Understanding the ‘region’ in COVID-19-induced regional migration: mapping Cairns across classification systems

ABSTRACT This paper unpacks the notion of ‘region’ in the current COVID-19 migration debate to understand how the city of Cairns, Queensland fits into a wider geography of internal urban-rural migration in Australia. It unpacks different constructions of ‘region’, showing how they often articulate ‘access’, ‘rural’ and ‘remote’ and a general sense of non-urban entities. We discuss the imagined geographies of different Australian regional classification systems such as the Australian Statistical Geography Standard (ASGS), Rural, Remote and Metropolitan Area (RRMA) and Modified Monash Model (MMM). We show how definitions and classifications of ‘region’ are constructed in particular ways to address political and social issues such as economic development, health, immigration and wider policy-making agendas. The analysis deployed develops a framework for understanding key dimensions of regionality relevant to migration to Cairns in the COVID-19 moment. A critical interpretive analysis helps shed light on the importance of place/context in relation to Australia’s recent urban--rural internal migration debate, but also provides insights to the counter-urbanisation debate in terms of displacing notions of the ‘rural idyll’.