Each year, over 200,000 temporary migrants come to Australia on a Working Holiday visa. The conditions attached to these visas produce precarious circumstances that heighten vulnerability to sexual harassment. While previous research has examined structural influences on sexual harassment, few studies have explored WHMs' experiences beyond specific workplaces or regions. Further, the role of temporal and spatial contexts remains underexplored. Drawing on a feminist geographic lens, and a mixed-methods study including a national survey (n = 573) and interviews (n = 11), this paper examines women Working Holiday Makers' (WHMs) experiences of sexual harassment in Australia. I argue that vulnerability is shaped not only by structural conditions such as visa rules, but also by temporal and spatial contexts. These include temporal pressures arising from time-bound work requirements and the spatial-embeddedness of rural colonial masculinities in regions where WHMs travel to undertake work. This paper contributes to feminist and migration geographies by revealing how sexual harassment is patterned through specific temporal and spatial contexts within Australia's migration system.
This article offers a geographical interpretation of Australia's evolving industrial decarbonisation agenda. In April 2024, the Albanese Government launched Future Made in Australia, seeking to align decarbonisation, regional development and sovereign manufacturing ambitions. Yet recent government-funded bailouts of energy-intensive industrial facilities has amplified concerns about viability, the pace of decarbonisation, and who bears transition risk. We ask: what do such crisis interventions reveal about how industrial decarbonisation is being governed, and whose interests and futures are prioritised? We identify three issues. First, crisis conditions are shaped by global market volatility, regional industrial legacies, material-technical aspects of production, and corporate under-investment. Second, governance of industrial futures and accompanying energy transitions responds to crises via deal-making between state and private actors, under place-, time- and industry-specific constraints. Third, socio-spatial justice implications remain secondary to national security concerns, market viability and asset stabilisation, even though regional workers and communities are exposed to the crisis intervention outcomes. Decarbonisation scenarios with community-wide consequences are thus unfolding not through participatory 'just transition' frameworks but through commercial-in-confidence negotiations - risking the decarbonisation futures these policies are ostensibly designed to drive. We discuss geographical, social and environmental implications of this for regional industrial futures and the decarbonisation imperative.
This paper explores the material and immaterial relations of collective breadmaking in a small community bakery program in Narrm/Melbourne. The case study of High Rise Bakery is developed through a 'follow-the-thing' approach employing participant observation, material audit, and interviews. Using this approach enabled a consideration of relations across key nodes in the initiative's socio-material network, from the growing of grain to the eating of bread. Drawing on work on care and commoning, breadmaking is found to be a collective (more-than-human) process that is deeply tied to people's care about and for self, food, and community. Further, re-ordering the food system into an infrastructure more supportive of social and environmental well-being was a shared preoccupation. A sense of interdependency and shared responsibility underpinned participants' engagements in the initiative and efforts to challenge dominant food system ideals (e.g. individualism, commodification) while building the relations of caring and commoning.
We argue that stories serve as care infrastructures, which pattern how people care about, for and with other people and places. Care is ordered through stories by positioning individuals and places as worthy or not of receiving care, and by situating the responsibility and capacity to provide care with certain actors. Through stories people make sense of, rationalise and justify practices of care and carelessness. And stories, as care infrastructures, are produced, maintained or reshaped through practices of storytelling. We explore the concept of stories as infrastructure through a case study of North Richmond-Abbotsford, Melbourne. Stories told in the media have long portrayed this neighbourhood as a dangerous place of public injecting, poverty and crime. Recent stories highlight the tensions posed by locating a medically supervised injecting room in a residential neighbourhood. This paper draws on local news articles relating to the medically supervised injecting room alongside semi-structured interviews with diverse women living in the neighbourhood and testimonials from two residents' group advocacy websites. Using narrative analysis, we explore how different forms of storytelling intersect to produce, maintain or reshape infrastructures of care. We show how, as infrastructures, stories de/legitimate practices, policies and materialities of care in the neighbourhood.
In the context of rapid urbanisation and climate change, initiatives like Singapore's One Million Trees movement offer promising solutions to the challenges facing urban life. Co-production is a key focus in governance reform agendas, emphasising increased citizen participation in shaping their environments. This study explores how co-production manifests and is experienced in Singapore's context. This article examines the experiential dynamics of public participation in Singapore's One Million Trees movement, drawing on original empirical results from a survey, semi-structured interviews and journaling with participants in that program. Our analysis highlight's themes of belonging, responsibility and empowerment while also showing how participants' desires for ownership and belonging in urban greening processes can sit together uneasily, marking the difference between feeling 'responsible' and being 'responsibilised'. We argue that understanding these tensions are critical for overcoming barriers to participation, internal or personal confliction, and the differences between government and personal values in urban greening.
The Australian protected area estate aims to address the biodiversity crisis by managing landscapes within clearly defined geographical boundaries. However, by focusing on the spatial aspects of landscapes, the temporal dimension of protected area management is often overlooked. In this study, we examine terrestrial protected areas in Australian environmental legislation and consider how time is accounted for in biodiversity management. When protected area legislation is informed by recent, short timeframes, the management of ecological communities can be confined by an imperfect reference, leading to ineffective and unsustainable conservation outcomes. We find that many protected area laws are stuck in a procedural present, where the present is prioritised through a focus on administrative procedures with no reference to time-bound outcomes. When legislation referenced future goals, it was in the context of an anthropocentric focus on the future human use of resources. Conversely, the past-oriented references we identified often referenced goals based on colonial notions of wilderness as an unpeopled, pristine state. Our analysis indicates that past and future considerations are not integrated holistically into Australia's contemporary protected area regime. We suggest this has adverse impacts on environmental management, effectively freezing landscapes in a static state and potentially hindering overarching conservation objectives.
How climate crises are framed shapes governance, policies, practices and outcomes. However, analysis of crisis-framing is yet to fully incorporate a spatial dimension. In particular, little is known about how the dynamics of space affect the ability of state and non-state actors to frame and contest issues at global meetings. Stimulated by climate crisis debate over the Great Barrier Reef, we undertook an event ethnography of a World Heritage meeting to explore how the use of multiple spaces within a single policy venue affects how actors frame issues. Focusing on crisis, we show how different uses of space enable or limit actors in the framing of a crisis. We observe that, beyond the formal meeting space where state actors typically dominate, there are other shared and alternative spaces where both state and non-state actors can be active in crisis-framing. We encourage consideration of these spaces as vital sites of crisis deliberation and negotiation for marginalised actors in state-dominated venues.
Global carbon, water and energy fluxes are strongly regulated by the interactions between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Precise quantification of these interactions is essential for assessing climate change impacts and enhancing the predictive capacity of biogeochemical and Earth system models. Despite their importance, long-term continuous measurements of carbon, water and energy fluxes remain limited for many ecosystems. This study analyses data from the ED Gingin flux station combined with satellite observations collected between 2020 and 2024, covering both winter and summer seasons, to examine seasonal dynamics and the carbon, water and energy balance of the Banksia woodland ecosystem in Perth, Australia. The results indicate that these woodlands function as net sinks for carbon, water and energy, as reflected by mean net ecosystem production (NEP). NEP was partitioned into gross primary production (GPP) and net ecosystem exchange (NEE) to distinguish photosynthetic carbon uptake from microbially driven carbon release. Variability in fluxes was primarily controlled by climatic factors, including temperature, vapour pressure deficit, rainfall and photosynthetically active radiation. Photosynthetic activity showed a strong relationship with NEE and ecosystem productivity was consistently higher during winter than summer. Overall, the findings demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating flux tower and satellite data to forecast ecosystem responses to climatic and anthropogenic disturbances.
Australia's coastal horticultural regions are being reshaped through their deepening integration into global production networks (GPNs). Focusing on the north-eastern coastal strip (NECS), we explain how global market, financial, labour, intellectual property (IP) and environmental governance networks (presented as five network types) intersect with territorially specific conditions - including climate, land markets, regulatory frameworks, water systems and multifunctional rural transitions - to produce uneven regional development trajectories. Through case studies of mandarins in the North Burnett, macadamia investment in Bundaberg, labour mobility programs across various sites, proprietary berry genetics in Coffs Harbour, and reef-related environmental regulation in Far North Queensland, we show that global forces do not simply impact upon rural regions but co-constitute them. Each of the five networks generate distinctive forms of value creation, contestations and governance outcomes. The analysis demonstrates that Australia's horticultural regions are increasingly governed through polycentric systems in which globally networked actors influence territorial change. We argue that understanding contemporary rural governance requires recognising how regional futures are shaped through these multi-scalar, mutually constitutive processes.
Public spaces support and frame the economic, cultural, ecological and political lives of city dwellers. Much emphasis has been placed on how public spaces can be designed well to generate conviviality, as well as facilitate wellbeing and economic activity. At the same time, exclusion from public space can be 'built in' at the level of infrastructure. This article positions public spaces as infrastructures of care. Drawing on a series of vignettes reflecting on experiences of public space during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, we develop an expansive understanding of public space as relational and performed, and as supporting infrastructures of care (or, at times, creating barriers to access care). The paper demonstrates how thinking with and paying attention to care as a mundane doing of - and in - ordinary places, foregrounds the power of such infrastructures as scaffolds to social connection and interaction. We posit that scholarly and policy attention to public space as a care infrastructure is crucial in the face of recent challenges to both universal public access to public space and ongoing struggles to address unevenness in the public distribution of care.
We are Yanama Budyari Gumada, a more-than-human, Dharug-led, intercultural research collective, and we join you from a dance circle, that we weed and stomp together at Yarramundi Regional Park, Western Sydney. This paper explores what caring as Country can look like for Dharug Custodians. We assert that Dancing up Dharug is Caring as Country, a dance that is expanded through its inclusion of more-than-humans. We understand dirt as both a guiding presence and a material manifestation of dance and explore weeding, stomping and co-becoming as ways of dancing on/with/as the dirt of the dance circle. On/with/as are used as reference points to position ourselves in relation to dirt. Dancing on Dharug speaks to the sensuousness and materiality of weed-dancing. Dancing with Dharug highlights the agency and affects of dirt - how dirt communicates, when we stomp. Dancing as Dharug emphasises that we are Ngurra (Country) and magnifies the generative, multidirectional care (caring as Country) that this entails. Spotlighting the fluid and emergent relationships between the weed-dancing and stomping, we co-become on/with/as the dance circle. We recognise that we are the dirt both in its softening and its hardening and we feel our own softening as we come together in this place.
With and as Bawaka Country (North East Arnhem Land), we share how sky Country and Yol & eng;u people are connected by, and co-become through, a multidimensional, multidirectional infrastructure of care. We discuss what care means, from a Yol & eng;u ontology, looking to the way a Yol & eng;u care infrastructure emerges through and as wetj (sharing), m & auml;rr (love) and raki (a string that binds everything through relationships and responsibilities). One of the many ways that a Yol & eng;u infrastructure of care manifests is when it is sung and enlivened through songspirals. Songspirals sing the land and its many relations into being. In this paper, we are guided by the Guwak songspiral that holds and maintains important relationships between people, Mil & eng;iyawuy, the river of stars, and sky Country. Bawaka Country, Rrawun Maymuru who is W & auml;& eng;a Wata & eng;u, custodian, of the Guwak songspiral and Guwak itself lead the paper. Guwak shows how wetj, m & auml;rr and raki co-become as a complex Yol & eng;u infrastructure of care, connecting human and more-than human beings all the way to the heavens. As we follow Guwak, we elaborate on what it means to care as Country, and consider the complex ways that care infrastructures might guide more-than-human kinship and responsibility.
In the context of the lockdowns and isolation protocols of the COVID-19 pandemic, food gardening increased significantly around the world, including in Australia. Drawing on responses from residents in Melbourne to a national survey on food gardening, this paper explores people's household food growing during the pandemic. Established research on gardening, for food or otherwise, points to its physical, mental, and social benefits for gardeners. Examining food gardening through feminist-inspired notions of care and care infrastructure offers different insights, ones oriented more around practice, ethics, and the socio-material networks that support care - of selves and others. We enhance this analysis by drawing out how time is experienced in people's care-through-food-gardening, arguing that attention to temporalities is vital to understanding the socio-material relations that condition present and future relations of care.
This article, the first in a two-part series, traces the development of Australian political geography from the 1920s to the 1980s, offering the first comprehensive review of the sub-discipline's evolution in the region. It situates contemporary scholarship in relation to the recent establishment of the Political Geography Study Group within the Institute of Australian Geographers. The article reflects on the challenges of writing this history, particularly the dominance of white, male, Western, and conservative perspectives that shaped the field. Much early scholarship was closely aligned with colonial agendas, including the ongoing colonisation of Australia and its surrounding regions. Between 1920 and 1945, 'political geography' was used loosely to describe studies of political processes. After 1945, the field increasingly adopted quantitative approaches, especially in electoral geography and boundary studies. Unlike other areas of human geography, however, Australian political geography largely resisted radical and critical frameworks such as Marxism. Instead, it often reinforced colonial ideologies, including terra nullius and anxieties about Australia's position as a white settler state in a decolonising world. We argue that this conservative orientation limited the sub-discipline's international influence. A critical reckoning with this past is necessary to reposition political geography in Australia and to clarify the ethical, political, and methodological commitments that should guide its future development.
In this paper we examine the work and place of care within the governance of unequal urban waterscapes, drawing from case studies with an Indigenous and a riverine community in S & atilde;o Paulo, Brazil. Centring on grassroots activist practices and the regeneration of water environments in the urban periphery, we consider how care infrastructures participate in the modern hydrosocial assemblage to produce, challenge, and reduce socioecological inequalities and injustices. This paper brings to light the careless practices of urban development and governance within the S & atilde;o Paulo context that fail to provide safe, healthy, and thriving environments. We argue that solidarity, collectivism, and connection to place are core constituents and drivers of grassroots modes of action that seek to resist these processes of neglect. Within experiences of resistance and reimagination of uneven waterscapes, the materiality and agency of water are crucial factors shaping the mobilisation of excluded local communities. The paper offers insights into how care flows with, and is transformed by, contested urban waterscapes, amidst the entanglements of water politics and ecologies in diverse contexts.
Accurate and timely internal migration data are crucial for understanding population shifts and informing policy during crises. Traditional sources, such as censuses and administrative records, are lagged, hindering the identification of emerging migration patterns. This study explores the potential of digital trace data from Muval, an Australian removalist website, to estimate internal migration in Australia from 2019 to 2023. Using a multiple regression framework, we estimate the relationship between Muval data and internal migration figures from the 2021 Australian Census. This relationship is then leveraged to predict migration at the Statistical Area Level 4 (SA4) for other years. Our predictive models explain over 90% of the variance in Census migration figures, allowing for estimation of migration flows from 2019 to 2023. The utility of these estimates is demonstrated through two case studies: migration to and from Greater Melbourne, and inward and outward migration to high-amenity regions between 2019 and 2023. This study contributes to the field of big data for migration estimation, offering a timelier and more responsive tool for understanding migration dynamics in rapidly changing contexts. Future research should focus on integrating demographic and socioeconomic variables to enhance the precision of migration estimates derived from digital trace data.
