Bali has long been a tourist destination for Australian tourists and the Australian tourist market is an important one for Bali tourism. In the last two decades, increasingly Australian tourists have and are shifting their mobility practices from touristic practices to expatriate practices. In using the term, touristic, I am referring to short-term visitation to Bali as a traveler. The term, expatriate, on the other hand, is used to refer to a person who is provisionally or permanently living in Bali and is not of Balinese-Indonesian cultural background or socialised in Balinese-Indonesian culture. While these two definitions partially contradict the World Travel and Tourism Council’s (2012) definition, of “travellers on trips outside their usual environment with a duration of less than one year”, the two definitions, used in this paper, reflect similar perspectives to new mobilities paradigms (Sheeler and Urry, 2006) regarding fluidity in describing movement and purposes of people across time, place, and space.

Essentially, the paper is a paper about ‘others’ and ‘othering’ (Harding, 1991). In the first instance, the Australian expatriates as ‘others’ experience multiple layers of ‘othering’ by local residents, due to, for example, gender, age, socio-cultural background, behaviours and attitudes. In using the plural term ‘others’, I am embracing Irigaray’s (1985) postmodern perspective of multiplicity rather than only one type of universal ‘other’. The expatriates, in turn, engage in ‘othering’ Balinese and Indonesian residents. They do this because of their social and economic practices and concurrent perspectives of ‘self” as ‘subject’ despite being “others” in the host country. The paper narrates that in engaging in such practices, Australian expatriates demonstrate micro-scale neocolonial (Nkrumah, 1965) and nomadic capitalist tendencies (Williams, 1985), which have flow-on socio-economic, cultural and political consequences for expatriates and residents.