In the early morning of 16 April 2009, a small Indonesian fishing vessel that had been intercepted the previous day by an Australian Navy patrol exploded, causing the drowning of five of the forty-seven asylum seekers on board and injuring dozens more. A coronial inquest in 2010 found that ‘a passenger or passengers deliberately ignited petrol’ in an attempt to ensure that the boat, designated SIEV 36, would not be returned to Indonesia (Cavanagh 5). The explosion occurred near Ashmore Reef in the Indian Ocean; thirteen seriously injured people were evacuated directly to the city of Darwin for urgent burns treatment, while twenty-nine were transported to AED Oil's Front Puffin rig in the Timor Sea before being taken to detention centres. While the injured thirteen were entitled access to Australia's refugee determination and appeals procedures, the remaining twenty-nine were not, having first arrived at an excised offshore place. The oil rig stands outside Australia's migration zone under the terms of legislation devised in response to the Tampa scandal of August 2001, when the Australian government refused to permit the Norwegian container ship MV Tampa and its human cargo of 438 rescued asylum seekers entry into Australian waters. That escalation point in policy and mood on unauthorized asylum seekers, concurrent with the tightening of security measures worldwide amid the shockwaves of 9/11, continues to inflect Australia's combative engagement with ‘irregular’ noncitizens. The control by disavowal over the bodies of the asylum seekers taken to the oil rig can be traced to the instrumentalization of lives at sea that prevailed during the Tampa incident eight years earlier.

It is just such lines of articulation that map the territory of this book.