Paper short abstract:

This paper considers forms of settler belonging in a small outback town in the Kimberley region of northern Australia. The paper charts the collective anxiety of settler residents, not only about the ongoing viability and existence of the town, but also their place within it.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers forms of settler belonging in a small outback town in the Kimberley region of northern Australia. Using the results of fieldwork undertaken with residents in 2016 and 2017, the paper examines the precarity of settler belonging in what is otherwise an Aboriginal town. Against the backdrop of declining local industries of pastoralism and mining, it charts the collective anxiety of settler residents, not only about the ongoing viability and existence of the town, but also their place within it. Rather than conceptualising these attachments as competing with or diminishing those of Aboriginal residents, the paper takes seriously the challenge of recognising settler assertions of belonging. What becomes apparent is how working class settlers, who have often led highly mobile lives, typify the philosopher Linn Miller's (2003) description of a 'longing for belonging' in contemporary Australia. It examines how precarity is mediated, namely by identification with the hopefulness and triumphant potential of forms of economic enterprise, especially that of the local shipping port which despite employing few people holds a particular position in the imaginations of settler residents.