Preface

This volume has its origins in a two-day workshop convened in June 2017 at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. Coming together as historians, anthropologists, geographers and sociologists, our twin aims were to consider both Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander experiences of labour mobility in a comparative context, and to bring historical and contemporary experiences into conversation. In doing so, we sought to interrogate the nature of labour relations and discourses of labour within colonial projects, including in the governing and making of colonised subjects, as well as the making and governing of colonised territories. We sought, also, to expand the terms and scope by which Australian coloniality has often been conceived, thinking together about the settler colonialism of the Australian state, the colonial administration of the territories of Papua and New Guinea, as well as more diffuse (but nevertheless violent) forms of post- and neo-colonialism articulated through ‘development’ and border regimes. ‘Coloniality’ provided an analytical frame for holding together this expanded scope of vision at the workshop and, similarly, holds together the papers collected here. A focus on labour mobility experiences within Australia facilitates our particular comparisons between Indigenous and Pacific Islander people, and the particular inquiry into Australian coloniality.

What emerged from the two days of collegial exchange was a picture of particularity and diversity, but ultimately, also, of powerful continuities across time and among the experiences of diverse indigenous peoples. The labour lines that this book traces, then, are lines across both time and space—lines of connection that speak to the extended reach of both colonial power and indigenous world-making across the region.

To the extent that our project seeks to disrupt the disciplinary compartmentalising of Indigenous and Pacific studies, and to interrogate the transnational connections, networks, imaginations and flows in which Australian settler colonialism is enmeshed, it builds upon the recent work of others, most notably the Pacific historian Tracey Banivanua Mar. We were fortunate and privileged to have Tracey participate in our workshop just months before she passed away. Tracey’s premature death came just as the full significance of her groundbreaking work—particularly her books Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007) and Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)—was being recognised. Tracey’s paper at the workshop is included here as a posthumous contribution, having been finalised by her colleagues and friends Kalissa Alexeyeff, Lucy Davies and Alan Lester. We extend our sincere thanks to them for their support.

We also wish to thank everyone who participated in the original workshop. In addition to the contributors to this volume, participants included Tiffany Shellam, who played a key role in organising the workshop, and also Shannyn Palmer, Kirstie Close, Julia Martínez, Melinda Hinkson and Elizabeth Watt, and John Connell, who acted as our discussant. For a variety of reasons, none sinister, their workshop contributions are not included in this volume. Thanks also go to the Alfred Deakin Institute for their financial support of the workshop and publication, and to Rani Kerin and her colleagues in the Aboriginal History series at ANU Press. We are also appreciative that two anonymous reviewers wholeheartedly supported our project while also providing constructive comments for some revisions. Finally, we thank the Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities and individuals who have responded positively to our inquiries, from whom we learn, and about whose lives and labour lines we are privileged to write.

Victoria Stead and Jon Altman

Melbourne