Understanding attachment to remote places: insights from a study of Hobart citizens’ relationships with Antarctica
Creators: name: Marx, Katrina
Publisher: name: University of Tasmania
Year: 2024

description: The Anthropocene presents a unique challenge for humanity’s relationship with remote environments. Places such as Antarctica are now subject to transboundary environmental impact yet remain out of reach as a travel or work destination to the vast majority of people. In order to mobilise broad-based public support on issues such as climate change or plastics pollution, it is therefore necessary to ask people to care about the impact that their actions have on places that they themselves may never visit. This thesis explores the nature of remote environmental connection by examining Antarctic place attachment in residents of Hobart, an Australian gateway city. <br>As Australia’s Antarctic gateway, Hobart acts as a launch site for polar travel and has a diverse array of scientific, economic, political, social, and cultural links to the southern polar region. Scholars have argued that residents of cities such as Hobart have a role to play as Antarctica’s future protectors, or “custodians”. I contend, however, that there is a disconnect between the aspirational “Antarctic custodian” narrative and the realities of the city’s Antarctic policy landscape, which allows little room for public engagement or participation. <br>Place attachment, defined in this research as a meaningful bond that someone experiences with an environment that leads to the desire to be close to that environment, is a potential means of gauging the extent to which Hobart citizens care for the Antarctic. Historically, the majority of place attachment research has focused on the experiences of people who have visited a place in person. Given that most Hobart residents will never visit Antarctica, I argue that it is necessary to broaden place scholarship to include “indirect” types of attachment that are formed without direct physical experience. To investigate this idea, I conducted qualitative in-depth interviews (n=37) with Hobart residents and ran an exploratory community survey (n=277) in order to examine what Antarctic place attachment looks like in the Hobart community. Interview and survey participants included residents with and without direct Antarctic experience, enabling a comparison of types of place attachment experienced by both groups. <br>The results of this research demonstrate that Hobart residents have a multifaceted relationship with Antarctica that is driven by their perception of Antarctica as a place and their sense of belonging within the Antarctic community. In addition, some Hobart-based activities (such as viewing Antarctic ships in the harbour) act as mediators, strengthening residents’ sense of connection with the far south. This place-community-mediator dynamic results in four broad types of Antarctic place attachment among Hobart residents: 1) direct Antarctic place attachment – the type of place relationship experienced by residents who had visited Antarctica; 2) indirect Antarctic place attachment – the bond experienced by residents who had not visited but nevertheless feel an attachment to the far south; 3) peripheral Antarctic place attachment – the connection experienced by residents who did not feel a specific attachment to Antarctica but nevertheless had an awareness of Antarctica’s proximity that contributed to their local sense of place in Hobart; and 4) no Antarctic place attachment, describing residents who had no feeling of Antarctic connection whatsoever. <br>While my results suggest that it is possible to form an attachment to place without visiting, a range of factors currently constrain the development of indirect forms of place attachment in Hobart residents. In particular, the presence of an “experience hierarchy” in the local Antarctic sector acts to socially and structurally marginalise people who have not travelled south within Hobart’s various Antarctic communities. In order to mobilise broad-based public support for remote areas, future engagement strategies should, therefore, aim to bridge the social divide that exists between community members who have visited these places and those who have not. These findings, while focused on an Antarctic gateway city, have the potential to inform place attachment scholarship in a broad range of settings and situations, including remote national parks, the deep sea, and outer space.