Paper short abstract:

The need for seasonal agricultural labour links transient populations to regional Australian communities. The mobile body offers a way of understanding how everyday interactions connect temporariness, stability, belonging and exclusion.

Paper long abstract:

Seasonal labour is integral to regional Australian social structures and has considerable significance for the maintenance of the agriculture industry. Seasonal labour is partially sustained by place- and industry-based migration schemes, which contribute to the maintenance of dynamic and diverse regional areas. Transient labour populations and regional communities continue to be mutually interdependent, but this relationship is made complex through narratives of stability and belonging that become embedded in the local space. Within employment contexts, the seasonal worker exists temporarily, but the need for their labour is more permanent. This economic focus limits the possibility for workers to become part of the community in a more social sense, creating a regional space understood through frameworks of stasis and exclusion. The temporal and spatial conditions that structure individual experiences of seasonal labour, transience, and temporary migration limit the performances of everyday life to marginal social spaces. The seasonal worker also contrasts understandings of a fixed, stable regional identity by moving through space in a seemingly unattached way.

In addressing these issues, this paper uses the mobile body to explore the state of being 'local', which assumes that belonging necessitates a deep, long-term personal connection with regional space. This paper forms part of a PhD research project focusing on sites in regional south-east Queensland, Australia where seasonal workers, farmers, and long-term residents intersect. Broader themes of temporality, migrancy, mobility and belonging touch on the exploitation of temporary migrant workers recently revealed Australian media discourse.

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