Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel: risk and socio-spatialities in Australians’ accounts of border controls during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, several jurisdictions have exerted controls over people’s mobilities as a way of containing viral spread. In Australia, international borders were closed for almost two years and internal borders were periodically shut and policed as part of strong public health measures implemented by federal and state governments. In this article, we discuss how Australians conceptualized risk in relation to border controls, drawing on a set of interviews conducted in 2021 in which participants were asked to recount their experiences of the pandemic. Our analysis builds on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants’ accounts of living in COVID times, in which they were confined within both national and internal borders. Our findings suggest three main socio-spatial imaginaries at work in participants’ accounts of life behind closed borders during COVID-19. The first imaginary is an idea of immunity as a spatial property, supporting the concept of geographic immunity. The second is an ambivalent distinction between Self and Other produced through borders hastily thrown up along state lines. The third is the experience behind closed borders of living in a state of ‘suspension’, whereby risk is provisionally held off spatially, yet projected into the future.

Resumen

Durante la pandemia de COVID-19, varias jurisdicciones han ejercido controles sobre la movilidad de las personas como una forma de contener la propagación viral. En Australia, las fronteras internacionales estuvieron cerradas durante casi dos años y las fronteras internas se cerraron y vigilaron periódicamente como parte de las fuertes medidas de salud pública implementadas por los gobiernos federal y estatal. En este artículo, discutimos cómo los australianos conceptualizaron el riesgo en relación con los controles fronterizos, a partir de una serie de entrevistas realizadas en 2021 en las que se pidió a los participantes que relataran sus experiencias con la pandemia. Nuestro análisis se basa en estudios sociales y culturales para comprender los significados simbólicos y los espacios sociales de los relatos de vida de nuestros participantes en tiempos de COVID en los que estaban confinados dentro de las fronteras nacionales e internas. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren tres principales imaginarios socio espaciales en el trabajo en los relatos de vida de los participantes detrás de fronteras cerradas durante COVID-19. El primer imaginario es una idea de inmunidad como propiedad espacial, apoyando el concepto de inmunidad geográfica. La segunda es una distinción ambivalente entre el ‘yo’ y el ‘Otro’ producida a través de fronteras reforzadas de manera apresurada a lo largo de las fronteras estatales. El tercero es la experiencia detrás de fronteras cerradas de vivir en un estado de ’suspensión’, en el que el riesgo se mantiene temporalmente espacial, pero que se proyecta hacia el futuro.

Résumé

Un certain nombre d’autorités gouvernementales ont imposé des contrôles sur la mobilité individuelle pendant la pandémie de COVID-19 dans le but de limiter la propagation du virus. En Australie, les frontières du pays ont été fermées pendant près de deux ans et les zones limitrophes internes, entre états et territoires, ont été bloquées et contrôlées de façon intermittente dans le cadre des mesures de santé publique mises en place par le gouvernement fédéral et les gouvernements des états. Dans cet article, nous présentons la manière dont les Australiens ont conceptualisé le danger face aux contrôles frontaliers, en nous appuyant sur une série d’entretiens menés en 2021, pendant lesquels nous avons demandé aux participants de raconter leurs expériences de la pandémie. Notre analyse se fonde sur les recherches sociale et culturelle pour comprendre les significations symboliques et socio-spatiales émanant des récits de nos participants sur leurs vies au temps de COVID, pendant lesquelles ils étaient confinés autant par les démarcations internes du pays que par ses délimitations internationales. Nos observations suggèrent que trois imaginaires sociospatiaux en action ressortent des témoignages sur la vie derrière des frontières closes pendant la pandémie. Le premier imaginaire est une idée de l’immunité en tant que propriété spatiale, soutenant le concept d’immunité géographique. Le deuxième est une distinction ambivalente entre le Soi et les Autres, engendrée par des limites érigées à la hâte entre les états. Le troisième est l’expérience de vivre dans un état de « suspens » derrière des frontières fermées, dans lequel le danger est provisoirement retardé au niveau spatial, mais projeté dans l’avenir.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• borders
• Australia
• risk
• socio-spatialities
• imaginaries

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• COVID-19
• fronteras
• Australia
• riesgo
• espacios sociales
• imaginarios

MOTS-CLEFS:

• COVID-19
• frontières
• Australie
• danger
• spatialités sociales
• imaginaires

Introduction

The outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 and governments’ subsequent attempts to ‘stop the spread’ of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has had major impacts globally on mobilities and socio-spatial arrangements. In the early stages of the pandemic, lockdown, sheltering in place and physical distancing restrictions were introduced in many countries, limiting people’s movements outside the home space. Quarantine arrangements were put into place to confine those who were infected. In some countries, national and internal travel restrictions or closures were introduced as part of these containment efforts (Burns et al., 2021; Lin & Yeoh, 2021; Yu & Qian, 2023). Australia became well-known worldwide for instituting one of the harshest and most prolonged national border closures, to the extent that the term ‘Fortress Australia’ was commonly employed in the international media (Kelly, 2022). Strategies for the control, surveillance and policing of internal borders were integral to COVID management and efforts to ‘stop the spread’ of the virus. Compared to most other countries in the Global North, Australia experienced far lower COVID case numbers and deaths in the first two years of the pandemic (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022; Duckett, 2022).

In this article, we draw on a qualitative interview-based project exploring Australians’ experiences of COVID, focusing on what it was like for people to live behind closed borders during the first two years of this continuing pandemic. Previous studies investigating the socio-spatialities of lockdown experiences in Australia have drawn attention to aspects such as changes to exercise and work routines in the home setting (Clark & Lupton, 2021; Watson et al., 2021a), loneliness (Franklin & Tranter, 2022) and lack of sexual intimacy (Thorneycroft & Nicholas, 2021), the use of digital devices and media to connect with others (Watson et al., 2021b), the practice of small acts of care (Raynor & Frichot, 2022) and navigating the emptiness of the locked down city (Young, 2021). In what follows, we explore a different dimension of the socio-spatialities of COVID and everyday life in Australia. While previous commentators have noted the role of international border enforcement and travel restrictions in COVID geopolitical rivalries (Brunet-Jailly, 2022; Cole & Dodds, 2021; Yu & Qian, 2023), our focus is on citizens confined within the government-imposed internal borders of one nation. We build on social and cultural scholarship to understand the symbolic meanings and socio-spatialities of our participants’ accounts of living in COVID times during the implementation and enforcement of these domestic border controls.

The project ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19’ has several broad social research aims. It seeks to identify the details of how Australians across the continent, living in both metropolitan and rural areas and from different age groups, health status and occupations, have experienced the changing conditions of the pandemic. The project has a focus on the sociomaterial dimensions of living in COVID times: that is, how space and place assemble with human bodies, other living things and non-living objects. To date, three stages of in-depth interviews, each with a different set of 40 adult participants, have been conducted using remote methods (telephone/video calls). The interviews for Stage 1 were conducted in mid-2020, Stage 2 in late 2021 and Stage 3 in late 2022. Each of these different time periods involved unique pandemic circumstances. During the Stage 1 interviews, Australians were emerging from the first and only national lockdown. In Stage 2, half the population had entered another strict lockdown period and COVID vaccinations were being strongly promoted by the government. By the Stage 3 interviews, many mitigations had been removed and the case and death rates had subsequently risen dramatically. The interviews from the total of 120 people included across these three years have therefore allowed us to identify the impacts of changing pandemic conditions and policy settings and to consider the changing socio-spatial dimensions of people’s experiences.

In this article, we draw on the 40 Stage 2 interviews, which involved considerable discussion of domestic border closures, given that they took place following a period of 18 months during which there was a high degree of variability in regional experiences of COVID cases, border closures and lockdowns across the continent. Our participants resided in every state (New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania) and territory (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory) of Australia, including metropolitan and rural regions, and therefore offered a diverse range of location-based perspectives on these experiences. In what follows, we begin by providing further details of how borders were controlled in Australia during the first two pandemic years, and then give an overview of the principal concepts of risk, immunity and borders on which our analysis builds. We then outline details of the project and present an analysis of the participants’ accounts of the border controls that were implemented by authorities during this period. The discussion section considers how risk took on new socio-spatial properties, complicating what it meant to be ‘Australian’. We explore how metaphors of being contained within a ‘bubble’ behind closed borders implied a state of suspension, one that projected risk into a temporal frame when the bubble would inevitably burst.

COVID-related border closures in Australia

Australia’s geography is one important factor in the initial success of its COVID mitigation strategies. As an island, Australian authorities can maintain strict control over its international border by regulating travel by air. A tight system of entry checks and mandatory visa requirements for non-citizens was already in place before the pandemic. On 20 March 2020, nine days after the World Health Organization announced that COVID-19 could be characterized as a pandemic, the Commonwealth government closed the international border and lockdown restrictions were introduced nationwide. Non-citizens who wanted to travel to Australia and Australian citizens who wanted to fly out of the country were required to apply for an exemption to the travel ban, which was granted only in exceptional circumstances. If allowed to enter as a citizen or if a travel exemption was granted, incoming travellers were required to spend 14 days in hotel quarantine at their own expense (Stobart & Duckett, 2022). These travel restrictions remained in place until November 2021, with the international border fully reopened to all travellers in February 2022 (Jose, 2022).

Internal border closures applying to citizens and non-citizens alike also occurred for long periods during 2020 and 2021. Most of the eight state/territory governments closed their borders in March 2020 when the national lockdown was declared, to prevent entry of infected travellers from higher-risk areas in Australia (Stobart & Duckett, 2022). These internal borders were often vigorously policed. People seeking to travel between one state/territory and another were required to apply for exemptions and to show evidence of these at police checkpoints placed on major roads, often involving waiting in long queues (see Figure 1). Once the spread of COVID cases had been well controlled, authorities progressively loosened the nationwide lockdown, and most internal borders were opened. However, the Western Australian government maintained a hard border between its state (comparatively huge in size but low in population density compared with other Australian state/territories) and the rest of Australia from 5 April 2020 to 3 March 2022. This period of 697 days was described as ‘one of the world’s longest border closures’ (Marcus, 2022). Announcing the opening of the Western Australian border, state Premier Mark McGowan described how well the state had done in minimizing COVID cases and that this had been achieved by operating as ‘an island within an island’ (Marcus, 2022).

Figure 1. Vehicles waiting to pass through the Queensland/NSW border checkpoint, July 2020. Photo credit: Murray Waite and State Library of Queensland. Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC. Available at https://collections.slq.qld.gov.au/viewer/IE2047823.

Further internal border closures were implemented in response to new outbreaks at various times in 2020 and 2021. When a second wave of infection affected Australia’s second-largest city Melbourne in July 2020, following a hotel quarantine breach, the Victorian government began locking down parts of the city and then the whole city, while other states and territories closed their borders to Victoria. A phrase used at the time by Victorian officials and the news media referred to a ‘ring of steel’ surrounding Greater Melbourne, beyond which Melbourne residents were not allowed to travel, while those living in regional Victoria outside this barrier were not permitted entry into Melbourne. The objective was to prevent COVID spread from Melbourne to the rest of Victoria. While this four-month ‘ring of steel’ was not a continuous physical barrier, as implied in the term, it was a rigorously monitored and enforced boundary, involving the presence of police checkpoints on major roadways into Melbourne (Scott, 2020).

Half of Australia’s population (those living in Sydney, Melbourne and the Australian Capital Territory) went through a further prolonged lockdown of several months from mid-to-late 2021 following another outbreak originating from a hotel quarantine breach, this time involving the Delta viral variant. Internal borders were again closed in response and residents were restricted to movements outside their homes within a small range (for example, 5 km in Sydney). Residents of affected regions were urged by the Commonwealth and state governments to seek COVID vaccination, which had recently become widely available, as a ‘way out’ of quarantine and border closures (Duckett, 2022).

These border strategies, together with other mitigation measures, were extremely effective in combatting COVID spread. There were long periods in the first 18 months following the international border closure where ‘COVID Zero’ was achieved (no cases of community transmission of COVID anywhere in Australia) (Stobart & Duckett, 2022). In both 2020 and 2021, Australia recorded many fewer cases per head of population and negative excess deaths (meaning death rates had decreased compared with pre-COVID years), in stark contrast to the devastation experienced in similar Western high-income countries such as the UK and U.S.A. and across continental Europe (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2022).

These border controls were not without controversy or criticism, however. Australia was by no means the only country in the Global North to implement international border closures to control COVID, but it was among the harshest in terms of the length of closure and unwillingness to provide travel exemptions. Tens of thousands of Australian citizens were left stranded overseas for many months. People who wanted to travel overseas from Australia to see family members, including those who were elderly or very ill, often experienced great emotional hardship, with little government support (Ali et al., 2022). The Prime Minister of the time, Scott Morrison, repeatedly criticized state leaders such as the Premiers of Western Australia and Victoria who maintained internal border closures for periods longer than he deemed necessary (Duckett, 2022). News reports referred to the intensification of state rivalries and the one-sided parochialism displayed by Premiers, as well as reporting difficulties experienced by people who found themselves on the wrong side of the international and state borders for long periods of time (Alcorn, 2020).

For many people living close to state/territory borders, accustomed to regularly and readily travelling into these regions, the periods of hard border control were difficult. These ‘cross-border communities’ were frequently confronted with different and complex rules to follow if they lived within a certain defined area around the border established by state/territory governments (McCann et al., 2022; Spennemann, 2021). At times, the police enforcing border rules were heavy-handed. People were fined and charged with offences for flouting border rules. In Melbourne’s second lockdown, the sudden decision by Victorian authorities to begin it by isolating disadvantaged migrant communities living in public housing tower blocks was subjected to considerable criticism for racism and flouting their human rights (Olivier et al., 2022; Wynn, 2021). Further, there was regular public shaming by health authorities and news media reports of people who had been ‘caught’ travelling across borders in contravention of the regulations in place at the time: again, with racism sometimes involved (Lupton, 2022).

Conceptualizing risk, immunity and borders

In focusing on the socio-spatialities of pandemic border closures, our analysis brings together critical border studies with literature on the biopolitics of public health and concepts of immunity that span complex political, medical, symbolic and spatial dimensions. In social and cultural theory, concepts of borders and boundaries have broad significance in understanding ideas and practices related to identity, community, the governing and monitoring of bodies and mobilities, Self and Otherness and the biopolitics of risk. Cultural and political geographers have identified how concepts of risk and dangerousness intersect with those of borders as way of excluding certain individuals or social groups from spaces, justifying exceptional measures of surveillance and containment, particularly in relation to racialized groups (Amoore, 2013; Vaughan-Williams and Pisani, 2020). The advent of the COVID pandemic inspired further reflections on the use of borders as a biopolitical measure that was both material and symbolic in this ‘state of exception’ that was simultaneously global, national and regional (Lin and Yeoh, 2021; Lupton, 2022; Wynn, 2021; Yu and Qian, 2023).

Cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas’ scholarship on purity and danger (Douglas, 1966), as well as her writings on risk and culture (Douglas, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982), emphasize the symbolic and social ways across global societies in which the notion of boundaries operates to distinguish between Self and Other. Such practices as the establishment and policing of legal and physical borders, including those between towns or nations, are a part of boundary making. There have been numerous examples throughout the COVID crisis of individuals or social groups being treated as the dangerous Other because of their known or suspected infection status, their cultural position as outsiders, or their alleged unwillingness to control their behaviours to protect others (Lin and Yeoh, 2021; Lupton, 2022; Yu and Qian, 2023).

Concepts of immunity similarly combine symbolic understandings about Self and Otherness, boundaries and permeability concerning risk and contagion. The initial use of the term ‘immunity’ (still in use) is a legalistic definition from ancient Rome, describing the extent to which an individual is protected by law (Cohen, 2009). Taken up in biological and medical terminology, immunity describes the processes by which the human body reacts to exposure from pathogens by generating antibodies to protect itself from infection. Metaphors of battle and war pervade the language of immunology. A successful response from the immune system to egress by a pathogen (or a vaccine designed to stimulate this response) renders the pathogen harmless or less virulent so that the individual does not become severely ill or dies. In immunological discourse, the invading microbe is portrayed as the Other, recognized by the immune system as requiring destruction or neutralization through attack from elements such as organs and cells that comprise this system (Cohen, 2009; Martin, 1994).

Political and medical meanings of immunity are now intertwined as part of contemporary biopolitics. Building on Douglas’ scholarship, Roberto Esposito (2011) has noted that that the term ‘immunity’ is often used to denote protection of the body politic. What he calls ‘immunity mechanisms’ are deployed by state-based systems to protect communities against both internal and external threats to their health and life, including infectious disease but also conflict and civil unrests. These mechanisms are continually in tension between the need to preserve citizens’ individual freedoms and the protection of the body politic. In modern COVID parlance, these different ways of imagining immunity of the body politic and of individual human bodies are continually used in both political and medical terminology. Public health measures such as quarantine, lockdowns, physical distancing, border closures, testing, contact tracing and ensuring clean air in enclosed spaces are immunity mechanisms. So too are pharmaceutical measures such as vaccines and antiviral drugs, together with preventive sanitary procedures undertaken at the individual level such as mask wearing and hand washing (Lupton, 2022). Operating together, these mechanisms simultaneously protect individual bodies and the body politic from viral infection (S. Williams and Michie, 2022).

In the specific context of Australia, a further concept – that of ‘geographic immunity’ – has been developed by Bashford (1998) in her analysis of Australian histories of quarantine. She suggests that in the early twentieth century Australia imagined itself as possessing ‘geographic immunity’ due to its status as an island nation, whereby at that time, potentially diseased others had to arrive by ship. Bashford argues that the spatial imagining of Australia was central to early public health measures around quarantine and disease. Other researchers have pointed to the racism and other forms of Othering that have traditionally been employed in Australia’s quarantine and border controls as exclusionary measures for those deemed contaminating, either symbolically or medically (Olivier et al., 2022; Wynn, 2021). We take this idea of ‘geographic immunity’ as a lens to illuminate how Australians experienced bodily forms of safety and risk from COVID-19 during 2020–2021. That is, as an immunity mechanism, border closures created a specific sense of bodily protection, one where the safety of self was linked to socio-spatial imaginaries that mapped onto borders (such as around specific Australian states) that prior to the pandemic may have been felt as only of negligible importance to health.

Scholarship in critical border studies frequently emphasizes border crossings such as the governance of borders (Amoore, 2013) and migration (Vaughan-Williams and Pisani, 2020) or looking across the border in forming identities (Walker, 2013). In our analysis, we take a different approach to borders, considering the effects of COVID-19 measures of ‘territorial confinement’ (Iveson and Sisson, 2023). We highlight the experience of borders as entities within which people are enclosed in a form of ‘suspension’ (see Choy and Zee, 2015). Jones (2022, p. 541) suggests that suspension ‘involves holding and being held’ and we consider this awareness of being ‘held’ by the border as it relates to the understanding of both geographic immunity and spatial modes of bodily safety. In examining borders in terms of enclosure and suspension, our analysis complements work in geography that takes ‘stillness’ as one of the social features of the COVID-19 pandemic (Osborne and Meijering, 2021). We show that being ‘held’ by a state-imposed border can be understood both as a form of constraint and as an immunity mechanism that provides a sense of safety.

Details of the study

The ‘Australians’ Experiences of COVID-19’ project began in May 2020, after receiving approval from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Human Research Ethics Committee. Recruitment was structured for each stage by the same sub-quotas to ensure a diversity of sociodemographic attributes and geographical locations. The semi-structured interviews were conducted remotely, either by telephone or video call, which allowed for ready inclusion of participants from all over Australia as well as ensuring COVID-safe participation. In Stage 2 of the project, the interviews were conducted between late September and early October 2021. This was a time when it appeared that the effects of the Delta variant were receding due to the rapid uptake of COVID vaccinations in the two states (New South Wales and Victoria) and territory (Australian Capital Territory) that had been affected by recent lockdowns (Lupton, 2021).

A research company who has been used by the second author many times for previous interview-based research was engaged to recruit and interview volunteers from their research panel members to participate in the Stage 2 round of interviews. Participant recruitment for qualitative research can be challenging and time-consuming: particularly if a heterogeneous group across different sociodemographic attributes and geographical locations is required. Using this trusted company had the benefit of timely, cost-effective and ready recruitment of the diverse range of participants we were seeking. The same experienced interviewer from the company conducted all the interviews under guidance and briefing by the project leader (second author) using the interview schedule formulated by this author. The interview schedule included questions about how COVID had changed their lives, what were the most challenging aspects of the pandemic and how they coped with these, what participants thought of their government responses to COVID management, and how they imagined life once the pandemic was over.

The Stage 2 participants resided in every state and territory of Australia. Sub-quotas were set to ensure a mix of people from rural (14 participants) and metropolitan areas (26 participants). Sub-quotas were also set for gender to ensure equal participation of women and men and for age (ten participants were recruited from each of the age groups 18–29 years, 30–49 years, 50–69 years and 70 years and over). Half of the participants reported university-level education, with the remainder having completed high school or a trade qualification. Nearly all participants (35) were Australian born, with two people reporting New Zealand as their birthplace, one Sri Lanka, and two the UK. All interviews were audio-recorded and fully transcribed by a professional transcription service. All participants were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity when reporting findings. Participants were provided with a gift card in appreciation of the time they devoted to the interview.

Our analysis of the interview transcripts was based on the interpretive thematic approach, which involves identifying patterns across the interview responses (Braun and Clarke, 2022). We were interested in identifying the logics that people drew on when explaining their experiences, the social relationships, connections and practices in which they took part and how they described their emotional responses (what it felt like to live during this time). This is an ‘analytically open’ approach which attempts to explore the multi-faceted dimensions of everyday life (Woodward, 2019). Both authors independently began their analyses, identifying themes, and then iteratively collaborated in writing the analysis presented here. Adopting a post-positivist approach, we acknowledge that all research is partial and conducted from situated standpoints. Researchers comes to analysis with their own perspectives and analytical collaboration is a process of sharing and mulling over other collaborators’ interpretations as we reach consensus over how to present our findings (Braun and Clarke, 2022). In our case, we are writing as Australian scholars trained in qualitative social research who experienced the lockdowns and border closures described in this article. The second author was located in Australia throughout the pandemic, while the first author moved from the United States to Australia at the end of 2020 after negotiating the international border restrictions and quarantine rules.

A different world: feeling safe from COVID

In a context in which state and territory government authorities implemented very different COVID management rules, people’s location in Australia was a major factor contributing to differences in their experiences. In general, participants attributed their relative risk or safety to the specific state in which they were located and identified the cause of feelings of safety to the closed border. Participants located in certain states of Australia reflected that once the 2020 nationwide lockdown had ended, their everyday life had returned to pre-COVID times. For example, Kate is resident of the small island state of Tasmania, which was effectively cut off from the Australian mainland by border closures. When asked about how the pandemic had affected her everyday life, Kate replied that:

It hasn’t, it really hasn’t, we’ve been completely lucky down here … we only had lockdown for a few months last year. And things after, with sort of everyone being a bit tentative to begin with when everything opened up again, life has pretty much gone back to normal.

Kate told us that she had sought vaccination against COVID in case she was ever exposed to the virus in the future, but it was the continued closing of her state borders that made her feel particularly safe. When she was asked to assess her current feeling of risk from infection, Kate explained that: ‘I don’t feel at risk at all – mainly because the borders are closed. Not necessarily because I have the vaccine, but because the borders are closed and we’re not letting anyone in’. Kate went so far as to suggest that the specific geographic features of Tasmania (a small island which is physically separated from the mainland of Australia) also contributed to this sense of safety:

I think our state government has handled it really well. We are in a really good position mainly because people, even though people are trying to sneak in, it’s much harder because of the fact that we’ve got water around the whole of Tasmania, so we’ve been lucky in that respect. And we haven’t until recently had international flights coming in here. So, yeah, it’s probably a bit of luck as to geographically where we’re situated and also the government just being quite strict about having border closures.

This sentiment of general ‘normality’ was shared by participants living in Western Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia: all regions that had not experienced further large COVID outbreaks and resultant protracted lockdowns. In 2020, Zara spent the two-week Christmas and New Year period isolated in mandated hotel quarantine after returning to Australia from overseas. In her early twenties, she had finished the first year of what was supposed to be three or more years of living in Japan. With the Australian border closed and Australian citizens not permitted to leave the country, she realized that she would be separated from her family indefinitely unless she returned home. Her immediate life plans disrupted, she returned to her home city of Perth, in the state of Western Australia.

Once she was released from quarantine, Zara found a city uncannily untouched by the chaos COVID was causing in other parts of the world. When she was interviewed for this study in October 2021 – nearly two years into the pandemic – Zara pointed out that:

You don’t see it [COVID-19] here, so you don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to wear a face mask; you don’t have to social distance. We’re 100% capacity for everything. So it makes it seem as if what’s happening everywhere else is like a dream, like it’s not our reality here.

This ‘dream’-like existence was the result of the long-term state border closure that had been instituted by the Western Australian government, effectively sealing off the state from the rest of Australia as well as the world. As a result, Zara’s everyday life was hardly affected by the pandemic, even while other parts of Australia were undergoing major lockdowns and restrictions. The one exception to this was that her brother lived in Sydney, across the continent and on the other side of the closed Western Australian border. Their mother had recently turned 60 and her brother was unable to enter the state to attend her birthday celebrations. Zara commented that life was basically normal ‘other than, really, him not being around as much as he kind of used to be’.

Zara felt extremely safe living in Perth due to this sense of geographic immunity. When asked how at risk she felt from COVID, she described her risk level as ‘from one to 10, probably a one. If there’s lower, I’d probably go lower’. Examined more closely, however, this feeling of ‘normality’ had limits. Living in Perth, Zara experienced a peculiar form of freedom and constraint. Residents of that city and the rest of the otherwise sparsely populated state of Western Australian were not required to engage in measures such as wearing masks, engaging in social distancing and adhering to capacity limits on public venues. Life in the city could carry on as normal, but only up to a point: as long as one never left the state, as long as one did not register the absence of distant family members at important events, as long as international travel was completely curtailed. As Zara observed, the tightly closed state border created a distinct reality in Perth, different from many other places in the world, which were like a ‘dream’ precisely because they could not be experienced directly by Western Australians confined within their own state.

Luck and the contingency of safety

Dream-like existences are just that: fleeting, illusory. The international and internal COVID borders controls were strict and tightly managed, but after almost two years of pandemic experiences, everyone realized that the COVID rules in their area were temporary and contingent on broader changes in case numbers, the emergence of new variants and the national and state governments’ responses. Many participants reiterated the refrain that they were very ‘lucky’ in the state/territory in which they were located. Jim, a retiree in South Australia, mentioned this good fortune multiple times in his interview, and then ended by saying he had nothing else to add, really, because ‘I guess I’m a bit boring in that it hasn’t affected us a great deal at all’. However, even for Jim, his ‘boring’ existence was punctuated by a shadow sense of uncertainty, the potential for things to change at any time. When asked how much at risk he felt from COVID infection, he replied: ‘here in South Australia, as I said, we’re very, very lucky, so I guess my feeling about getting it at the moment, is no. But it’s always in the back of your mind that things can change dramatically in a matter of hours’.

Jim’s comments suggest that there was a provisional nature to the sense of security that individuals felt, even if their lives were currently unaffected. By this stage of the pandemic, people in most parts of Australia had been involved in ‘snap lockdowns’ and ‘snap border closures’ that were unanticipated and could throw plans into disarray. Pete in Tasmania described the uncertainty of travelling during this period when a snap border closure was always potentially imminent: ‘I suppose I have family in Queensland, so going up there is a little bit like dodging bullets. I’ve come back and the same day they’ve actually closed the border. So I’ve been very fortunate, but other people, it can add a huge cost to their trips’.

Even if people had not been directly affected, mass media coverage or hearing about the experiences of others in their social networks and families brought these events well into their consciousness. Jason, although feeling safe behind the closed border of Tasmania, said that he nevertheless was affected by what was happening to loved ones: ‘I’m very concerned about some of my family, because they’ve obviously been in lockdown for months in Sydney’. People kept a close eye on what was happening in other states. For example, Stuart, pointing out he did not feel at risk as there was very little COVID in his home state of South Australia, added that: ‘I saw a media report this morning to say that Sydney [in New South Wales] was going to start opening up shortly … so after that there’s a possibility that you might get [COVID]’.

While COVID risk may have seemed far removed geographically, therefore, its presence was felt hovering. For those participants who lived in regions that had had few COVID cases due to border closures, danger lurked in the unknowable future when the borders eventually opened. They had heard about the situation in other states where increasing case numbers and resultant extended lockdowns had occurred. They were uncertain whether this future lay ahead for them. Felicity in South Australia, when asked about how at risk she felt currently from COVID-19 responded: ‘Right now? Pretty negligible. When the borders open – whole different ball game’. Similarly, Kate in Tasmania expressed apprehension about the borders opening: ‘knowing [COVID-19] is out there and wondering when our borders will open and what will happen if were to tear through Tasmania’. Fellow Tasmanian Kylie also wondered about how the borders opening would affect her state, reflecting that: ‘I mean, until we do open them, we really don’t know what’s going to happen’.

For our participants in these ‘protected’ states, living a ‘normal’ life behind a closed border was therefore coupled with the fear of what would happen when that border lifted. Alongside this uncertainty and apprehension was a feeling that the future was murky and unclear, that the hard borders currently in place were necessarily temporary, but this provisional nature deferred danger temporally. Where safety became a property of space, risk was folded into time. Indeed, ‘the bubble’ was one spatial metaphor used to describe life behind closed borders. Kylie in Tasmania mentioned that both she and her work colleagues (who were located in Western Australia) were in a ‘little bubble’ due to extended border closures from other, more dangerous parts of Australia. For Kylie, this meant that residents of both states felt that they could safely visit the other states, while other parts of Australia were either too risky or closed to them: ‘so we all, sort of, kick back and go, oh, well we’re in our bubble, we can visit each other’.

A ‘bubble’, as it appears to be meant here, is a structure that encloses and contains within a larger atmosphere. Those within the bubble operate differently from those who are outside it. However, like dreams, bubbles are both fragile and temporary phenomena. Thus, Jim felt that his lucky, boring existence could ‘change within a matter of hours’. Similarly, Kylie expressed trepidation with the unknown effects of the opening of borders on the horizon.

The way that the future would come into the present, in our participant’s narratives, was with the widespread adoption of vaccines. As Kylie’s response above indicates, vaccination rates were touted by government leaders and health officials as the path forward for opening internal and international borders again. With vaccinations, biological immunity replaced geographic immunity as the protective mechanism against COVID-19. Lisa in the Northern Territory pointed out this reversal in her response: ‘now that I’ve had the vaccine, I’m comfortable COVID can come. It doesn’t scare me. Prior to having the vaccine, I was comfortable because I was in Darwin’. Lisa had family overseas and was anticipating the opportunity to leave the country, fortified by vaccination:

I want to be on one of the first flights out. I believe we’ve got the vaccine now, I’m in good health, and I’ve got the vaccine, and I’ll wear a mask and use disinfectant. So I’ll try and minimise it, but I’m not overly nervous about catching it, or the impact that it would have on me, if that makes sense. It doesn’t scare me now that we’ve had the vaccine.

Along with vaccines shoring up her fears of catching COVID-19, Lisa drew a direct line between her ability to travel and the broader acceptance of vaccines in Australia: ‘I was struggling even, with the antivaxxer sentiment, because for as long as they’re preaching, it’s delaying me seeing my family’. Many other participants similarly saw the vaccine as the key to opening borders and getting to see distant loved ones again.

The attenuation of ‘Australia’: states, borders and identity

The physical boundaries between the extremely large states and territories that comprise the Commonwealth of Australia are largely invisible and highly permeable, with many potential entries and exit roads criss-crossing the borders and few material reminders of where one state begins and another ends. As Jennifer observed, the mentality in pre-COVID times was that: ‘you don’t really notice that you’ve gone from one state to another’. These conditions changed at the various times in the COVID pandemic in which borders were guarded and enforced, although it was impossible to fully monitor and police every entry/exit point.

For our participants, one feature of the closed-border COVID-19 system in Australia was how ‘Australia’ itself receded into the background as a unit of identifiable significance. Margaret in Western Australia put it this way:

I think it’s quite interesting. If I’d asked my kids a year ago who was the Premier of NSW, or Victoria, or Queensland – to be honest, I don’t even think they’d know what a Premier is, let alone, who are they. And now, everybody knows all the Premiers and we’re all so aware of all the different states. And we’re all so aware of the differences, that we have changed from being a nation to states.

One notable feature of our interviews was the way some participants adopted an ‘us’ and ‘them’ language in respect to residents of other states. For example, Nigel in Queensland acclaimed his state Premier for ‘keeping the southern people out, that’s good’. Lisa in Darwin hedged one answer by saying: ‘maybe I’m coming at that from a Northern Territory standpoint, where we haven’t been impacted that much. So I don’t know what’s going on in the Eastern Seaboard’. Stuart in South Australia addressed the interviewer (based in New South Wales) with a statement of what her government could have done better:

Had they shut down faster like South Australia did you guys mightn’t be in quarantine now. And the Victorians have been in lockdown eight times or something and they didn’t learn their lessons either, they didn’t shutdown quick enough either. (emphasis added)

The italicized language in Stuart’s statement – your government/you guys – the Victorians/they/their – place New South Wales and Victoria in a separate realm from that from which Stuart himself speaks. ‘They’ – the Eastern Seaboard, the southern people – are positioned as Other, distinct from ‘I’ and ‘we’ – who are presumably together in our ‘bubble’ or ‘behind the border’.

Yet, despite this recourse to language that denotes social boundaries within and beyond state lines, many participants longed for what was across the border – family and friends. These people were not the potentially dangerous Other: they were part of established kinship networks involving strong relational and affective connections. People discussed empathizing with those intimate others who were going through difficult times in other parts of Australia, as well as feeling the loss of direct connection with them. Kylie’s situation in Tasmania was typical of many:

We can’t travel out of Tasmania to visit anyone, pretty much. You don’t want to leave the state because you might not get back in. So it means my kids haven’t seen family. I haven’t seen friends and family for probably two years

Similarly, Afan in the Northern Territory pointed out that even though he was living without the lockdowns occurring in other parts of Australia at the time of interview, he was emotionally impacted through his interconnections with those who were experiencing them:

In Darwin here, overall, especially in terms of lockdown, I would say that we have been a little bit lucky. But the fact is that we live in a very globalized world, so what happened in one state or another country impacts everyone, because you have friends and families in other part of the country as well.

Indeed, imagining the experiences of others currently locked-down could subtly affect one’s own behaviour, even in a mostly ‘open’ state. Lara in South Australia had many close friends in Sydney and Melbourne, and the lockdowns they had faced weighed on her:

I guess it does impact mental health, not being able to see your family and friends, and just not being able to go over and see them. And if they’ve been in lockdown for 100 days or something, the conversation – it’s hard to relate when you’ve been in a state that’s been relatively not locked down.

Everyday life was thus affected by the experiences of others in different states, even when an individual was free of comparable restrictions. Missing loved ones across the border complicates an analysis that suggests that the quarantine line also demarcates lines of identity. Our participants’ accounts refer to a tension between distances imposed by material boundaries but also those involving the awareness that the pandemic experience was not the same for everyone: even those who a person might feel most intimately connected with in terms of relational and affective bonds.

Conclusion

In this article, we have explored some of the ways that the biopolitical immunity mechanisms (Esposito, 2011), concepts of Self and Otherness (Douglas, 1966) and risk cultures (Amoore, 2013; Douglas, 1992; Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982) might be characterized in light of pandemic border control. We extend previous analyses of the political, socio-spatial and racialized dimensions of borders by focusing on the restrictions placed on the internal movements of citizens within one nation. During this unprecedented time, our participants identified risk posed by external ‘Others’ based purely on fellow citizens’ location in space and place: principally, in which state or territory they were residing during periods of lockdowns and domestic border closures.

In our analysis, rather than focusing on techniques of the governance of risk (Amoore, 2013) we have sought to highlight the effects of those techniques on ordinary citizens’ understandings of their own and others’ risk status. For our participants, domestic border closures in Australia meant that risk was located in places and associated with specific place-based grouping of other Australian citizens in new ways. These risk practices and concepts meant that ‘safety’ and ‘risk’ became a property of state or territory residence, or in some cases, identified within certain parts of cities or regions within states.

Unlike countries like the US, UK, Italy and Spain that were ravaged early on by COVID-19, the closed Australian border kept the country in something like a state of suspension, whereby everyday experience approximating pre-COVID ‘normal’ could remain in place temporarily. Choy and Zee (2015) link a concept of suspension to one of atmosphere. In the metaphor of the ‘bubble’, used to describe life within some Australian states, we see a fragile atmospheric separation that quite literally protects those inside from potentially infectious air. The interior of the ‘bubble’ is just as important as what lies outside of it, and feelings of safety stemmed from a cordoned-off atmosphere, one that did not contain airborne levels of COVID-19 present in the rest of the world, or eventually even other states of Australia. Here, we expand the emphasis in border studies on crossings and migration by instead considering borders as a form of enclosure. Enclosure within a border implied certain socio-spatial imaginaries wherein one is both forcibly and protectively ‘held’ by that border but only provisionally.

One striking feature of our interviews was the way that many people’s everyday lives carried on ‘as normal’ despite the havoc being wreaked around the world by COVID-19. This sense of normality was differentially distributed depending on location – some areas of Australia at the time of our interviews had little to no restrictions or community transmission of cases. We analyse this experience of ‘normality’ as part of a particular socio-spatial imagining of borders. One important feature of participant accounts was a depiction of bodily protection that we have suggested can be viewed through the lens of what Bashford (1998) has termed ‘geographic immunity’. Geographic immunity is activated through bordering practices because its logic as a cultural idiom only makes sense if there are some others, somewhere else, whose infectiousness one is protected from. However, it also implies a coherent and bounded geographic ‘Self’: the body politic that is ‘immune’ from the viral disease happening elsewhere. Geographic immunity changes the temporality of risk, from probable or ‘possible’ (Amoore, 2013) to inevitable and determinate.

Geographic immunity appears at first as a refusal of risk. The closed border is a blunt force designed to obviate risk from any party. However, as our interviews show, the idea of geographic immunity is impossible to sustain in the long term in a globalized context. Our participants were aware that the borders would eventually re-open. Instead of refusing risk, they were resigned to risk at some unknown point in the future, when geographic immunity gave way to open borders. Thus, although government rhetoric might have positioned the nation or particular state/territory as an impregnable ‘fortress’ or ‘ring of steel’, in fact the Australian COVID policy was much more like a ‘bubble’ in that it was inherently temporary. As this implies, geographic immunity is not just about the spatiality of risk; it is also a temporal concept and in the Australian context its effect was a temporality of waiting. Whereas the design of the border closures was based on a logic of anticipatory risk pre-emption, the effect on Australians within the borders was one of waiting and suspension. Sequestered in a COVID-free atmosphere, those within the bubble were also suspended in a lived experience that they knew could not last – a delicate and provisional spatio-temporal suspension. Kaya Williams, writing about the risk calculations of American criminal justice, posits that the ‘maintenance of a bubble requires faith in a fiction’ (K. N. Williams, 2017, p. 54). In the context of Australian COVID pandemic policy, that fiction was the idea that geographic immunity could be sustained.

Our findings underline how feelings of geographic immunity were intimately intertwined with other ideas about immunity. Indeed, the experience of geographic immunity (in the form of border closures) often precluded for people the necessity for biological immunity (in the form of vaccines). That is to say, feelings about vaccines were often explicitly linked to feelings about borders – either a sense of safety within closed borders, or an impatience to escape from them. Immunity in this context became a property of geography and borders, rather than of the body. For participants, the time when geographical borders could open again was when the body’s immunity was fortified through vaccines. Then biological immunity could take over from geographic immunity. Borders would also be reimagined as sites of crossings again, rather than as primarily modes of enclosure.

Bashford (1998) has suggested that in early Australian health policy, because quarantine and the national border coincided, Australian nationalism also emerged through an idea of contagion and immunity. What is different about the COVID border closures is that the quarantine line lay along state borders that prior to COVID barely registered as relevant to everyday life. As Spennemann (2021) points out, prior to the pandemic, mobility across state borders mostly made itself known through quirks in car registration and road rules. Thus, the institution of a hard border where there was only ever an administrative one opens up questions about what quarantine does in such a circumstance. While anonymous residents of other states were depicted by some of our participants as Other, for many, those living over the state border were conceptualized as forms of ‘Self’ in the guise of children, parents, friends and so on, and they expressed empathy with their plight and a desire to be re-united with them. This is a geographic immunity that relies not on fears of invasion from outside the nation, but rather complicates what it means to be ‘Australian’. Western Australian Premier McGowan’s concept of ‘an island within an island’ was articulated (albeit not exactly in the same phraseology) in these accounts.

Thinking about borders as representing both material forms of biopolitical governance and symbolic extensions of immunity concepts helps us see how bodies, identities and intimate relational connections extend into spatial formations. Thus, ‘bubbles’ of social relations, the ‘fortress’ protecting Australia and ‘rings of steel’ around various Australian regions gave those within them a sense of extending an immunity concept into time and space. ‘Immunity’ was a property of the control of other bodies through distance and enclosure, before becoming a biological capacity through exposure from vaccines. Here we see how the effects of risk mitigation efforts rapidly complicate ideas about national and regional identity, as well as understandings of space and bodily protection.

Acknowledgments

We thank the participants for sharing their experiences and giving their time to be interviewed for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the University of New South Wales.