Sometimes events take on a significance beyond their historical context. They come to define an issue. That was the case with Gallipoli and the Eureka Stockade. It may also prove to be the case with the bodies left in the water after an asylum seeker boat sank, the delay by the Australian authorities to take responsibility for their recovery, and the eventual decision to search for them.
There were no doubt pressing economic, logistical and legal reasons for the initial hesitation. Watching out for the living may have been given precedence. But unburied bodies have a powerful significance. Families who do not have the opportunity to bury their dead relatives speak of how the inability sharpens the agony of their loss.
Australians have recently shared the grief of Daniel Morcombe's family and seen the importance for them of finding his remains.
In many cultures, too, there is a compelling religious obligation to bury the dead because their next life depends on it. So we can only imagine the torment of the relatives of those lost at sea if they knew that the bodies of those whom they loved might have been recovered for burial, but the attempt was not made.
In texts foundational for Western democracy, too, the burial of bodies has a central place. Sophocles, Athenian dramatist and general, explores Antigone's burial of her rebel brother in defiance of the king's order to leave him unburied. Reasons of state to do with public order conflicted with the claims of humanity and moral order. The conflict led to tragic results for all the protagonists. Many playwrights, including Jean Anouilh at the time of the Vichy government of France, have returned to the story.
The symbolism of the asylum seekers' unburied bodies goes to the heart of the conflict between reasons of state and compassion so evident in Australian discussion of asylum seekers. They are worth setting out unpolemically.
The reasons of state can be expressed in the unchanging determination of Australian Governments to ensure that Australia decides whom it accepts into the community. They have always wished to set its refugee policy within this order. The practices and rhetoric of successive governments have been designed to vindicate this order in face of the threat seen in on-shore asylum seekers.
The practices of mandatory detention, denial of work rights, introduction of temporary detention, excision of Australia from the immigration zone and opening of detention centres outside Australia are