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

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…