Sometimes events take on a significance beyond their historical context. They come to define an issue. That was the case with Gallipoli and the Eureka Stockade. It may also prove to be the case with the bodies left in the water after an asylum seeker boat sank, the delay by the Australian authorities to take responsibility for their recovery, and the eventual decision to search for them.
There were no doubt pressing economic, logistical and legal reasons for the initial hesitation. Watching out for the living may have been given precedence. But unburied bodies have a powerful significance. Families who do not have the opportunity to bury their dead relatives speak of how the inability sharpens the agony of their loss.
Australians have recently shared the grief of Daniel Morcombe's family and seen the importance for them of finding his remains.
In many cultures, too, there is a compelling religious obligation to bury the dead because their next life depends on it. So we can only imagine the torment of the relatives of those lost at sea if they knew that the bodies of those whom they loved might have been recovered for burial, but the attempt was not made.
In texts foundational for Western democracy, too, the burial of bodies has a central place. Sophocles, Athenian dramatist and general, explores Antigone's burial of her rebel brother in defiance of the king's order to leave him unburied. Reasons of state to do with public order conflicted with the claims of humanity and moral order. The conflict led to tragic results for all the protagonists. Many playwrights, including Jean Anouilh at the time of the Vichy government of France, have returned to the story.
The symbolism of the asylum seekers' unburied bodies goes to the heart of the conflict between reasons of state and compassion so evident in Australian discussion of asylum seekers. They are worth setting out unpolemically.
The reasons of state can be expressed in the unchanging determination of Australian Governments to ensure that Australia decides whom it accepts into the community. They have always wished to set its refugee policy within this order. The practices and rhetoric of successive governments have been designed to vindicate this order in face of the threat seen in on-shore asylum seekers.
The practices of mandatory detention, denial of work rights, introduction of temporary detention, excision of Australia from the immigration zone and opening of detention centres outside Australia are some of the devices used to deter people from coming by boat to make claims on Australia.
These measures have been associated with such prejudicial descriptions of asylum seekers as queue jumpers and illegals, with the focus on people smugglers rather than the asylum seekers themselves.
In the political debate, too, the more radical proposals canvassed have to do with restoring order. They include pushing back boats, withdrawing from the refugee convention, sending back asylum seekers to camps from which they fled, making summary decisions about their cases, and denying them permanent residence in Australia.
From this perspective unburied bodies are a small thing. But Antigone's resolute gesture of simple compassion for her brother and insistence on fidelity to a moral tradition offered a different perspective. It called into question an order that violated human dignity. This protest is part of the Western democratic and also Judeo-Christian inheritance. It motivates those who defend asylum seekers.
It leads critics of the Australian Government policy to explore what respect for the humanity of asylum seekers demands of society. They argue that those who flee from fear of death and persecution make a just claim on us for protection by the fact of being human beings. They argue that these claims should be fairly assessed.
They argue that it is lacking in respect to treat innocent people badly by condemning them to prolonged detention with its proven harm to mental health in order to discourage others. Respect means allowing them to live decently while their cases are being heard. It is not compatible with pushing away boats.
From this perspective unburied bodies matter because persons matter. And the order the state upholds is credible only if it is based on respect for the humanity of all the human beings whom it touches, including asylum seekers.
The ambivalence of the Australian authorities to the bodies of asylum seekers left floating on the sea is a graphic symbol of the tension between the narrowly defined order that Australia wants to impose and the moral tradition it has inherited. The latter is enshrined in the United Nations Convention to which Australia is a signatory.
The decision to search for and collect the bodies was a welcome acknowledgment of the claims of humanity. These need also guide and moderate the reasons of state. The drama of Antigone shows what can be at stake for a society in the resolution of such conflict.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
This week is Refugee Week.