrorists. Homegrown
terrorism is thus emblematic of our fears that the other seeks to
turn our democracy against us. Muslim homes become unheimlich
to the secure nation, embodying fears that migrant others hide
malevolent intentions, at the same time that domestic intimacy is
denied to Muslim homes.
 G. Caluya / Emotion, Space and Society 4 (2011) 203e210
The fact that Muslims have taken the place of Asians in the
White homely nation fantasy of Australia is perhaps most evident
in Pauline Hanson’s latest media scandal. While preparing to
move to the UK, Hanson declared that she would not sell her house
to a Muslim although she would consider selling it to an Australian
of Asian descent (Vasek, 2010). Although Hanson’s foray into
federal politics was brief, her ability to articulate a national fantasy
of belonging based on the ontological security provided by family
intimacy continues to resonate in contemporary Australian political
discourse. Just as Asian homes under Hansonism represented the
breakdown of public order, so too did Muslim homes under John
Howard’s national security framework symbolise the insecurity
and helplessness felt in the face of international terrorism. While
the debate seemed to shift from a racial rhetoric to a religious
one, both functioned to refashion non-White migrant homes as
symbolic of the national unheimlich. In both cases, migrant homes
become lightning rods for the racial anxieties many White people
feel from a perceived ‘failure of multiculturalism’.
4. Conclusion
Although the invocation of the nation as a home is not new,
what I have tried to show in this article is how Hansonism’s invo-
cation of the “homely nation” was able to re-centre and re-privilege
White national belonging within multicultural Australia. ‘Ordinary’,
‘mainstream’ Australia became metonymically linked to Whiteness
by premising its conception of the nation upon White domesticity
without naming it as White. I wish to stress that I am not suggesting
that migrants cannot find ways to make themselves a home. Many
authors have written extensively of migrants’ ‘homing desires’ or
their ability to create communities of ‘intimate ethnicity’ (Fortier,
2000). My concern throughout this article has been to under-
stand how ‘the home’ functions in contemporary Australian racial
politics to imagine senses of belonging, intimacy and security.
In doing so, I have tried to show how the ontological security
associated with the familial intimacy of White domestic space
becomes symbolic of the secure nation. On the one hand, feelings of
insecurity in the wider sociopolitical arena (such as crime, unem-
ployment and terrorism) are often deeply felt as a loss of ‘home’
and the intimate sense of security provided by domestic space.
On the other hand, lost ‘family values’ are blamed for other social
insecurities such as drug abuse, crime and sexual abuse. In other
words, ‘home’ functions to transpose feelings of security, belonging
and intimacy between the White family household and wider
scalar levels such as one’s street, neighbourhood, suburb or nation.
At the same time, however, this scale-jumping between White
family household and the nation, which the plasticity of ‘home’
allows, privileges White domesticity in national belonging such
that migrant (particularly coloured migrant) homes become
emblematic of the national unheimlich. This points to one reason
why contemporary racism is so difficult to challenge, since to
question it is to undermine the very intimate senses of belonging
and security it secures.
The challenge for Western democracies will continue to be how
to imagine senses of belonging, intimacy and security that
includes migrant others. Given the spatial constraints of this article
I am unable to expand on this further here. However, I do want to
point out that although the White homely nation fantasy is
a dominant form of imagining national belonging it is not totalising.
It is a poetic irony that this is exemplified by one of the victims of
the raids on Muslim homes. In one of the raids, the wife of one of
the Muslim men suspected of links to terrorism, “offered ASIO and
federal police officers Indonesian sweets and drinks, but was
turned down” (Karvelas et al., 2002: 9). Even in the midst of a home
invasion, while police and security forces interrogate her husband,
209
rifle through their personal belongings and confiscate household
items, she nevertheless treats the invaders as guests. It is both
a desperate gesture to salvage the intimacy of her domestic space
and a gesture of migrant hospitality even in the face of blatant
national inhospitality. Far from being a ‘passive migrant’, her act is
a politico-ethical gesture that foregrounds the inhospitality of the
state against the overabundance of migrant hospitality, which
forces the officers to recognize their hostility by evoking their
shame. The question, of course, is whether the police and security
forces, and by extension Australians in general, are capable of
feeling this sense of shame.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Elspeth Probyn for her numerous comments and
ongoing support and Sara Ahmed, Kane Race and Lawrence
Grossberg for commenting on older versions of this article. Also
thanks to Pal Ahluwalhia for supporting my move to South
Australia and for his intellectual generosity. This research has been
made possible by the generous funding of the Australian Post-
graduate Award and College of Social Sciences Research Award
granted to me by the University of Sydney as well as my current
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of South
Australia. I am grateful to these institutions for providing chal-
lenging intellectual environments within which to work.
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Gilbert Caluya Gilbert Caluya is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of
South Australia currently researching Islamic diversity in Australia. He completed his
PhD thesis “Terror’s Terroritoris: Fear, Politics and Everyday Space” in 2008 with the
Gender and Cultural Studies Department, University of Sydney where he taught for
several years. His research interests include everyday security and surveillance, affect
and emotion, the cultural politics of intimacy, queer theory and critical race theory.