Lost in space (and time): the disrupted intimacies of Pacific and Timorese guestworkers in Australia

Abstract

The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme is Australia’s first long-term guestworker migration scheme. In recruiting workers from nine Pacific Island Countries and Timor-Leste to perform low-wage work for periods of up to four years, it leverages uneven regional development to create racialised and gendered situations of exception within Australia’s migration regime. PALM workers encounter exceptional spatial and temporal restrictions on their personal lives in Australia, which have to date been under-examined in a literature on migration and intimacy privileging the experiences of ‘middling migrants’. The ‘intimate chronomobilities’ of Pacific and Timorese migrant workers are constrained by relative immobility and extended periods of transnational family separation that impair the maintenance and navigation of personal relationships and family ties. Drawing on a combination of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with migrant workers, their family members and government stakeholders, this article reframes these experiences as ‘intimate chronoimmobilities’ to emphasise the restrictive interplay of space and time in PALM workers’ lives. By examining overlapping expressions of biographical, institutional and everyday space–time, we demonstrate how the scheme produces a spectrum of inequitable affordances for intimate life that jeopardise the welfare of workers and their families, standing as discriminatory aberrations within Australia’s migration regime.