Moral childhoods: the role of morality in friendship-making among children from refugee backgrounds in rural, multicultural settler Australia

ABSTRACT

This article examines how children draw on local sources of morality and moral worth to forge connections, build friendship and enforce distinctions across difference in a rural multicultural city of settler Australia. Children’s friendship-making practices across ethnic and class differences have been widely explored in urban Australia. Far less is known about how children connect and distance in regional and rural places, notably those experiencing profound social change. This paper examines friendship work among children from humanitarian refugee backgrounds in one rural city of south-eastern Australia through the lens of morality and moral worth. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, it shows how deeply classed and racialised ideas about morality and moral worth scaffold children's social worlds, delineate which behaviours are valorised, and can exclude children whose actions do not meet the necessary moral criteria of belonging. A focus on morality provides rich insight into how children shore up familiarity and build affinities with one another while simultaneously policing and enforcing boundaries. This has important implications for understanding how children from refugee backgrounds build relationships and friendships in rural settler Australia, and the implications of such work for children’s everyday geographies of belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Childhood
• migration
• refugees
• settlement
• belonging
• regional and rural Australia

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 These labels are themselves complex and deeply nuanced. See Butler and Ben (2021); Stead (2021).

2 Australia’s program increased to 16,250 places in 2017-2018, and 18,750 places in 2018-2019, before returning to a ‘ceiling’ of 13,750 places in 2020–2021 (Refugee Council of Australia 2020). The Australian Government provided an additional 12,000 places for people displaced by conflict in Syria and Iraq (Department of Home Affairs 2021).

3 I use the common term ‘rural’ throughout this paper to speak to the complexity of life for children in places beyond and between the nation’s large capital cities (Panelli, Punch, and Robson 2007). At the same time, I recognise the problematic nature of this term in Australia in light of the complex demarcations of non-metropolitan identities and places that can become consumed under the homogenous term ‘rural’. See previous discussions by Bryant and Pini (2011) and Panelli (2002). Australia’s geographic regions are formally defined through the ‘ABS Remoteness Structure’: The Australian Standard Geographical Classification System.

See http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/d3310114.nsf/home/remoteness+structure.

4 As I argue elsewhere (Butler and Ben 2021), understanding relatedness among difference in rural places in Australia requires an understanding of the settler colonial context and its emplaced colonial legacies. These histories and their ongoing effects shape the deeply moral terrain in which more recent arrivals will inevitably forge relationships with longer-term residents, or those who consider themselves ‘locals’.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council: [Grant Number DE190100247].