Journal articles on the topic 'Woomera'

The Australian Civil Space Industry is poised at a crucial moment in its history. Careful strategic decisions need to be made regarding whether Australia will continue to take a back seat in the space race or whether it will join the growing space technology industry, providing major opportunities for Australian innovators. This cannot occur if the current legal and regulatory frameworks do not facilitate research activities and investment. The Australian Government is currently reviewing the Space Activities Act 1998 (Cth) and the Space Activities Regulations 2001 (Cth). This article will consider the unique role played by the Woomera Prohibited Area in the development and testing of launch technology and undertake an assessment of whether the Woomera Range (and by extension Australia) may once again play an important role in the research, development and testing of space technology. The article will place the legal restrictions regarding access to and use of the Woomera Range within the context of the proposed revision of the Australian legislation regulating civil space activities.

In March 2002 the authors notified all the children living in the Woomera Detention Centre to South Australia's child protection system, in an effort to ensure that the well-being of those children was protected. An investigation was conducted; serious problems at Woomera were identified; and the relevant South Australian Minister asked the Federal Minister for Immigration for ‘new guidelines’ for the centre. Then silence descended.In this article, the authors detail the reasons for their notifications and outline the events which followed. The Federal Government criticised the report of the investigation by SA child protection workers, and there is no indication of any action taken on it. In explaining the ensuing silence the authors refer to their understanding of the contents of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Federal and South Australian Governments. This memorandum, it is believed, ensures no further information about Woomera will be revealed. Further, the memorandum appears to leave the Federal Government with total responsibility for follow-up action. The South Australian Government seems to have surrendered its responsibility in this regard. Given the lack of action, the authors question whether both levels of government could be in breach of South Australia's Children's Protection Act 1993.

This paper focuses on aspects of the media engagement with demonstrations at the Woomera Detention Centre during Easter 2002. A broad range of interests and affiliations were represented within the 1000–2000 protestors, several hundred of whom attacked the fences, allowing a number of detainees to escape. In an era of online activism, the Easter 2002 demonstration at Woomera showed the continuing significance of the embodied occupation of public space by protestors. It echoed an upsurge in public demonstration, from Seattle to more recent worldwide marches against war in Iraq. In addition to receiving extensive mainstream media coverage both in Australia and overseas, a whole series of ‘alternative’ forms of media were mobilised around the demonstration. Through a study of some mainstream and alternative media, this paper suggests that casting them as oppositional — one as reactionary towards asylum seekers from Islamic cultures and the other as emancipatory — is too simplistic. While mainstream media are the subject of searching critiques of their representational and agenda-setting power, similar critical evaluations are few for alternative media. It suggests that such a dichotomy has serious consequences for the understanding and operation both of emancipatory struggles and of the media. Giroux (2002) has called for a politics of educated hope, and this paper suggests that critique should be accompanied by an active search for moments of contradiction and possibility.

TheCollaboration ofAustralia andNippon for aGAmmaRayObservatory in theOutback operates two large telescopes at Woomera (South Australia), which detect the Čerenkov light images produced in the atmosphere by electronpositron cascades initiated by very high energy (~1 TeV or 1012eV) gamma rays. These gamma rays arise from a different mechanism than at EGRET energies: inverse Compton (IC) emission from relativistic electrons.The spoke-like images are recorded by a multi-pixel camera which facilitates the rejection of the large numbers of oblique and ragged cosmic ray images. A field of view ~3.5° is required. The Australian team operates a triple 4 m diameter mirror telescope, BIGRAT, with a 37 photomultiplier tube camera and energy threshold 600 GeV. The Japanese operate a single, highly accurate 3.8 m diameter f/1 telescope and high resolution 256 photomultipler tube camera. In 1998 a new 7 m telescope is planned for Woomera with a design threshold ~;200GeV.

AbstractThe CANGAROO project incorporates two Čerenkov imaging telescopes at Woomera to obtain stereo images of very high-energy gamma-ray (and cosmic-ray) showers. The first stereo observations, with one imaging system, were made in March 1992, and preliminary stereo imaging observations began in July 1992. This paper describes the stereo imaging technique, the sources under investigation, and the indications from the first data sets.

Just over fifty years ago, on 29 November 1967 at 2:19 pm (local time), a small scientific satellite named the Weapons Research Establishment SATellite (WRESAT) was launched from Woomera, South Australia. It had been designed and constructed by engineers, scientists and technicians from the Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury, South Australia; it had a payload of scientific instruments put together by the Physics Department at Adelaide University; and it was sent into orbit at the sharp end of a modified Redstone rocket, a gift from the United States. All of this was achieved in less than 12 months; and it made Australia the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space from its own territory, after the USSR and the USA. This paper is the author's personal account of his part in the project, where he was involved first with the satellite's telemetry system and then with a temporary extension to Oodnadatta of Woomera's flight safety system. The paper goes on to describe events following the successful launch, and the celebration of the 50th anniversary in 2017. Finally, there is a discussion of the politics and technologies behind WRESAT.

Just over fifty years ago, on 29 November 1967 at 2:19 pm (local time), a small scientific satellite named the Weapons Research Establishment SATellite (WRESAT) was launched from Woomera, South Australia. It had been designed and constructed by engineers, scientists and technicians from the Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury, South Australia; it had a payload of scientific instruments put together by the Physics Department at Adelaide University; and it was sent into orbit at the sharp end of a modified Redstone rocket, a gift from the United States. All of this was achieved in less than 12 months; and it made Australia the third country in the world to launch a satellite into space from its own territory, after the USSR and the USA. This paper is the author's personal account of his part in the project, where he was involved first with the satellite's telemetry system and then with a temporary extension to Oodnadatta of Woomera's flight safety system. The paper goes on to describe events following the successful launch, and the celebration of the 50th anniversary in 2017. Finally, there is a discussion of the politics and technologies behind WRESAT.

AbstractIn this paper the Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy program at the University of Adelaide is described. VHE gamma rays with energies above ~5 × 1011eV are observed using the atmospheric Cerenkov technique. Results from the first three years observations at Woomera and the current upgrading of the telecope are described. The CANGAROO project, a collaboration between the University of Adelaide and a number of Japanese institutions, is also introduced.

Silicified leaf impressions attributed to the tribe Banksieae (Proteaceae) are reported from a new Tertiary macroflora from near Glen Helen, Northern Territory and from the Miocene Stuart Creek macroflora, northern South Australia. The fossil leaf material is described and placed in Banksieaeformis Hill & Christophel. Banksieaeformis serratus sp. nov. is very similar in gross morphology to the extant Banksia baueri R.Br. and B. serrata L.f. and is therefore representative of a leaf type in Banksia that is widespread geographically and climatically within Australia and that is unknown in Dryandra or other genera of the Banksieae. The leaf material from Stuart Creek and Woomera represents the lobed leaf form typical of Paleogene macrofloras from southern Australia, but one species,B. langii sp. nov., is closely similar in gross form to Banksieaephyllum taylorii R.J.Carpenter, G.J.Jordan & R.S.Hill et al. from the Late Paleocene of New South Wales and similarly may be sclerophyllous. Also reported are impressions of Banksia infructescences, or ‘seed cones’, in Neogene sediments near Marree and Woomera, South Australia. These fossils demonstrate the presence of Banksiinae in central Australia in the mid-Tertiary, potentially indicating the former existence of linking corridors between now widely separated populations of Banksia.

Changes in soil strength and surface micro-relief were measured in a calcareous earth (Gc. 1.12) at a site north of Woomera, before and after the passage of a tracked vehicle. The passage of a tracked vehicle resulted in a reduction of ?oil strength and the formation of ruts. The degree of change depended on the number of vehicle passes and whether the vehicle was travelling in a straight line or turning. Implications for erosion are discussed.

AbstractThe design and construction of the 30 m2 Bicentennial Gamma Ray Telescope at Woomera South Australia is described. This novel instrument is now completed and commissioning is underway. It is designed to observe astronomical sources at energies greater than ∼ 500 GeV by means of atmospheric Cerenkov light. It contains 55 spherical, glass mirrors of focal length 2.66 m arranged in three groups of 10 m2, to focus the light onto three sets of detectors operated in fast co-incidence. The recording electronics includes a rubidium clock to enable pulsars to be studied.

This article analyses the Australian Government’s communications on children in immigration detention, particularly those detained at Woomera and Baxter Detention Centres. The authors examine paradoxes and ‘double-bind’ theory; theory which analyses communications which continually put the target of them in the wrong and allow no escape. The analysis uses selected passages from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’ to highlight the nature and impact of such communication. The authors conclude that the Australian Government has consistently used paradoxical communication. In doing so it has placed children and families in detention, child protection workers, the South Australian Government, and sometimes external critics in a communication trap from which it is difficult to escape. Other bodies such as Courts have also demonstrated much paradox in their behaviour and communications on detention issues.

Pitjantjatjara is a dialect of the Western Desert Language (WDL) of central Australia (Douglas 1958). The Western Desert Language is a member of the south-west Pama-Nyungan group. Together with Warnman, it forms the Wati sub-group. It is spoken by 4000–5000 people, and covers the widest geographical area of any language in Australia, stretching from Woomera in central northern South Australia, as far west as Kalgoorlie and Meekatharra and north to Balgo Hills, in Western Australia. The main dialects, which differ most in regards the lexicon but also to some extent in grammar and phonology, include Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Ngaanyatjarra, Ngaatjatjarra, Southern Luritja, Pintupi-Luritja, Kukatja, Gugarda, Ngalia, Wangkatja, Wangkatha, Manyjilyjarra, Kartutjarra and Yurlparija. It is perhaps more accurately conceived of as a dialect chain, whereby a dialect such as Pitjantjatjara is mutually intelligible with its neighbours Ngaanyatjatjarra and Yankunytjatjara, but not with dialects more distant than these, such as Kukatja and Manyjilyjarra.

If iconophobia is defined as the suspicion and anxiety towards the power exerted by images, its history is an ancient one in all of its Platonic, Christian, and Judaic forms. At its most radical, iconophobia results in an act of iconoclasm, or the total destruction of the image. At the other end of the spectrum, contemporary iconophobia may be more subtle. Images are simply withdrawn from circulation with the aim of eliminating their visibility. In his book Images in Spite of All, French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman questions the tradition of suspicion and denigration governing visual representations of the Holocaust, arguing we have abdicated our ethical obligation to try to imagine. This essay will argue that disruptions to traditional modes of spectatorship shift the terms of viewing from suspicion to ethical participation. By building on Didi-Huberman’s discussion of images and the spectatorial gaze, this essay will consider Laura Waddington’s 2002 documentary film Border. Waddington spent six months hiding with asylum seekers in the area surrounding the Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte in northern France. I will argue that Waddington proposes a model of spectatorship that implicates the viewer into the ethical content of the film. By seeking to restore the dignity and humanity of the asylum seekers rather than viewing them with suspicion, Border is an acute reminder of our moral responsibility to bear witness to that which lies beyond the boundaries of conventional representations of asylum seekers.The economy managing the circulation of mainstream media images is a highly suspicious mechanism. After the initial process of image selection and distribution, what we are left with is an already homogenised collection of predictable and recyclable media images. The result is an increasingly iconophobic media gaze as the actual content of the image is depleted. In her essay “Precarious Life,” Judith Butler describes this economy in terms of the “normative processes” of control exercised by the mainstream media, arguing that the structurally unbalanced media representations of the ‘other’ result in creating a progressively dehumanised effect (Butler 146). This process of disidentification completes the iconophobic circle as the spectator, unable to develop empathy, views the dehumanised subject with increasing suspicion. Written in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror, Butler’s insights are important as they alert us to the possibility of a breach or rupture in the image economy. It is against Butler’s normative processes that Didi-Huberman’s critique of Holocaust iconoclasm and Waddington’s Border propose a slippage in representation and spectatorship capable of disrupting the homogeneity of the mass circulation of images.Most images that have come to represent the Holocaust in our collective memory were either recorded by the Nazis for propaganda or by the Allies on liberation in 1945. Virtually no photographs exist from inside the concentration camps. This is distinct from the endlessly recycled images of gaunt, emaciated survivors and bulldozers pushing aside corpses which have become critical in defining Holocaust iconography (Saxton 14). Familiar and recognisable, this visual record constitutes a “visual memory bank” that we readily draw upon when conjuring up images of the Holocaust. What occurs, however, when an image falls outside the familiar corpus of Holocaust representation? This was the question raised in a now infamous exhibition held in Paris in 2001 (Chéroux). The exhibition included four small photographs secretly taken by members of the Sonderkommando inside the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944. The Sonderkommando were the group of prisoners who were delegated the task of the day-to-day running of the crematoria. The photographs were smuggled out of the camps in a tube of toothpaste, and eventually reached the Polish Resistance.By evading the surveillance of the SS the photographs present a breach in the economy of Holocaust iconography. They exist as an exception to the rule, mere fragments stolen from beneath the all-seeing eye of the SS Guards and their watch towers. Despite operating in an impossible situation, the inmate maintained the belief that these images could provide visual proof of the existence of the gas chambers. The images are testimony produced inside the camp itself, a direct challenge to the discourse emphasising the prohibition of representation of the Holocaust and in particular the gas chambers. Figure 1 The Auschwitz crematorium in operation, photograph by Sonderkommando prisoners August 1944 © www.auschwitz.org.plDidi-Huberman’s essay marks a point of departure from the iconophobia which has stressed the unimaginable (Lanzmann), unknowable (Lyotard), and ultimately unrepresentable (Levinas) nature of the Holocaust since the 1980s. Denigrated and derided, images have been treated suspiciously by this philosophical line of thought, emphasising the irretrievable gap between representation and the Holocaust. In a direct assault on the tradition of framing the Holocaust as unrepresentable, Didi-Huberman’s essay becomes a plea to the moral and ethical responsibility to bear witness. He writes of the obligation to these images, arguing that “it is a response we must offer, as a debt to the words and images that certain prisoners snatched, for us, from the harrowing Real of their experience” (3). The photographs are not simply archival documents, but a testament to the humanity of the members of the Sonderkommando the Nazis sought to erase.Suspicion towards the potential power exerted by images has been neutralised by models of spectatorship privileging the viewer’s mastery and control. In traditional theories of film spectatorship, the spectator is rendered in terms of a general omnipotence described by Christian Metz as “an all-powerful position which is of God himself...” (49). It is a model of spectatorship that promotes mastery over the image by privileging the unilateral gaze of the spectator. Alternatively, Didi-Huberman evokes a long counter tradition within French literature and philosophy of the “seer seen,” where the object of the spectator’s gaze is endowed with the ability to return the gaze resulting in various degrees of anxiety and paranoia. The image of the “seer seen” recurs throughout the writing of Baudelaire, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Barthes, negating the unilateral gaze of an omnipotent spectator (Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons).Didi-Huberman explicitly draws upon Jacques Lacan’s thinking about the gaze in light of this tradition of the image looking back. In his 1964 seminars on vision in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan dedicates several chapters to demonstrate how the visual field is structured by the symbolic order, the real, symbolic and the imaginary. Following Lacan, Didi-Huberman introduces two terms, the veil-image and the tear-image, which are analogous with Lacan’s imaginary and the real. The imaginary, with its connotations of illusion and fantasy, provides the sense of wholeness in both ourselves and what we perceive. For Didi-Huberman, the imaginary corresponds with the veil-image. Within the canon of Holocaust photography, the veil-image is the image “where nobody really looks,” the screen or veil maintaining the spectator’s illusion of mastery (81). We might say that in the circulation of Holocaust atrocity images, the veil serves to anaesthetise and normalise the content of the image.Lacan’s writing on the gaze, however, undermines the spectator’s mastery over the image by placing the spectator not at the all-seeing apex of the visual field, but located firmly within the visual field of the image. Lacan writes, “in the scopic field, the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am the picture...I am photo-graphed” (Lacan 106). The spectator is ensnared in the gaze of the image as the gaze is reciprocated. For Didi-Huberman, the veil-image seeks to disarm the threat to the spectator being caught in the image-gaze. Lacan describes this neutralisation in terms of “the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the gaze” (101). Further on, Lacan expresses this in terms of the dompte-regarde, or a taming of the gaze (109). The veil-image maintains the fiction of the spectator’s ascendency by subduing the threat of the image-gaze. In opposition to the veil-image is the tear-image, in which for Didi-Huberman “a fragment of the real escapes” (81). This represents a rupture in the visual field. The real is presented here in terms of the tuché, or missed encounter, resulting in the spectator’s anxiety and trauma. As the real cannot be represented, it is the point where representation collapses, rupturing the illusion of coherency maintained by the veil-image. Operating as an exception or disruption to the rule, the tear-image disrupts the image economy. No longer neutralised, the image returns the gaze, shattering the illusion of the all-seeing mastery of the spectator. Didi-Huberman describes this tearing exception to the rule, “where everyone suddenly feels looked at” (81).To treat the Sonderkommando photographs as tear-images, not veil-images, we are offered a departure from classic models of spectatorship. We are forced to align ourselves and identify with the “inhuman” gaze of the Sonderkommando. The obvious response is to recoil. The gaze here is not the paranoid Sartrean gaze, evoking shame in the spectator-as-voyeur. Nor are these photographs reassuring narcissistic veil-images, but will always remain the inimical gaze of the Other—tearing, ripping images, which nonetheless demand that we do not turn away. It is an ethical response we must offer. If the power of the tear-image resides in its ability to disrupt traditional modes of representation and spectatorship, I would like to discuss this in relation to Laura Waddington’s 2004 film Border. Waddington is a Brussels based filmmaker with a particular interest in documenting the movement of displaced peoples. Just as the Sonderkommando photographs were taken clandestinely from beneath the gaze of the SS, Waddington evaded the surveillance of the French police and helicopter patrols as she bore witness to the plight of asylum seekers trying to reach England. Border presents her stolen testimony, operating outside the familiar iconography of mainstream media’s representation of asylum seekers. If we were to consider the portrayal of asylum seekers by the Australian media in terms of the veil-image, we are left with a predictable body of homogenised and neutralised stock media images. The myth of Australia being overrun by boat people is reinforced by the visual iconography of the news media. Much like the iconography of the Holocaust, these types of images have come to define the representations of asylum seekers. Traceable back to the 2001 Tampa affair images tend to be highly militarised, frequently with Australian Navy patrol boats in the background. The images reinforce the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric exhibited on both sides of politics, paradoxically often working against the grain of the article’s editorial content. Figure 2 Thursday 16 Apr 2009 there was an explosion on board a suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 36 in the vicinity of Ashmore Reef. © Commonwealth of Australia 2011Figure 3 The crew of HMAS Albany, Attack One, board suspected illegal entry vessel (SIEV) 38 © Commonwealth of Australia 2011 The media gaze is structurally unbalanced against the suffering of asylum seekers. In Australia asylum seekers are detained in mandatory detention, in remote sites such as Christmas Island and Woomera. Worryingly, the Department of Immigration maintains strict control over media representations of the conditions inside the camps, resulting in a further abstraction of representation. Geographical isolation coupled with a lack of transparent media access contributes to the ongoing process of dehumanisation of the asylum seekers. Judith Butler describes this as “The erasure of that suffering through the prohibition of images and representations” (146). In the endless recycling of images of leaky fishing boats and the perimeters of detention centres, our critical capacity to engage becomes progressively eroded. These images fulfil the function of the veil-image, where nobody really looks as there is nothing left to see. Figure 4 Asylum seekers arrive by boat on Christmas Island, Friday, July 8, 2011. AAP Image/JOSH JERGA Figure 5 Woomera Detention Centre. AAP Image/ROB HUTCHISON By reading Laura Waddington’s Border against an iconophobic media gaze, we are afforded the opportunity to reconsider this image economy and the suspicious gaze of the spectator it seeks to solicit. Border reminds us of the paradoxical function of the news image—it shows us everything, but nothing at all. In a subtle interrogation of our indifference to the existence of asylum seekers and their suffering, Border is a record of the six months Waddington spent hidden in the fields surrounding the French Red Cross camp at Sangatte in 2002. Sangatte is a small town in northern France, just south of Calais and only one and a half hours’ drive from Paris. The asylum seekers are predominantly Afghan and Iraqi. Border is a record of the last stop in their long desperate journey to reach England, which then had comparatively humane asylum seeking policies. The men are attempting to cross the channel tunnel, hidden in trucks and on freight trains. Many are killed or violently injured in their attempts to evade capture by the French police. Nevertheless they are sustained by the hope that England will offer them “a better life.” Figure 6 Still from Border showing asylum seekers in the fields of Sangatte ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington dedicates the film, “for those I met.” It is an attempt to restore the humanity and dignity of the people who are denied individual identities. Waddington refuses to let “those who I met” remain nameless. She names them—Omar, Muhammad, Abdulla—and narrates their individual stories. Border is Waddington’s attempt to return a voice to those who have been systematically dehumanised, by-products of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his classic account of documentary, Bill Nichols describes six modes of documentary representation (99–138). In Border, Waddington is working in the participatory mode, going into the field and participating in the lives of others (115). It is via this mode of representation that Waddington is able to heighten the ethical encounter with the asylum seekers. Waddington was afforded no special status as a filmmaker, but lived as a refugee among the asylum seekers during the six months of filming. At no point are we granted visible access to Waddington, yet we are acutely aware of her presence. She is physically participating in the drama unfolding before her. At times, we become alert to her immediate physical danger, as she too runs through the fields away from the police and their dogs.The suspicious gaze is predicated on maintaining a controlled distance between the spectator and the subject. Michele Aaron (82–123) has recently argued for a model of spectatorship as an intrinsically ethical encounter. Aaron demonstrates that spectatorship is not neutral but always complicit—it is a contract between the spectator and the film. Particularly relevant to the purposes of this essay is her argument concerning the “merging gaze,” where the gaze of the filmmaker and spectator are collapsed. This has the effect of folding the spectator into the film’s narrative (93). Waddington exploits the documentary medium to implicate the spectator into the structure of the film. It is in Waddington’s full participatory immersion into the documentary itself that undermines the conventional distance maintained by the spectator. The spectator can no longer remain neutral as the lines of demarcation between filmmaker and spectator collapse.Waddington was shooting alone with a small video camera at night in extremely low-light conditions. The opening scene is dark and grainy, refusing immediate entry into the film. As our eyes gradually adjust to the light, we realise we are looking at a young man, concealed in the bushes from the menacing glare of the lights of oncoming traffic. Waddington does not afford us the all-perceiving spectatorial mastery over the image. Rather, we are crouching with her as she records the furtive movements of the man. The background sound, a subtle and persistent hum, adds to a growing disquiet, a looming sense of apprehension concerning the fate of these asylum seekers. Figure 7 Grainy still showing the Red Cross camp in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002Waddington’s commentary has been deliberately pared back and her voice over is minimal with extended periods of silence. The camera alternates from meditative, lingering shots taken from the safety offered by the Red Cross camp, to the fields where the shots are truncated and chaotically framed. The actions of the asylum seekers jerk and shudder, producing an image akin to the flicker effect of early silent cinema because the film is not running at the full rate of 24 frames per second. Here the images become blurred to the point of unintelligibility. Like the Sonderkommando photographs, the asylum seekers exist as image-fragments, shards stolen by Waddington’s camera as she too works hard to evade capture. Tension gradually increases throughout the film, cumulating in a riot scene after a decision to close the camp down. The sweeping search lights of the police helicopter remind us of the increased surveillance undertaken by the border patrols. Without the safety of the Red Cross camp, the asylum seekers are offered no protection from the increasing police brutality. With nowhere else to go, the asylum seekers are forced into the town of Sangatte itself, to sleep in the streets. They are huddled together, and there is a faintly discernible chant repeating in the background, calling to the UN for help. At points during the riot scene, Waddington completely cuts the sound, enveloping the film in a haunting silence. We are left with a mute montage of distressing still images recording the clash between the asylum seekers and police. Again, we are reminded of Waddington’s lack of immunity to the violence, as the camera is deliberately knocked from her hand by a police officer. Figure 8 Clash between asylum seekers and police in Border ©Laura Waddington 2002It is via the merged gaze of the camera and the asylum seekers that Waddington exposes the fictional mastery of the spectator’s gaze. The fury of the tear-image is unleashed as the image-gaze absorbs the spectator into its visual field. No longer pacified by the veil, the spectator is unable to retreat to familiar modes of spectatorship to neutralise and disarm the image. With no possible recourse to desire and fantasy, the encounter becomes intrinsically ethical. Refusing to be neutralised by the Lacanian veil, the tear-image resists the anaesthetising effects of recycled and predictable images of asylum seekers.This essay has argued that a suspicious spectator is the product of an iconophobic media gaze. In the endless process of recycling, the critical capacity of the image to engage the viewer becomes progressively disarmed. Didi-Huberman’s reworking of the Lacanian gaze proposes a model of spectatorship designed to disrupt this iconophobic image economy. The veil-image asks little from us as spectators beyond our complicity. Protected by the gaze of the image, the fiction of the all—perceiving spectator is maintained. By abandoning this model of spectatorship as Didi-Huberman and Waddington are asking us to do, the unidirectional relationship between the viewer and the image is undermined. The terms of spectatorship may be relocated from suspicion to an ethical, participatory mode of engagement. We are laying down our weapons to receive the gaze of the Other. ReferencesAaron, Michele. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London: Wallflower, 2007.Border. Waddington, Laura. Love Stream Productions, 2004.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.London: Verso, 2004.Chéroux, Clément, ed. Mémoires des Camps. Photographies des Camps de Concentration et d'Extermination Nazis, 1933-1999. Paris: Marval, 2001.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Trans. Lillis, Shane B. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.Didi-Huberman, Georges. Ce Que Nous Voyons, Ce Qui Nous regarde.Critique. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1992.Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.Trans. Sheridan, Alan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.Levinas, Emmanuel. "Reality and its Shadow." The Levinas Reader. Ed. Hand, Seán. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. 130–43.Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.Metz, Christian. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1982.Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2001.Saxton, Libby. Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London: Wallflower, 2008.