Diamonds in the Backyard: Migrant Youth and Hip Hop in Australian Regional Towns

Abstract

Although ‘migrant hip hop’ has been a focus of academic work (e.g. Alim et al. 2009; Kaya 2015; Mitchell 1996; Williams 2018), significantly less attention has been paid to the role of hip hop among migrant youth in regional spaces. This also applies in the case of Australia, a country where most of the population lives in the cities while the remainder are scattered across regional towns that are often large distances apart (Bennett et al. 2019). This lack of attention to migrant hip hop in Australia’s regions may be explained by the fact that regional migration is a comparatively recent phenomenon for Australia, starting at the beginning of the 1990s with the introduction of regional skilled migration (Hugo 2008). In the early 2000s, regional areas began to accommodate humanitarian entrants from Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia, as well as skilled migrants. Despite this regional influx of non-Western migrants, international migration cannot be compared with the major urban migrant areas of resettlement, such as Melbourne and Sydney. Therefore, even though a trend towards international migration to regional areas may have commenced, the regional migrant population has remained fragmented and scattered. Australian regional cultural settings, with their thin and highly dispersed layers of migrant community presence, make answering any questions regarding racial and cultural belonging hard to address for migrant youth. Nevertheless, this is a central aspect of their migrant experiences, and is reflected in their different forms of cultural expression, including the hip hop music produced by a number of migrant youth. Drawing on research conducted in regional areas of New South Wales and Queensland, respectively the second and third largest states in Australia, this chapter aims to reveal existing utilization of hip hop by migrant youth as a vehicle of ‘juggling the cultures’ of belonging (Sushytska 2019) as an outlet of self-expression for translocal identity and a career pathway. As the chapter illustrates, a distinctive feature of the Australian ‘regional case’ is that when young people settle in regional areas, they bring an ‘urban’ hip hop culture into the regional setting, thereby placing themselves ‘on a map’ of international hip hop geography. By doing so, they highlight issues of diverse cultural expressions, artistic pathways in regional areas and issues of cultural recognition that constitute regional Australian hip hop localization.