The afterlives of the frontier: intersections of geopolitics and extended urbanization in Port Hedland

This article theorizes how distinct world-making projects intersect and come into tension with each other through extended urbanization. It draws on archival and field research on the remnants of the Port Hedland immigration detention center in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Port Hedland is geopolitically significant as the site of one of the first detention centers opened when mandatory immigration detention was introduced for irregular boat arrivals in the 1990s. At the same time, it was, and still is, part of vast transnational operational landscapes as the largest bulk port in the world. The town is, and historically has been, deeply implicated in processes of extended urbanization through the infrastructures of extractivism that connect iron-ore mines in the Pilbara to the port and the fly-in-fly out workers that circulate through it. Drawing on this history, the article situates the remnants of the detention center in relation to diverse territory-making projects, beginning with British colonization, passing through its construction as a miner’s barracks, and ending with its current use as workers’ accommodation. This history serves to underline how geopolitical borders and the operational landscapes of extractivism are the product of intertwined rather than easily separable spatial logics.