ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the growing interest and analysis of transnational family relations and caregiving across distance and the transformative role of new technologies in facilitating these processes. In doing so, it traces the trajectories of Australian migration policy and scholarship, from an historical emphasis on family settlement and integration to the recent focus on skilled migration and increasing mobility. Australian government efforts to keep the nation culturally Anglo-Celtic (or at least European) were sustained through a century-long focus on settlement migration; specifically, for those considered to be 'preferred settlers'. Australia's long history of settlement migration stands in stark contrast to the migration agenda of Western Europe, which featured gasterbeiter (guest worker) programmes designed to attract workers and to explicitly repel family settlement. Unlike the classic care chains focus on the global political economy of paid care, Australian research on transnational families tends to examine the exchange of informal (unpaid) care between transnational family members.
