AustLit

'John Doyle's mini-series Marking Time, which screened on the ABC in 2003, tells the story of a white Australian boy, Hal, who falls in love with an Afghan refugee girl, Randa. The mini-series was publicized as a narrative about Australian tolerance and multiculturalism, set against the backdrop of events from 2001 such as the Tampa incident. But we can read it as a fantasy of white multiculturalism in which white Australians are central to the nation and must order multiculturalism by facilitating the entry of non-white migrants into the nation. Within this fantasy, Hal and Randa's relationship functions as an idealized interaction between the white, male national subject and the peripheral figure of the female, non-white refugee. The non-white woman's body comes to symbolize the space where the white nation may be reproduced under the control of white men. Appearing in Australian culture at a watershed moment when the acceptability of even conservative white multiculturalism was being questioned, Marking Time's fantasy of the appropriation of the non-white woman highlights the precarious status of women (white and non-white) within the nation, and the need to reconceptualize belonging and borders.'

'Tom Zubrycki's documentary film Molly and Mobarak (2003) and John Doyle's television mini-series Marking Time (2003) were both released during the most vehement anti-refugee governmental regime of contemporary Australian history. Whilst the Howard government and the Ruddock and Vanstone ministries were intent on dehumanizing refugees, these film-makers - amongst other Australian artists - were intent on humanizing them. Afghani refugees were portrayed in these films attempting to create viable lives in rural Australia, as thousands of Afghani asylum seekers were detained by government policy in remote and offshore detention centres. This article considers Zubrycki's and Doyle's portrayals of Afghani refugees as political and aesthetic interventions into official discourses distancing the interests of 'Australians' from those of the refugee 'others' (Gannon and Saltmarsh 2006, 2007). At the same time as applauding these interventions, this article also attempts to map their limits by asking in particular whether the conventions of film narrative inevitably contain and tame. Does narrative carry with it, in these instances at least, a conservatism where empathy becomes most possible when the other is made over to become like 'us'?' (Publisher's abstract)

Pearce looks closely at two recent Australian texts and the specific portrayal of Muslim-Australian girls. She utilizes a postcolonial approach to compare the ways in which the film Marking Time and the novel Does My Head Look Big in This? engage in the racialized politics of Muslim identity.

In terms of the struggle for agency and identity, Pearce argues that Marking Time conforms to an Orientalist paradigm, whereby Muslim identity is represented as mysterious and exotic, providing the site for the white, western male hero's 'rite of passage' (p.59). In contrast, Does My Head Look Big in This? challenges negative stereotypes and notions of 'tolerance' which permeate western representations of Muslim identities and culture, by re-articulating a politics of difference and indicating possibilites for the inscription and articulation of cultural hybridity and multiple subjectivities.