Border studies in Australian and New Zealand geography

Presenting author: Francis Collins (University of Waikato)

This presentation focuses on the relationship between borders and migration in the settler colonial geographies that articulate Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In both contexts, bordering in relation to migration has served as a foundational element of the establishment of settler colonialism: as part of the subjugation of Indigenous peoples, to establish white settler identities as core to the nation, and to secure economic prosperity through differential inclusion of migrants. These neighbouring countries have also established very close political and economic ties that are underpinned in human terms by the maintenance of a 'free movement' arrangement. The trans-Tasman geography is one that is overlayed by intersecting grids of sovereignty, then, and wherein bordering emerges in dynamic and diverse sites and practices.

This presentation explores these relations by honing in on three events of bordering migration: the assisted inclusion of white settlers in trans-Tasman migration; the deportation regimes of the Australian government; and the aspirations and execution of a travel bubble to facilitate mobility under the conditions of the Covid-19 global pandemic. Drawing on these three events I seek to demonstrate how bordering sustains contemporary settler colonial through fragmented geographies of division and interconnection.

Presenting author: Joseph Palis (University of the Philippines-Diliman)

This presentation examines a countercartographic form of storying and reevaluates the use and functional possibilities of geonarratives as a method and approach used in a subaltern setting that allows participants to tell stories in their own terms and in a manner they deem best captures their place-based often-untold narratives. By enabling and encouraging the use of available materials at their immediate disposal, the participants produced drawings, collages, technology-aided illustrations, and other forms of visualizations to tell various spatial stories. The outcome is then used as visual basis and prompt to discuss, tell and perform their stories-so-far in a manner that allows stories to flow, meander and circle back consistent with the chosen style and modality of the participant.

Using five mapping workshops in the Philippines as illustrations, I will discuss how geonarrative mapping was used, approached and practiced with the aim at making invisible stories visible, and enabling the storytelling of untold stories. Geonarratives are snapshots of stories captured creatively and cartographically. These geonarratives do not profess to be authoritative or official but an awareness and acknowledgement of the relational and multilayered realities as embodied by participants through storytelling and mapping of their everyday geographies of emotion, natures, and bodies.

Presenting author: Henrietta McNeill (Australian National University)

While travel largely stopped and borders closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, states continued to deport individuals who had been sentenced for committing criminal offenses. In Australia and New Zealand, questions over whether deportation during a global pandemic should occur were raised: weighing up arguments of legality, public health, and security. The decision was made in some cases to continue the deportation process. Once deported, mandatory quarantine on arrival under COVID-19 restrictions provides snapshot in time: highlighting and exacerbating the challenges that returning offenders face. These include extended detention before forcible removal; surveillance through detention and monitoring; and securitised discourse by the media and public creating ongoing stigma. This snapshot enables us to understand the challenges of an under-studied group, consider the ramifications, and estimate the costs that states are willing to bear to manage perceived risk to their borders.

Presenting author: Josh Watkins (National University of Singapore)

This article shows how politics of scale influence states' conceptions and performances of asylum-seeker responsibility and risk. The resettlement and border security initiatives that result have dramatic consequences for the forcibly displaced, shaping their experiences in displacement based on who they are, where they are and how they got there. Using Australia's asylum-seeker policy from 1976 through 1999 as a case, I document the Australian Government's embrace of the idea that proximity engendered special responsibilities to 'regional' asylum-seekers, yet that over time the Government came to reject 'the regional' as a unique scale of responsibility, replacing it with 'the global'.

The article also demonstrates how social contexts influence conceptions of risk and obligation and become codified into moral geographies of forced migration management; embodied and territorialised through programs of refugee resettlement, border militarisation and externalisation.

Presenting author: Hedda Askland (University of Newcastle)

Other authors: Meg Sherval (University of Newcastle), Nicola Mai (University of Newcastle)

Once upon a time, there was a rural geographer, a social anthropologist and a sociologist who wanted to travel the land and understand how this land would be nurtured for the future. They lived in a region of natural and cultural wonder, where the blue ocean meets golden beaches and where green gums climb along sandstone cliffs. The people who lived there were a mixture of peoples from many places. Some had lived there since the beginning of their time when Baiame came down from the sky to the land and created its rivers, mountains and forests. Others were descendants of people who travelled on ships from the West in search of new riches and territory on which to settle. Yet others were more recent arrivals, people who had travelled from both east and west in search for a land beholden with promise of a prosperous life and good living. The land was marked by the movement of these peoples, the animals and plants native to the land and those they had brought with them. It was, however, humans who had left the greatest marks on the land and throughout the region their seemingly ever-expanding search for movement and mobility had shaped the landscape and the communities hosted within.

The region had attracted a group of people interested in exploring the land in a particular way, not just horizontally through expansive movement across space but also vertically. Rumours of treasure brought them to the region and as they dug, wide and deep, they found minerals and rocks that made them rich and powerful. But, as they dug, they also found ambivalence; a trickster emerged, black as the crow and sleek as a bluetongue lizard, dangerous and unpredictable. The trickster - a void made material in its form of emptiness - is dangerous, disruptive and unpredictable but may also, through playful interaction, allow the reestablishment of the land on a new basis. The three companions wanted to learn about this trickster and its stories. This paper will tell the story about how they aspire to get to know the trickster and how the people of the land anticipate its powers in the future.

Presenting author: Angela Smith (UNSW)

This paper will document the recent practices, debates and visual representations surrounding air deportation in Australia. As a settler colony in the Asia-Pacific region, forced mobilities from and within Australian territories are intrinsically linked to questions of belonging, possession and sovereignty. As a remote island, Australia is entirely dependent on aviation infrastructures in order to carry out removals. Aviation and the aerial view were critical to the exercise of colonial power globally, not only through aerial military domination but also via cartographic practices which gave shape to colonial geographies.

Today, Australia locates itself within a detention archipelago of its own creation across the Asia-Pacific region: sites of immobility and forced mobility for those peoples subject to Australia's migration regime. In recent years, public debates and visual contestations surrounding airlines, immigration detention and high-profile deportations have brought questions of who belongs in the settler colony to the fore. In particular, high profile cases of prospective deportations of Aboriginal people resulted in a legal battle over whether Aboriginal people could be rendered "alien" under the constitution, and therefore deportable. Such boundary-drawing around who belongs in Australia is also challenged by the deportations of racialised and criminalised New Zealanders, as well as others who have made their homes in Australia such as the well-known Tamil family from the QLD town of Biloela.

In the proposed presentation, I will explore the question of bordering, belonging and the settler colony through three interconnected themes: (i) Indigeneity and deportation; (ii) forced mobility by air between islands in the Pacific; (iii) airlines and visual representation.

Presenting author: Michael Roche (Massey University)

ANZAAS, originally founded as the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science and modelled on the British Association for the Advancement of Science provided a Trans-Tasman forum for geography well before the establishment of university geography departments (Sydney 1921, Canterbury 1937) and the creation of the New Zealand Geographical Society (1944) and the Institute of Australian Geographers (1958).

The nature of the geographical presentations before and after university geography was established is examined. Presentations before and after Geography Society/Institute conferences on both sides of the Tasman are also examined to reveal boundary issues in the context of colonial frontiers and scientific institutions.

Presenting author: Andrew Burridge (Macquarie University)

In May 2020, former Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton, the person tasked with overseeing the country's national borders, stated in response to the ongoing closure of the NSW-Queensland state border due to COVID-19 that citizens should question the constitutionality of such measures. However, it is not only these states, or cross-border urban communities that straddle the line, that have been impacted. Every state and territory has now experienced some form of border 'closure' or restriction, since Tasmania first declared a state of emergency on 18 March 2020.

The outbreak of COVID-19 and the subsequent travel restrictions imposed therefore provides an important moment in which to reflect upon the role of state borders within Australia. State borders have rarely been considered by geographers or border studies scholars since initial boundary surveys demarcated each state and territory prior to, and immediately after federation. 

Within this presentation, I consider not only the current swathe of border restrictions that have been implemented across Australia since March 2020 - the first substantive closures since the 1919 pandemic - but also consider the likely role of Australia's state borders, and of Australian border studies, into the future.

Presenting author: Phoebe Everingham (University of Newcastle)

Other authors: Andrew Peters (Swinburne Univerity), Freya Higgins-Desbiolles (University of South Australia)

In settler colonial contexts such as Australia multiple oppressions of conquest and plunder have both formed the bedrock of the Australian nation and continue to shape the Australian identity and sense of nationhood. In this paper we highlight the legacies of colonial map-making to the expansion of the Australian frontier, controlling the 'uncontrollable land', and how this links to tourism development in Australia.

We draw on a case study of the closure of the climb at Uluru to demonstrate the messy, complex and competing ideologies, practices and performances of Australian nationhood related to mapping the 'frontiers' and how this plays out in the realms of tourism consumption at Uluru. While the mapping and labelling of the Australian landscape inscribed a Eurocentric representation of the land and all it contains within dualistic divisions of mind/body/spirit/human/nature which has underpinned tourism at Uluru, the closure of the climb presents possibilities for prioritising forms of tourism that 'unlearn' these colonial logics. One such way to 'unlearn' coloniality is through the idea of 'un-mapping', a process that peels back the layers of coloniality and presents counter-narratives of resistance. This paper makes some exploratory links between 'unlearning', 'unmapping' in relation to tourism development and what these concepts can contribute to critical border studies.