Missing water: imagination and empathy in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen

Abstract

Australia's cultural and political life is dominated by the image of the boat, most recently in the form of border anxiety concerning asylum seekers arriving by boat from the north. In this context, it is surprising to note the cinematic refrain of a literal absence of boats in Asian Australian ‘boat stories’ on screen, by which the visual iconography of the boat (as a physical object) is disavowed at the same time as it is underscored and over-exploited in the service of a certain kind of politicized cinema. This paper traces a trajectory from Steven Wallace's Turtle Beach (1992) to more recent film and television examples including Khoa Do's Mother Fish (2010) and the Special Broadcasting Service's Go Back to Where You Came From (2011–2012). Regarding Asian Australian narratives as merely ‘boat stories’ disavows their wider significance by reducing them to personal histories, but these ‘boat stories without boats’ ask far more in terms of the imaginative investment required of spectators in order to generate empathy, in this case towards the plight of asylum seekers.

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