Gateway geopolitics : assembling infrastructure, policies, and tourism in Hobart and Australian Antarctic Territory/East Antarctica

• Main Authors: Dodds, Klaus, Salazar, Juan Francisco (R11072)
• Other Authors: Mostafanezhad, Mary (Editor), Azcárate, Matilde Córdoba (Editor), Norum, Roger (Editor)
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: U.S., The University of Arizona Press 2021
• Subjects: 440104 - Environmental anthropology; 280123 - Expanding knowledge in human society; Antarctic; Australian Antarctic Territory; Bray; East Antarctica; Southern Ocean; The Antarctic; Titan; Ushuaia; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/95b3d803-aa65-4341-adf4-b80acabffa0d; https://hdl.handle.net/1959.7/uws:60042

At the heart of this discussion of gateway geopolitics are both the specter of presence and an absence. Miller and Del Casino (2018) make the important point about how visitors and participants in festivals and heritage centers are enrolled in embodied place-making experiences. In their compelling example of the Titan Missile Museum in the United States, they take the reader through a spine-chilling example of how Cold War heritage enables the potential violence of the nuclear missile to be felt. What the Antarctic Festival in Hobart makes present and even manifest is something less discombobulating: an embodied sense of geographical proximity. For many visitors to the Antarctic Festival, they may never get to experience the Antarctic continent directly, but may enjoy a simulated experience via Australia’s premier gateway. Australia and Tasmania’s political, scientific, and legal relationship to Antarctica and specifically to the Australian Antarctic Territory is integral to how the country presents itself as a regional power and founding member of the Antarctic Treaty System and associated legal instruments. The gateway is a material and embodied expression of a desire to project and simulate territorial power, mobilize infrastructures (including research stations), and consolidate identity politics, crucially the image of Australia as an Antarctic power (Bray 2016; Collis and Stevens 2007; Dodds and Hemmings 2009; Haward 2017). This strategic aim is underpinned and made possible by what we have termed gateway assemblages, including ideas, practices, and objects ranging from ports and festivals to anticipated infrastructure and implementation strategies (Maclean 2016; Väätänen 2019). In December 2018, Australian media reported that the managers of Hobart airport were concerned about their capacity to handle international airports due to a lack of customs, immigration, and biosecurity infrastructures, a concern that has no doubt intensified due to the likely long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for public health control within and beyond the Commonwealth of Australia (ABC News 2018; Dodds and Hemmings 2020). Antarctic-based activities were deeply disrupted by border shutdowns elsewhere and polar science and tourism are likely to be severely affected in the summer season of 2020–21 and beyond. However, haunting this presence is the specter of insufficient presence, as others such as China use Tasmania’s very proximity as their point of contact with the Antarctic and Southern Ocean as well. We might, with apologies to earlier scholarship on “cartographic anxieties,” speak of “gateway anxieties,” which might yet intensify if China shows greater wiliness in continuing its polar operations in the midst of a pandemic (Bille 2014). The apparently fixed geography of a “gateway city” can nonetheless become more flexible and stretchable as others move back and forth from Hobart as a gateway hub to the Antarctic coastline and interior. Current Australian media reporting is replete with references to the activities of other states, especially China, with regard to infrastructural investment in Antarctica and investment and mobility to and from China into Australia. In contrast to this territorially rooted sense of gateways, we have proposed an alternative geopolitical imaginary, which is structured around hubs, gateways, and flows. Tourism and festivals weave between these two imaginaries, bringing flows of people and objects to islands such as Tasmania, in the process territorializing hubs, gateways, and nodes for engagement with Antarctica. What if China and other parties simply choose to bypass Antarctic gateways such as Hobart? Australia’s relationship with Antarctica is made and remade through flows, territorialized investment, and infrastructural relationships to gateway cities such as Hobart. Without the large-scale tourism that is enjoyed by other southern cities such as Ushuaia, the state of Tasmania and the federal government of Australia have doubled down on Hobart as a place for Antarctic heritage and polar administration and logistics. The “gateway” has been commercialized and politicized. Festivals, heritage centers, and political meetings of bodies such as CCAMLR take on added importance. The assemblages that constitute the “gateway city” are, as Savage (2019) might argue, composed of and made possible by actors, networks, governance structures, organizations, and infrastructure dedicated to leveraging advantage from polar nationalism and commercialism. The gateway has to make money, but it also must cement state geopolitical power; it may end up doing so in ways that elude those who are championing particular strategic aims. For those advocating a turn toward tourism geopolitics (Gillen and Mostafanezhad 2019; Mostafanezhad and Norum 2016), gateway geopolitics provides a powerful example of how the physical geographies of the Earth get caught up in discursive and material interventions designed to administer, control, and profiteer from festive and heritage tourism. At the time of writing, Antarctica has not recorded a single case of COVID-19. Public health might, in the future, become a source of tension as international parties move back and forth from the polar continent, possibly bypassing Antarctic gateways.