Journeys and Star Gazing

Flotillas of Hope was an Australian maritime protest against the Howard government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers on Nauru under the Pacific Solution. The action began with an internet call for people to sail to Nauru, transforming opposition to offshore detention into a physical voyage across the Pacific.

The flotilla consisted of two vessels, Eureka and One Off. Eureka left Sydney on 15 May 2004, and the two boats departed Brisbane together on 23 May. They sailed through the Solomon Islands towards Nauru, intending to arrive for World Refugee Day on 20 June. Those aboard carried messages of solidarity, handmade gifts and teddy bears for the refugees. The entire return journey covered approximately 11,000 kilometres.

The voyage challenged one of the foundations of the Pacific Solution: distance. By transferring asylum seekers to a small and isolated Pacific island, the Australian government had placed them beyond the ordinary reach of journalists, advocates and the Australian public. Access was tightly controlled, making independent observation and reporting extremely difficult. The refugees were not merely detained offshore; they were largely removed from public view.

In this respect, Flotillas of Hope can be understood as a form of social-action aikido. In aikido, an opponent’s force is not met directly but entered, redirected and turned back upon itself. The government had used distance and isolation to produce invisibility and public indifference. The flotilla used that same distance to create an extraordinary journey capable of attracting public attention.

The government’s intended sequence was:

distance → isolation → invisibility → public indifference

The flotilla redirected it:

distance → extraordinary voyage → government obstruction → media attention

The boats carried satellite phones, radios and other communications equipment. Crew members reported their journey through online logs and gave live interviews from the sea to Australian and international media. In this way, they became both participants in the action and witnesses reporting it. Although the authorities controlled physical access to Nauru, they could not exercise the same control over the story unfolding beyond its shores.

Nauru refused the crews visas and warned that entering its territorial waters could result in fines, imprisonment and the seizure of their boats. When the flotilla arrived, the authorities prevented the crews from landing and ordered them to leave. The promised meeting at sea, during which refugees were supposedly to receive the gifts, did not take place.

In a conventional sense, the flotilla had been stopped. Yet the obstruction became part of its success. After Australians had crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean carrying toys and messages of hope, the refusal to allow them ashore exposed the determination of the authorities to prevent direct contact with the refugees. The government’s barrier became the news.

The greater the effort to exclude the flotilla, the more visible the machinery of exclusion became. The action did not simply tell people that Nauru was isolated; it publicly demonstrated that isolation. The crews’ inability to land revealed more powerfully than an ordinary protest could have done how offshore detention depended upon distance, secrecy and the control of access.

During the voyage, 77 Afghan detainees on Nauru were recognised as refugees, most of whom were to be resettled in Australia. This decision was announced before the flotilla reached Nauru. It occurred within a broader period of legal, humanitarian and political pressure upon the government. The flotilla cannot by itself be proven to have caused the decision, but its developing campaign and subsequent voyage contributed to keeping Nauru within public and international attention.

Flotillas of Hope belonged to a longer international tradition of maritime protest, but it was unprecedented in Australian refugee activism. Private Australian citizens sailed thousands of kilometres to confront both the physical and informational boundaries of the Pacific Solution. The action turned the government’s greatest tactical advantage—the remoteness of Nauru—into a dramatic symbol of the policy’s secrecy and inhumanity.

Its success therefore should not be measured solely by whether the crews landed or delivered their gifts. It succeeded because it disrupted the intended silence surrounding Nauru. It brought witnesses to the boundary of the detention system, generated national and international coverage, and made the authorities’ attempts to prevent scrutiny part of the story.

That was the social-action aikido of Flotillas of Hope: the government used distance to make the refugees disappear, and the flotilla used that same distance to make them visible again.

Stavros