Most of us organise our lives according to priorities. We get caught up in routines. The degree to which these impinge on our ability to respond to what is occurring outside our immediate areas of concern is a vexed question. Brueghel, in his mid-16th century painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, examined this.
The dominant figure in Brueghel's landscape is a ploughman on the side of a cliff. With his back to the sea, he negotiates the wooden plough drawn by his horse. If he heard Icarus falling from the heavens into the sea it didn't interrupt his routine. The crew of a ship close enough to rescue the drowning boy instead takes advantage of a favourable breeze and sails away. The shepherd daydreams, the angler continues fishing. To all intents and purposes Icarus is invisible to those in his immediate vicinity.
Since the 1990s consecutive Australian Federal Governments have had a penchant to render asylum seekers invisible to the general public. Our political leaders, working on the assumption that out of sight will mean out of mind, have prevented the media from having access to camps on the mainland or on Manus Island and Nauru. Kevin Rudd brought this to new lows with his 'PNG Solution', a policy which has now been adopted by Tony Abbott.
It's difficult to relate to stories of personal human suffering while we accept or embrace policies which deliberately exclude us from witnessing or hearing about them. While asylum seekers remain an anonymous group, rather than individual men, women and children with names and life stories, they and their sufferings remain invisible.
For a moment in mid-2013 the possibility of asylum seekers becoming visible seemed a reality. On 17 JulyChristmas Island Administrator, Joh Stanhope, called for the name of a baby boy, who drowned when an asylum seeker boat capsized, to be made public by the Australian Government. This was never done, and his body, along with the bodies of others from the same boat, remained nameless in the morgue. Were his parents among the drowned? Or were they rescued and left to grieve?
When we know people's names, backgrounds, history, when we see them and hear them, we can relate to them as individuals. We can like or dislike them, agree or disagree, sympathise with or criticise them, but we can no longer treat them as part of an anonymous mass that can be shifted here or