Moving On Up: Economic Opportunism, Transpacific Mobility and Non-Elite Internationalism

Abstract

Despite a wealth of scholarship on Australian travel, economic motives for transnational mobility remain little studied. Tourists, soldiers, reformers and students dominate the pantheon of Australians in the world, while the aspirational jobseeker is near forgotten. As a result, Australian international engagement has been closely associated with social and economic elites. Yet recent research hints that economic opportunism was a central motivation for white Australians’ travels to interwar China. This article argues that the same was true of the United States. Drawing upon state and private archives, it examines how the famed prosperity of the United States led non-elite Australians to seek work and money across the Pacific. Throughout the early 20th century, steamers ploughed between Sydney and San Francisco carrying economic migrants in pursuit of their own American Dream. Consequently, a wide diversity of white Australians would demonstrate an everyday engagement with the “international” that derived more from economic need than high-minded ideals. By recovering their journeys, this article draws new connections between Australians’ physical and economic mobility, unsettles the idea of travel as an elite or dutiful phenomenon, and asks how a more materialist analysis of transnational lives might recalibrate our understanding of Australia in the world.