Not settlement but movement: Exploring mobility as central to the wellbeing of young people from migrant backgrounds building lives from rural Australia

Australian federal, state, and local governments have invested in international migration prevent population decline and promote economic development in regional and rural Australia. While geographic mobility is integral to life in many rural communities, policy and research approaches to ‘successful settlement’ frequently centre on insufficient ideals of stasis. Based on participatory research with young people from migrant and refugee backgrounds in regional and rural Australia, this paper explores everyday mobilities that were central to the wellbeing of this group, conceptualising successful regional and rural settlement as fundamentally mobile. We conceptualise mobility from a rural perspective, drawing from geographer Anne Buttimer’s ‘home and reach’ framework, and a racialized perspective, informed by phenomenological approaches to whiteness and racialized embodiment developed by Sara Ahmed and Helen Ngo (Ahmed 2007; Ngo 2017). For young people in this study, the familiar spaces of home were characterised by discomfort and existential precarity associated with ‘being not’ white, which drove them to reach for spaces of respite and existential security elsewhere. At the same time, iterative processes of return supported an embodied connection to home as the place where their relational lives were centred. Ultimately, the freedom to leave and return underpinned their possibilities for staying to build a meaningful, enduring sense of home.