Paper short abstract:

This microcosmic study of place, belonging, and temporariness examines working holidaymakers doing seasonal agricultural labour in rural Australia, and the economic vulnerability that is encoded into their everyday lives via this precarious work. Working holidaymakers’ enact various strategies for survival, which reveal overlapping and discordant realities, with consequences ranging from the mundane to sinister.

Paper long abstract:

Each year, thousands of working holidaymakers travel across regional Australia, in search of seasonal agricultural labour. They are in the country for one year as part of the Working Holiday (417) visa, but many dream of staying for a second; to fulfil visa application requirements, working holidaymakers are required to undertake 88 days’ work in rural industries. In agriculturally-rich areas, it is easy to find employment at local farms, although the work itself is precarious, labour-intensive, offers little pay, and is often tangentially risk-averse.

For those living and working in one small Australian town, affectual encounters with the landscape can highlight, and even intensify the economic vulnerability that already permeates their everyday lives. Monetary constraints mean that travel outside of work hours is mostly undertaken on foot. There are three possible routes WHMs can take between a caravan park (where many live) and a grocery store, where most purchase food and alcohol. An authorised path is safe, but time-consuming; two others are shorter and more convenient, but present genuine physical danger. To inhabit regional space and be employed in seasonal agricultural labour means participating in a combative landscape, against realities that are encoded with exclusion.

Through the reappropriation of place and temporariness, working holidaymakers’ everyday lives are remade, and the landscape is transformed into something more conducive to everyday survival – although at a possible personal cost. These strategies intended to counter subtle, inadvertent structural violence in fact reveal discordant temporal landscapes, with consequences ranging from mundane, to sinister.