From paradise to prison: The disrupted spatial imaginaries of victimised female British migrants in Australia

Abstract

British migration to Australia may be motivated by the paradisiacal glow in which the country is framed, but personal lives after arrival can upset these pre‐migratory spatial imaginaries, evoking feelings of darkness, doom, horror, isolation, and imprisonment. This article uses two concepts—that of spatial imaginaries and that of biographical disruptions—to unpack the stories of three British migrant women whose idealised expectations of Australia are overturned after each enters a violent marriage with an Australian man. By exploring the similarities of these women's tumultuous marital lives, I reveal how spatial imaginaries can be drastically altered by biographical disruptions that occur within intimate settings, particularly events that are violent in nature. This article highlights the unsolidified, contingent, and relational nature of migrant spatial imaginaries with an emphasis on how the startling, biographically disruptive, and emotionally unsettling nature of intimate partner violence fundamentally shapes the way spaces are viewed.

Talking population geographies and a ‘love letter’ to the journal

“…Examples in the journal include: Li and Findlay (1996) deploying interviews to hear the stories of Hong Kong Chinese immigrants; Ní Laoire (2000) explicitly naming as 'biographical' her approach to working with Irish young migrants; Halfacree (2004) using migrants' voices to recover 'non-economic' reasons for peoples' 'counter-urbanisation' moves; Gladkova and Mazzucato (2015) searching migration stories for the role of ad hoc social interactions; and Luo (2023) also explicitly naming as 'biographical' her work based on taking the 'life histories' of 'irregular' Chinese immigrants to the UK. 16 Subsequently the journal has carried numerous papers where the values-the perceptions, conceptions and imaginings-of migration have been evoked, including: giving a poignant personal narrative introducing a special issue on America as a 'land of migrants' (Shrestha, 2003;also Shrestha, 1995); quarrying archived oral histories to convey the horrors of 'forced migration' imposed on a Native American 'tribe' being removed to a 'reservation' (Berry & Rinehart, 2003); reconstructing the 'imaginative geographies' held in the minds of British migrants to Aotearoa New Zealand (Higgins, 2018); and, paralleling the Higgins paper, reconstructing how some 'victimised' young women British migrants to Australia end up substituting a 'spatial imaginary' of 'paradise' with a 'disruptive' one that revisits a brutalising 'convict' and 'prison' portrayal (Ridgway, 2021). Experiential and values-attuned studies may be situated within a broader arc of so-called 'reflexive' migration research, alert to how meanings of migration, place, borders and more are co-constituted by reseachers and researched; and this reflexive approach can itself be set alongside a 'doing migration' approach concerned with the many ways in which individuals perform-or are cajoled into performing-the identity of 'migrant' (even if actually immobile, never having moved and not intending to do so).…”