Introduction

This chapter explores Australian Sudanese and South Sudanese youths’ perspectives on their experiences within public spaces in the city of Melbourne. Australia has large Sudanese and South Sudanese communities, with the city of Melbourne being ‘home to the largest number of Sudan-or South Sudan-born residents’ (Robinson, 2013, p 22). Since the early 2000s, approximately 50,000 people from sub-Saharan African nations have been settled in Australia under the country's Humanitarian Entrant Programme for refugees (DSS, 2016; Baak, 2019). It is important to note that for many of these individuals at their time of birth (and later at their time of entry into Australia), South Sudan was not recognised as a nation state. It has since become the world's youngest nation state, officially gaining independence in 2011. Of these 50,000 individuals, more than half identified their country of birth as Sudan or South Sudan (DSS, 2016; Baak, 2019). In Australia, many young people from these communities are socially and educationally thriving (Harris et al, 2013; Santoro and Wilkinson, 2016). However, others experience a variety of social, political, educational and familial challenges throughout the youth years (Abur and Spaaij, 2016; Deng, 2016). Chief among these challenges are the influence and consequences of negative racialised public and political attention experienced by these youth, which frames these young people as dangerous ‘outsiders’ (Benier et al, 2018; Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020b).

To better understand the broader social and political context of this negative racialised attention, it is important to contextualise this attention within Australia's broader settlement and migration history. As a relatively young nation state, Australia has a contentious colonial history, with a denial of traditional Indigenous ownership of land (Due, 2008). Additionally, under Australia's Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (colloquially known as the ‘white Australia policy’ and formally removed from government in 1973), patterns of migration were heavily regulated and ‘restricted any legal nonwhite immigration’ (Benier et al, 2021, p 224). Against the backdrop of the country's colonial and migration history, ‘Australian identity’ has been socially and political positioned as being those from Anglo-Celtic (and similar European) backgrounds (Ahluwalia, 2001; Macaulay and Deppeler, 2020b). Therefore, it has been argued that through an ongoing ‘colonial objective to make Australia a white country and for white people’ (Majavu, 2017, p 6), Australian communities with sub-Saharan African heritage are often cast as ‘Black others’ in ‘White Australia’.