To address its politically contested issue of porous borders, Australia reopened its ‘Pacific Solution’ which included reopening the offshore detention centre for asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. These arrangements were put in place alongside and in parallel to the existing bilateral relationship between the two countries in which Australia’s development aid is framed as in its national interest to have a secure PNG, including addressing high levels of Gendered Violence in PNG. In this paper, I develop the analytical frame of a ‘fabricated security space’ to examine the gendered dimensions of the security and securitisation discourses in the bilateral relationship between Australia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) between 2012 and 2019. Specifically, I focus on Australia’s offshore detention of asylum seekers in the Manus Regional Processing Centre (RPC) during this period as one aspect of this bilateral relationship. The Australian policy and resultant highly secured detention centre complex were superimposed onto PNG’s own diverse and complex social fabric of security characterised by gendered social relationships. The Manus RPC complex, and the actors who arrived with it, set in motion a chain reaction that increasingly revealed the porous nature of this fabricated security space, leading to the undermining of bilateral efforts to address insecurity in the sense of high levels of crime, ethnic violence and gender-based violence in PNG. These gendered dynamics reflect the ongoing legacy of colonial
narratives about PNG.