Examinations,access, and inequity within the empire: Britain,Australia and India, 1890–1910

Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British position, by locating synergies between the deployment of examinations as a form of racial gatekeeping at the height of the empire, with reference to discourses of equity and access emanating from Britain, Australia and India. It reads British attempts to ameliorate the harsh exclusions of the White Australia policy – administered through the apparently neutral device of the Dictation Test – alongside remarkably similar constraints embedded in the exams for the Indian Civil Service that were designed to limit the numbers of Indians in the ICS. Race-based immigration restriction was consistent with – not repugnant to – imperial sensibilities, contrary to so many protestations. The prevalence of racially discriminatory immigration legislation in settler societies had the effect of projecting the worst forms of racism to the peripheries of empire, exposing the contradictions of the colonial project in India.     

Engaging with risk (or not): shared responsibility for biosecurity surveillance and the role of community gardens

Governance of risks to native flora and fauna and agriculture from disease and pests increasingly emphasises the importance of a ‘shared responsibility’ for biosecurity. Few studies, however, have examined factors that influence stakeholders' engagement with such risks and responsibilities, particularly in community, rather than agricultural, settings. In this paper, we focus on a group of stakeholders in a context of heightened regional biosecurity activity, in northern Queensland, Australia. We explore the role that community garden actors may or may not play in biosecurity surveillance. Through interviews with 16 community garden group leaders and local government representatives, we unpack external social factors that contributed to stakeholders' engagement, unengagement, or disengagement with and from biosecurity risks. These factors included institutional characteristics such as land tenure and the presence or absence of management policies and guidelines. However, we found that less formal institutional characteristics such as social networks played a greater role in shaping stakeholder engagement. Unengaged stakeholders were typically unaware of risks posed by plant pests and diseases and had limited network connections to relevant government agencies but expressed an interest in learning and participating in biosecurity surveillance networks. Disengaged stakeholders were more knowledgeable of biosecurity risks and had established network connections but expressed a low interest in or willingness to report a potential biosecurity threat. This case study provides insights into important social dimensions of governing risk among stakeholders and offers recommendations to improve stakeholder engagement within biosecurity surveillance networks.     

Getting yourself out of the way: Aboriginal people listening and belonging in the city

Much is known about the meaning of Country to Aboriginal people living in northern Australia. Discourse abounds in various disciplines about how Country provides people in remote locations with a sense of belonging and place. Yet little is known about what Country means to Aboriginal people living in large urban locations such as Sydney, Australia. The two authors conducted a series of interviews with nine Aboriginal people about what Country and belonging mean for them in the city. A methodological relation between the two authors is explored as a means of reflecting on the role of mentoring in a research partnership, and on the transferal of research capacity through that collaboration. Older participants identify how listening and belonging are each governed by the other to the extent that there can be no belonging without listening. We draw on the frames of both human geography and philosophy to argue that listening depends on an ability to get yourself out of the way.