Seasonal migrants are a staple part of life in regional Australia, yet their livelihoods are tied to relatively unstable and unpredictable factors of horticultural work that secures them in place. The seasonal nature of farming goes well beyond harvest cycles and weather conditions: it encompasses global mobilities of people as labour sources, which are underpinned by migration policies that favour short-term, casualised, and 'seasonal' contracts of labour mobility. This paper reflects on the precarities created by the design of visa programs for horticultural workers in Australia, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews. The paper focuses on the two main sources of horticultural labour: the thousands of workers from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste on the 'Pacific Australia Labour Mobility' visa who have a long history and presence in Australia, and the dubiously framed 'cultural exchange' of backpackers on the 'Working Holiday Maker' visa. It discusses two major aspects that secure workers in place, producing precarious and insecure migration situations: first, the seasonal design of the visas around horticultural work; and second, the political context of labour mobility which relies on colonialist assumptions about the im/mobilities of willing workers and limited migration opportunities, particularly in the Oceania region.
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.
