Migration, class and intra-distinctions of whiteness in the making of inland rural Victoria

Abstract

This paper examines how white rural identities have been historically produced and transformed over time as a result of colonial migration regimes, the racialisation of labour, intra-distinctions of classed whiteness and projects of social mobility. White identities in settler Australia's ethnically diverse rural towns and cities are commonly depicted as reified, homogenous and fixed-in-place. In rural-focused sociological research, any recognition of whiteness is typically in response to classed stigma around “failed” whiteness, or in discussions of a white-centred “rural cosmopolitanism”. Yet critical Indigenous studies and critical rural studies scholars have long shown that the very ubiquitous construction of whiteness acts as a framing device in the imagining of Australian “rurality”, one which obscures ongoing legacies of power and structures of rural inequality. In this paper I further this agenda by examining how whiteness has been historically produced in one rural, inland city of south-eastern Australia. First, I discuss the colonial projects of race-making and class mobility which were embedded in the region's rural irrigation schemes of the late nineteenth century. Second, I examine how Australia's post-war migration programs, the racialisation of labour and intra-distinctions of class all redefined the boundaries of whiteness over the twentieth century, and consider how this contributed to shaping rural social geographies. Drawing on a range of historical and contemporary sources, I show how white rural identities in settler Australia, rather than being reified and immutable, have been historically created under specific social, political and economic conditions.