The Image of Iraqi Refugee in Selected Contemporary Australian Plays

This study investigates the representation of the Iraqi refugee in selected contemporary Australian plays, exploring how dramatic texts respond to the geopolitical realities of border politics, deterritorialization, and forced migration. Focusing on Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers, Ben Eltham’s The Pacific Solution, and Towfiq Al-Qady’s Nothing But Nothing, the study employs a postcolonial and performance studies framework to analyze the shifting discursive constructions of refugee identity. The thesis argues that contemporary drama serves as a critical site for contesting the representation of the Iraqi refugee, tracing a developmental trajectory where the refugee subject moves from being 'spoken about' through external white Australian media representations (Rayson), to being 'silenced' and managed by bureaucratic state structures (Eltham), and finally to 'narrating himself' through performance and self-representation (Al-Qady). It contends that while the Australian state operates as an oppressive mechanism of border control, the theatrical space functions as an anti-necrocivilizational zone that restores agency, memory, and performative life to the refugee. This project contributes to refugee theatre studies and Arab/Iraqi academic scholarship by offering one of the few sustained comparative treatments of Australian refugee drama from an Arab perspective. Architecturally, it provides a novel comparative corpus that bridges white-authored political drama with refugee self-narration, establishing a foundational framework for analyzing how the refugee evolves from an object of external political discourse into a self-determining subject of theatrical witnessing. Furthermore, it offers the first comprehensive peer-reviewed reading of Hannie Rayson’s Two Brothers through the analytical lens of refugee and asylum-seeker theory. Keywords: Iraqi Asylum seekers, belonging, identity, Islamophobia, Iraqi diasporic drama, narrative agency, Australian drama.