Abstract
This thesis examines the role of place in young adult experiences of staying in, leaving, or returning to the places where they have grown up. It analyses this topic through an in-depth study of young adults who grew up in Katoomba, NSW, a peripheral place on the border of regional Australia with a “gap” in the population between 19-35 years of age. Young adults growing up in Katoomba live at the intersection of two mobility imperatives (Farrugia 2016): the imperative to move in young adulthood and the imperative to move away from rural and regional places. In Katoomba, these imperatives coalesce in a placially-specific culture of migration (Easthope & Gabriel 2008) where young adults are known as the “missing” generation and young adulthood is framed as occurring outside Katoomba. Young adults’ experiences of movement, however, are more complex than these constructions suggest, and this thesis argues that it is Katoomba as a place that is central to this complexity. As such, this thesis uses a conceptual framework that foregrounds place as primary, as co-constitutive with the lived body, as “gathering” and “holding” disparate elements in relation, and as characterised by movement, an approach that draws on the work of Casey (1996, 1997, 2009). This thesis uses a mixed methods methodology, incorporating surveys, observation, and interviews with young adults who grew up in Katoomba.Using this theorisation of place as a grounding orientation, this thesis finds there are four central interrelations between Katoomba, young adults, and movement that affect young adults’ experience of movement: the enduring embodiment of Katoomba; the pedagogical processes through which such embodiment occurs; the ambivalence of the lived experience of young adult geographic movement; and young adults’ labour of belonging to navigate amongst such ambivalence. These interrelations are cumulative and layered. Katoomba young adults identify and recognise their own and others’ embodiment of Katoomba through the moniker of the “Mountains person” which encompasses a variety of bodily capacities, practices, and affective relations with Katoomba. This thesis argues the embodiment of place occurs through extensive pedagogical processes of moving around Katoomba and learning to leave it. These pedagogical processes emerge in young adults’ lived experience where their ongoing interrelation with Katoomba and the imperative to leave it requires extensive navigation. As such, young adults’ lived experiences of geographic movement are ambivalent and remain enmeshed with Katoomba. These negotiations are, equally, practices of belonging. Katoomba young adults use whatever resources are available to them to maintain a sense of being amongst this constantly shifting interplay of Katoomba, movement, and notions of young adulthood. These include feelings of homeliness and unhomeliness which, through the labour of young adults, are converted into experiences of and claims to belonging. This thesis argues for the importance of studying the places of young adult movement to illuminate how places stay with the body, how fundamentally this affects young adults’ orientations to and experiences of the world, and how the imperatives to “leave town” obscure the complex webs within which young adults, and places themselves, move.
| Date of Award | 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Gregory Noble (Supervisor) |