A Curriculum of Migrant Home:

Settler Geographies, Land and Colonial Place-making

Abstract

In this article, I examine two ideas that have provoked me to reconsider my relationship to decolonising work as a settler. First, I consider the idea of home and the grounds, both material and symbolic, that make such “home-making” possible as a settler moving between states with similar aggressive investments in what Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) calls white possessive logics. Second, I take up a practice increasingly common in Australia – Welcomes to Country – that complicates how land is positioned as a space for people to gather. While I don’t suggest that Welcomes to Country are a panacea that resolve settler co-opting of acknowledgements as a tool of innocence (Asher, Curnow, & Davis, 2018), there is something inherently disruptive in Welcomes that might prove ethically instructive for those of us who find ourselves migrating within the settler-colonial sphere as we seek to make new homes.