Paper short abstract:

In this paper I explore FIFO workers and residents living side-by-side in a remote and “closed” company town in Australia. I argue that the FIFO and residential lifestyles entail fundamentally oppositional conceptualisations of work/domestic spatial distinctions, and that these oppositions informed discourses on space and belonging.

Paper long abstract:

Many contemporary mining communities within Australia and internationally comprise a mixed population of residential and long-distance commute workers - that is, those who co-locate their primary residence and that of their families to mining settlements, and those who move in and out of mining settlements according to work-based rotations but whose primary domicile lies elsewhere. The problems associated with these two radically different lifestyles living side-by-side is usually embedded within analysis and debates around economic and sustainable development. In contrast, there has been little attention paid to the respective groups' conceptualisation of space and belonging, and the ways in which the variant degrees of fragmentation of the two lifestyles lead to differing articulations of relationship to spatial and temporal spheres.

In this paper I explore the experience of fly-in-fly-out workers and residents living side-by-side in a remote and "closed" company town in Australia and the differing ways they conceptualised and articulated their social, spatial, and temporal relationship with the town. This paper is based on extended fieldwork exploring notions of belonging and community within a highly transient and mobile population of mining workers and their families, and the ways in which residents' rallied around the concept of "community" as a means of resistance to the emerging dominance of fly-in-fly-out. I argue that the fly-in-fly-out and residential lifestyles entail fundamentally oppositional conceptualisations of work/domestic spatial distinctions, and that these oppositions informed discourses on the significance of space and belonging.