5.7 Tongan mobility histories in Australia

What is the significance of these understandings about Tongan collectives, their face-to-face and online connections and the way they nurture and maintain shared understandings, material culture and heritage? Tongan people living in Australia are not just filling a labour shortage. Our collective mobilities are, and have been, the result of factors and processes that are not linear and not just economically driven. Evidence suggests that contemporary Tongan migration trajectories and mobility journeys are simultaneously evolving and responding to changes occurring in the island homeland and diaspora contexts that we choose to live in.^[1]

The mobility of Tongan collectives involves a host of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons.^[2] Our priorities of solidarity, family and community encourage our participation in migration, including labour lines, to and through Australia. These movements have been met with varying responses, resulting from the transforming social, economic and political landscapes of Australia, Tonga and often Aotearoa NZ, where many Tongans land first on their pathway to Australia. For instance, the declining economic situation in Aotearoa NZ, the changing trans-Tasman arrangements between Australia and Aotearoa NZ, or the visa policies with Tonga, including recent allowances made for seasonal workers and their families to be considered as citizens, all play a part in the mindsets of Tongans when they discuss and plan their migration and mobility steps. One thing is for certain, Tongans are not a passive participant in this process, as is wrongly portrayed by literature describing Tongan migrants as forced or influenced by government regimes.^[3] Tongans living in Australia enact agency to move, settle or pause temporarily in a place, for the wellbeing of their families and themselves, as a way of maintaining vā. This Tongan agency is something I have discussed elsewhere.^[4]

Tongan people will almost always prioritise their spiritual, familial and social wellbeing; these spheres influence their migration decisions.^[5] My research with Pasifika collectives and their mobilities, to and through Australia, since April 2020 has provided insights into how familial and communal support across the Tasman has continued to contribute to the successful collective mobility of family members. For instance, the role of Tongan elders in our collective mobility is significant, drawing family members together for knowledge and practice sharing face-to-face and online – a collective space that has increasingly become useful in our shared mobilities since 2020.

Sosaia, a Tongan man and first-generation migrant born in Tongatapu, spoke with me in 2020 via e-talanoa during the pandemic lockdowns and travel bans. He was aged 75 years at the time of our last face-to-face talanoa communication, when he had been travelling back and forth, with his wife, between his home in Aotearoa NZ and the home of his daughter in Australia. He had been making these short-term visits each year for the past five years, since the birth of his first grandchild, as a way of helping his daughter with tauhi fanau-child care. The help he provided effectively minimised the annual cost of his grandchild attending the local play centre for extremely expensive fees – a sound reason for his regular three-month stays each year.

Paea and Selu, aged 60 and 67 at the time of our last communication (2021), are also Tongan grandparents who shared their e-talanoa narratives with me during the COVID-19 lockdowns. They live in Aotearoa NZ but began their trans-Tasman tauhi fanau travels in 2014 when their daughter first moved to Australia as a newlywed and was expecting their first grandchild. Although these grandparents are permanent residents of Aotearoa NZ, they have remained Tongan citizens, travelling on Tongan passports. Each trip requires them to apply for visas and visa renewals to extend their stay beyond just a visit. The significance of their trans-Tasman trips is that it is their way of maintaining important sociocultural connections with their daughter and her Tongan husband’s family based in Australia. They made regular trips until the start of 2020. Recently, in 2021 and again in 2022, they resumed their travel, navigating in and around the pandemic restrictions.

Several Pasifika collectives have helped individuals to migrate to represent them in family events happening across the Tasman, especially funerals.^[6] Other members overcame the challenges of restricted travel to care for their elderly parents. During the changing trans-Tasman pandemic-influenced regimes, the choice to continually migrate across spaces within and between Australian states’ pandemic jurisdictions, as well as across Aotearoa NZ’s varying restriction zones, often meant expensive quarantine time in hotels on either side of the Tasman. However, according to many committed Pasifika family members, these experiences of extended waiting and every dollar spent on quarantine processes were worth the sacrifice of time and money if it meant they could finally embrace loved ones awaiting their arrival.

It was clear that 2022 signalled a long-awaited freedom for many people across the globe, including Australia and its neighbours. Tongan collectives became mobile again, although with trepidation.^[7] By midyear, spontaneous and planned travel between our Pacific homelands and diaspora collectives in Australia and Aotearoa NZ were in full effect. This freedom of movement finally allowed for some form of normalcy across the Pacific and Tasman; families resumed their sociocultural activities, and gathering points at church and community events became increasingly physical in nature, although online forums remained a part of the ‘new normal’.^[8]

Personally, during the months of June to November 2022 I clocked up over 45,000 km of travel, with 62 hours of flying across six Pasifika diaspora and island sites. Observing my fellow Pasifika family and friends, their devised circular trips to, from and through Australia and Aotearoa NZ and onward to our Pacific homelands and sometimes further to the US have been on the rise since this time. However, with the increased busyness that comes with such freedom of movement, many – young and old – are increasingly seeking spiritual and cultural restoration, as well as further reconnection to their important others (living and deceased members of their collective). Often this rebuilding process entailed a holistic wellbeing retreat back to their villages in Tonga or to their diaspora settlements and suburbs to reconnect with famili (family) and kainga (kinfolk).

In Australia, although our Pacific peoples, including Tongans, are generally viewed as a ‘cheap source of labour’ by government and immigration institutions, we as a people continue to uphold our dreams and hopes for our children’s and grandchildren’s futures. Yes, these hopes do carry us away from our Pacific homelands for a time. Often they do take us into the mire of harsh labour environments, wrought with circumstantial by-products of racism, deficit mindsets and minority labelling. But eventually, generations later, we rise, because those hopes and dreams were talked about and collectively fanned into flames over time and across spaces. Migration narratives are told and retold as a way to remind the next generation why we came, why we choose to remain, and to whom and where we still belong – to ‘Otua-God and Tonga.^[9]

At the 2022 Griffith University Pasifika graduation in Brisbane, it was clear that this special event not only marked Pasifika academic success in Australia for the familial and communal collectives represented by each graduate, but was also the joint celebration of ‘togetherness’ and ‘freedoms’ from the not-so-distant memory of pandemic social restrictions that had kept our communities physically separated for what seemed too long! Many of the ‘thank you’ speeches given by graduates as a part of the ceremony (Figure 11) emphasised their gratitude and relief that the challenges of studying during a pandemic had been overcome by maintaining their important vā with God, family and community. They stayed connected spiritually and socially.

During this occasion I spoke with several Pasifika (including Tongan) families who had chosen to migrate to Australia in search of betterment for their children, grandchildren and wider collective. Some of the graduates that spoke at the ceremony described their academic achievements as a way of giving back and thanking their parents and grandparents for their migration journeys from the Pacific Islands. Some of the migration narratives shared at the podium noted that their familial migration journeys had been through Aotearoa NZ to Australia, while others had migrated directly from the Pacific Islands (for instance, some had come through Fiji from Tonga) to Australia. There was consensus among the 15 Pasifika graduates at this event that they had not achieved their degrees on their own. It was only with the love, prayers and ongoing support of their families and ‘village’^[10] – the people who were the source of their inspiration to begin their studies and to stay the path to successful completion.