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Introduction:
The Australian Country Girl
I grew up in a small town not quite on the coast in northern New South Wales
(NSW)the same town where my mother and grandmother had grown up
before me. Just that fact means that its hard to pin down when I frst began
thinking about what Australian country girl might mean. I want to single out
three moments from that personal history to sketch the parameters of this
book and what I hope it contributes to the felds of girls studies, rural studies,
and Australian cultural studies. The frst moment is actually the last, occurring
in the early stages of research for this book.
During a taxi ride from the airport to my home in an inner-western Sydney
suburb the driver declared that I was obviously a country girl. Id answered his
question about where Id fown in froma small inland city where Id conducted
some pilot interviewsand he replied that hed already known I was a country
girl because I was clearly interested in talking to him. What he thought country
girl meant involves a popular Australian type. Theyre friendly; they dont take
themselves too seriously; theyre not snobs. I was both amused and sincerely
fattered even though accepting compliments about either my modesty or my
country authenticity also felt like a lie. I left the taxi ready to pass this story around
for the amusement of family and friends but also struck by its strangeness.
Its hardly surprising that 16 years after leaving the town where I grew up I was
pleased to be thought a country girl. It appealed to a nostalgia this project was
always likely to provoke for me and it was meant as a compliment anyway. But
I also wanted that image of country girls to be the one people take for granted,
however well I know that country girls can be as hostile, reticent or competitive
as any other Australian girls. There was something more than personal pride or
nostalgic pleasure in that response. And that drivers idea of country girlhood
comes from a similar place. By his own account he had never been out of
the city much, although hed always meant to. Our mutual recognition of and
investment in a country girl type depends on a signifcant Australian history.
My second moment is far more scholarly. I was in the University of
Melbourne library in 1994, reading Meaghan Morriss essay Things to do with
shopping centres. At the time I was still struggling with the very different
background I seemed to have brought to my doctoral research compared to
the students around me. What had seemed to me like a dramatic urbanization
and sophistication of my life during my undergraduate degree had been
reinterpreted in the big(ger) city as parochial and old-fashioned. I felt suspected
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
2
of being something like a country bumpkin. I was stopped short by a couple
of sentences in which Morris refects on an imaginary text Ive often wanted
to write about country town familial sado-masochism. (1998: 223) Wrapping
up a complex argument about allegories of modernity in spaces and practices
of consumption this might have been a tangential aside for many readers but
it made perfect sense to me. This imagined text, Morris writes, is about the
orchestration of modes of domestic repetition, the going back again and
again over the same stories, the same terrains, the same sore spots. (223) She
uses this image of the banal dramas played out between home and the pub
and the carpark and [the local shopping centre] and back again to home not
only to describe the uses of a country town shopping centre but also as a call
for scholars to consider the repetitions in and around their own work (223).
I wanted then, as now, to read Morriss imaginary text. But I also wondered if
her warning could mean the same thing to other students. This essay clearly
states that Morris herself had grown up a NSW country girl and the chord it
struck with me felt like recognition of a shared experience.
My third moment involves another kind of intimate repetition. The year
before I decided to embark on this project I was visiting my grandmother in our
hometown. She was guiding me through old photographs, as shed done many
times before, and handed over one Id seen more often than most because she
particularly liked it. In this picture (Figure I.1), my 12-year-old grandmother sits
in her family garden, wearing her school uniform. The sun is shining on the
thick fall of her dark hair and theres no other occasion for this photograph. It
is a photograph of Adas beautiful hair and in her eighties she still remembered
and handled the picture that way. But in the moment Im recalling, my old
curiosity about Nan as a girl took a new turn.
After years of research on girls and girlhood I was well aware that infuential
new narratives about modern girlhood were circulating in Australia in 1928.
Now I wondered how much and by what means those ideas had affected her
girlhood. Did she have any idea, sitting for this photograph, how differently
girls were being represented in 1928 than 1918, when this hairstyle for a girl this
age might have seemed fashionable in the city? What could the theories, laws
and popular and civic institutions shifting and forming around girls at the time
have meant to her? For the frst time, this photograph represented for me Nans
entry to an in-between zone where she was no longer really a childalthough
she would very soon be a motherjust as that beautiful hair was both an asset
and something soon to disappear as both impractical and out of style.
In historical terms, this project looks back across the long Australian
twentieth century from the beginnings of Federation to the present, drawing
on a range of primary and secondary materials, including fction, flm, histories
and exhibition materials, media archives, photography, policy documents,
statistical representations of the demographic makeup of country Australia
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
4
and television. I bring these historical materials together with ethnographic
feldwork in country towns, including in institutions which bring town girls
together with girls from farms and stations. These materials are in turn framed
by a critical perspective that aims to force some distance between my writing
position and the transient feld of country girl experiences.
A long-popular romantic image of girlhood is brought into view by my story
about Nans photograph. According to this image, the girl is an icon of feeting
possibilities, an ephemeral value poised between childhood innocence and
another kind of beauty. Even for my private engagement with Nans memory
of her own girlhood this is a seductive trap. Even recalling the apparently
unanswerable full-stop on Nans girlhood imposed by what we would now call
teen pregnancy (although with markedly different meanings than it had for
her) and the coming years of raising numerous children in sometimes diffcult
conditions doesnt escape that romanticism. Such romanticization transforms
the girl into something staticinto a tableau rather than a person caught up in
the events of the world and life around her. Contemporary girls may recognize
this elegiac image from their own experience of popular culture but their own
lives will never be tableaux framed by a refusal of time passing. Contemporary
girls tend to celebrate the imminent passing of girlhood just as they tend to
focus on social limits that defne it with an urgency that confounds such a
frame. At the same time, idealized images of passing girlhood and their special
relation to pastoral ideals directly impact country girls present lives, appearing
everywhere from parliamentary debate to popular drama.
The ongoing resonance of romantic images of country girlhood in Australia
belongs to a broader and highly infuential story in which Australian character
is sourced in country life. This is often referred to as the bush-myth, with
particular reference to debates between Australian historians about narratives
of Australian-ness discussed in Part II. This story is generally inaccurate given
that Australia was colonized by a modern urbanized Britain and that urban
centralization has always been a dominant force in Australia. Since before
Federation in 1901, moreover, most Australians have lived in urban centres.
Nevertheless a mythic Australian-ness defned against the city continues to
infuence Australian policy, popular culture, research trajectories, and everyday
life. The country girl plays a more signifcant role in this myth than is generally
recognized and the early chapters of this book relate the image of the country
girl to the famous bush-man story about Australian identity (see Chapter 3). The
country girls story about authentic rural Australian-ness and urban Australian
modernity is importantly different. My earlier moments in the taxi and the
library need to return here. If this myth of authentic country Australian-ness
underpins the image of the country girl I shared with the taxi-driver it is also
contradictory. That imagined country girl is crucially unaffected, which is what
she centrally has in common with images of country girls in other places. She
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INTRODUCTION
5
opposes the stylized performance (if not posturing and pretence) associated
with urban femininity. She lacks, that is, feminine urbanity. As an ideal the
Australian country girl is simultaneously familiar, powerful, and yet inadequate
for any descriptive purpose.
Morriss essay struck me forcefully because it doesnt oppose modernity and
country life. It counters the premise of the bush- myth insofar as it focuses on
the sometimes torturous familiarity of country town life through sceneslike
domesticity and shoppingwidely associated with femininity and modernity.
I am not proposing that the country girl offers any corrective to established
stories about Australian national identity, as if a truly national identity were
possible. I am also not interested in the impossible task of deciding which kind
of archival materials provides the most representatively correct purchase on
Australian history or Australian culture. But I do want to insist that a focus on
girlhood and girl culture has much to offer rural studies, which means not just
more information about girls in rural areas but questions about rurality itself.
I also want to insist that girls studies needs to think more carefully about the
urban framework within which it understands girlhood. This is not suffciently
addressed by engaging with the rural through third world girl problems. This
prioritization of the urban is something girls studies shares with cultural studies.
My previous work on girls has sometimes been criticized for selective and
partial use of historical archives (for example, Bellanta 2010). That same work
has sometimes also been criticized for a lack of interest in the lives, opinions
and behaviour of real girls (for example, Currie). On both counts it has been
criticized as too Foucauldian. I accept these criticisms to some degreeno
single project can do everythingand certainly acknowledge my conceptual
debt to Michel Foucaults conjunction of critical philosophy and history. This
book is, by comparison, far more interested in both historical and ethnographic
perspectives on girls, but it is still centrally interested in what kind of object
the Australian country girl is for a range of discourses and within a range of
contexts, including girls own country lives. Melissa Bellanta describes properly
historical research as committed to render[ing] the past strange (2010: 423) and
thus opposed to a genealogical project which cultural studies has inherited from
Foucault. But both Foucauldian genealogy and cultural studies have centrally
contributed to the perspective Bellanta would endorse: the view that girl is a
changeable category, diverse and full of possibilities. (423) Historical research
sometimes risks attributing coherence and representativeness to particular
recordsthis is how it was, thenand through a narratively satisfying language
of cause and effect naturalizing whatever seems to follow. For understanding
how the institutions and practices that today defne, manage and appeal to girls
came to be, it is as important to think about continuity as discontinuity.
If Bellanta and I agree on the value for Australian history of an increased
focus on girlhood (Bellanta 2010: 41920) we also agree on the importance
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
6
of what Meaghan Morris calls unsettling empirical surprises. (Bellanta
2010: 422) Indeed, I take support for my approach from Morriss caution that
The rhetoric of cultural studies sometimes inclines us to give far more weight
to change than to maintenance; doing so, we too easily rest content
with a thin account of the past that underestimates both the resilience of
old stories and the complexity of cultural change. (2006: 81) In Morriss work
no primary source is completely primary, and this is true here of my historical,
ethnographic, and textual sources.
Openness to unsettling empirical surprises underpins my commitment to a
mixed methods approach for this research. I have aimed for an interdisciplinary
empiricism that I hope offers many such surprises. I have combed archives
of many kinds and read a wide array of popular, governmental and scholarly
texts. I have also interviewed and run focus groups with many country girls and
women, conducted surveys, and spent signifcant periods not only visiting but
also living and working in country towns with the aim of better understanding
how country girls live and are understood there. In Australia, country girl not
only names a feld of experiences by girls and women but also a set of ideas
about Australia that is surprisingly consistent across the long twentieth century.
The country girl is a character type, a narrative motif, and what we might call,
after Foucault, a discursive formation. I have thus found specifc images of
Australian country girlhood helpful as points of access to this formation and as
examples for discussing the production, distribution, and consumption of ideas
about country girls.
My frst attempts to interview and survey high school girls, in 20002001,
were motivated by my not wanting to leave all the power of defning girlhood
to people who were not girls. This feldwork confrmed my sense that girlhood
is a particularly self-refexive experience. As I put it in Girls, in 2002,
Girls are used to being interrogated in middle or aggressive ways as to what kind
of girl they are Furthermore, like prisoners and inmates of asylums, girls have
been ideal ethnographic subjects because they are often available in accessible
groups for such research. Girls are not only practiced in self-refection but
also conveniently located in organizations such as schools, families and leisure
groups, sorted into ready-made demographic clusters with enough free time to
talk about being girls. (169)
But while I wanted to speak to girls because I thought they knew something that
should be heard, the role individual girls could have in an account of modern
ideas about girlhood was uncertain from the beginning (see Driscoll 2002: 168).
Nevertheless, this diffculty led me to several realizations that now seem important.
During that research I felt the difference between country and city girls
far more clearly than the difference between public and private school girls
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INTRODUCTION
7
my research design had anticipated (in Australia, a public school is a relatively
inexpensive state school). Yet the distinction between country and city seemed
virtually irrelevant to work on girls around me at that time, as if it was an
irrelevant variable compared to identity categories like class and race. My own
country girlhood perhaps made this difference more visible to me; certainly
it has fuelled my frustration at the absence of discussion of rural girls in the
emerging feld of girls studies. Theres been a fruitful conjunction of rural
studies and cultural studies in Australia (Gorman-Murray 273) across the years
in which Ive been writing this book but cultural studies too is overwhelmingly
interested in the urban construed as the general. I want to invite cultural studies
to pay more attention to the country and girls studies to pay more attention to
the geographical dimensions of girls lives.
Although I dont think history or ethnography belong entirely to any one
academic discipline, my approach here is neither history nor anthropology.
Cultural studies gives me some liberty to mix and even clash my approaches but
it also imposes some expectations. I need, for example, to address the critique
of ethnography with which cultural studies has sometimes been associated.
In fact, many ethnographersespecially anthropologists, who have a special
institutional investment in the value of ethnographyhave contributed to
the ongoing interrogation and rethinking of ethnography over much more
than a century. The transformation of a people into research subjects into
active research participants across the social sciences is tied to critiques of
the authenticity claims inherent in what was once the dominant anthropological
image of immersion in an other culture. These critiques have not invalidated
the aim of really being there, however, because if this impossibly immediate
experience of others is the central problem of ethnography it is also its greatest
strength. It involves a commitment to imagining other ways of perceiving the
world that has evident scientifc and social value even as it is also a fantasy
dependent on a preordained hierarchy between the knower and the known.
It is not news to contemporary ethnographers of any discipline that the
act of writing ethnography and its generic conventions transforms what it
describes, or that people mediatetransform, translate, distort, and modify
(Latour 39)their own reality. Ethnography pursues, to quote Bruno Latour,
a plausible continuity between what the social, in our sense of the word, does
and what a text may achieve (128). I have aimed for what Johannes Fabian
would call dialogical ethnography, relying on exchange and conversation at
least as much as it does on observation and recording (1990: 764). I have also
tried to vary the ways in which I represent feldwork scenes and events, within
individual chapters and across the book, with the aim of ensuring that my
perspective as researcher and writer is never naturalized.
I have learned as well from how cultural studies uses ethnography. It seems too
easy to forget that ethnography was a privileged method for the early Birmingham
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
8
School studies that remain so prominent in histories of cultural studies. Jane
Kenway, Anna Kraack and Anna Hickey-Moody usefully foreground Paul Williss
discussions of ethnography for cultural studies (Kenway et al. 38). Willis and
Mats Trondman defne ethnography as respecting, recording, representing
at least partly in its own terms the irreducibility of human experience. (394)
This irreducibility is important to me, and I am indebted to their account of
two contexts anchoring experience for ethnography. First, the symbolic forms,
patterns, discourses, and practices that help to form [experience] and give it
shape, so that the ethnographic enterprise is about presenting, explaining, and
analyzing the culture(s) that locate(s) experience. But also, how experience is
entrained in the fow of contemporary history, large and small, partly caught
up in its movement, partly itself creatively helping to maintain it, enacting the
uncertainty of the eddies and gathering fows dryly recorded from the outside as
structures and trends. (395) In incorporating critical approaches into both
ethnography and history I want neither the fat realm of data nor the empty
realm of big ideas, to paraphrase Williss The Ethnographic Imagination. This
approach seek[s] to deliver analytic and illuminating points not wholly derivable
from the feld but vital to conceptualising its relationships. (Willis xi) In throwing
concepts at things in Williss terms I hope to get something more than shards,
useless academic fragments in crazy piles. I hope instead to tell my story about
their story through the fullest conceptual bringing out of their story (Willis
xixii)or, rather, a story to which they and I differently belong.
This book began partly because I became academically interested in both
ethnography and the apparent difference of country girlhood at the same time,
propelled by girls in small towns who saw even flling out a survey as something
to do. I also wanted to bring to girls studies a material sense of how girlhood
and girl culture operate on different terrain, including along the familiar dullness
of a broad small-town street on a Saturday afternoon as the shops are closing.
And it also arose from my encounter with rural studies. Ive developed a kind
of aversion to the very word rural. Although Graeme Davison makes a case
for bush being a more properly Australian term (2005: 1.12, 1.14), I prefer
country as the word people who live outside big Australian cities mostly use to
describe themselves. I grew up in a country town, not a rural town, and I was a
country girl rather than a rural girl. I also prefer country because it foregrounds
some important oppositions with long histories, including that between city
and country (drawing on a European history that reaches out to Australia) and
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous (drawing on the particular infections
of country for Aboriginal people in Australia).
1
Rural seems to me to be a term
1 In order to recognize differences within the country as a lived geography I have
distinguished very large country towns, sometimes called regional cities, as regional
centres. This is not about population per se, but about a mesh of cultural resources
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INTRODUCTION
9
for addressing specifc governmental criteria or naming a policy object. Neither
of these approaches seems very interested in the experience of Australian
country girls except as a story about lack and loss.
Of course, if country girls have rarely been a central object for rural studies
they are no more often considered by cultural studies. In fact, the scholarly
feld that calls itself rural studiesdominated by sociology and geographyhas
heatedly contested its own defnitions of rurality and approaches to rural people.
This is especially the case since the early 1990s, which is also when cultural
studies became a mainstream discipline focused on the ordinary, contemporary
and (by default) urban world. One of the most useful overviews of these
shifts in rural studies is Paul Cloke and Jo Littles collection Contested Countryside
Cultures, which includes contributions by Chris Philo and by Jonathan Murdoch
and Andy Pratt, whose early nineties exchanges in the Journal of Rural Studies
spawned considerable literature and affrmed new scholarly directions. This
set of papers, which I will discuss again in Chapter 6, was sparked by Philos
review of a book on country childhood in which he urged researchers to be
sensitive to the diversity of interests represented in the countryside. (Murdoch
and Pratt 1997: 54) For Murdoch and Pratt, such a call hardly goes far enough
in acknowledging that all classifcations of the rural both impose and stabilize
meanings of the rural. In response to Philos call for attention to others in rural
studies (1992: 194), Murdoch and Pratt question what such representation of
others would change (1993: 422). These debates belong to what is sometimes
called the cultural (or postmodern) turn in geography. In some respects, they
echo what Fabian sees happening in the critique of ethnography in anthropology
sometimes called the representational turn. Fabian suspects that what looks like
a crisis is just a lot of noise made by anthropologists, or in this case geographers,
regrouping in their attempts to save their representers privileges. (1990: 761)
Fabian sets such debates aside by acknowledging that Yes, generic constraints
are at work when we write, but to discover them does not absolve us. (762)
Jo Little (2006) argues that rural studies took a long time to care about identity
categories like gender and youth because its emphasis on provision of services
to rural areas was shaped by a Marxist framework in which industrialization and
urbanization are tied together in the impoverishment of social and cultural life,
leaving behind a more authentic relation to labour which the rural stood for.
Raymond Williams already makes a very similar argument in his 1973 book
The Country and the City, which has been an important touchstone for me here.
Such critical questions address assumptions that rural life relies on pre-modern
or at least pre-industrial social relations, including work and community. These
assumptions can distract from the actual present characteristics of country life;
as well as political and economic centrality. I use the term metropolitan to distinguish
major urban centres and city to represent a symbolic formation. See Chapter 7.
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
10
they can offer a mythic justifcation for why certain services are or arent needed
in rural areas; and they can invoke a fantastically inaccessible ideal culture as
proper to country life.
Of course, interest in rural gender studies predates this more general concern
for rural identities, and Little traces the increasing importance of gender to
rural studies since the 1970s (2006: 365), escalating after Philos 1992 article on
Neglected rural geographies (Little 2006: 365) marked a turn away from those
rural social scientists who rarely did more than gesture to the role of gender
in rural life. After this turn, Little argues, women seemed to be one of those
others, like elderly people, young people, people of colour etc. (2006: 365)
that rural studies had only just noticed. While that story ignores some important
contributions, earlier perspectives on gender did not seem able to address
differences that segment gendered experiencelike the difference between
women and girlsor the intersection between gender and other forces that shape
rural identities. In the Australian context, Lia Bryant and Barbara Pini take up the
term intersectionality to stress that, while it is no longer accurate to claim, as
academics had done merely a decade ago, that rural women are invisible, only
some kinds of women and gendered situations have become visible in this way
notably older, white, able-bodied, married land-holders. (Bryant and Pini 1)
A focus on rural children appeared around the same time in response to the
same debates (see McCormack). Michael Leyshon points to two assumptions
obstructing research on rural youth: that young people in the countryside are
only able to take on bit part roles in the social fabric of rural communities
(2011: 305); and that only adults can have enough experience and suffciently
complex uses of those experiences to have identities worth studying. Both
are exacerbated by the idea that country lives involve simpler, more limited
experiences (31617). Taking up Little and Leyshons points, and emphasizing
the perspective country girls have on their own lives, I am less interested in
uncovering one of Philos socio-geographies of invisibility (1997: 22) than
in considering the ways in which girls are made visible, by others and among
themselves. It seems evidently a mistake to call country girls invisible in the
realm of their own experience given the amount of private and public attention
focused on them. However, they are rarely positioned as signifcant agents in
rural studies or by the developers of Australian policy at any scale. For both,
girls appear infrequently and usually as potential women-on-the-land or as a
form of rural youth which seems less problematic than boys disenfranchised
by rural decline. There are now exceptions, notably including Margaret Alstons
work over a number of years, but there remains a great deal to be said about the
difference (or not) of country life for girls. And this requires more than taking
an intersectional approach to sampling rural demographics.
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INTRODUCTION
11
Murdoch and Pratt exhort researchers to focus on the difference encountered
by rural research instead of setting aside dominant discourses for a focus on
Philos other voices. They claim that by
becoming a stranger in the rural, by coming from elsewhere, from there and
not here, and hence by being both inside and outside the situation at hand,
we can begin to experience that estrangement, that uncanny displacement,
which can so often characterise the experience of Otherness. In other words
we are forced to confront strange ruralities. (Murdoch and Pratt 1997: 645,
quoting Chambers)
My own stranger-ness in this sense is not very estranged (see Chapter 1), and
it is not strange ruralities that interest me as much as an oblique angle on the
everyday difference of country life for girls and of girlhood for country girls.
I came to this project frustrated by the unrecognizability to me of the people
who could occupy the cultural landscape of much rural studies and most of
all by the relative insignifcance of country girls for both rural studies and girls
studies. I set out to reject both idyllic and anti-idyllic stories of rural life which,
while they are popular grist for a daily mill in country Australia circulate there
with clear awareness of their many internal contradictions and the limits to their
explanatory power. These motivations have shaped the increasingly important
role of participant observation in this research.
Arranging interviews, focus groups and surveys required that I spend
time in school spaces during which it became quickly clear to me that there
was much to learn about girls lives from observing their group activities. My
increasingly active participation in school environments eventually developed
into a practice I want to call working ethnography, in which I took on jobs that
are usually casual and part-time and often voluntary: in libraries, cleaning up in
home economics and art classrooms, or in canteens. Having a reason to be in
a space and part of its expected use, however peripherally, facilitated stronger
relationships and richer observations. I was always up front about being a
researcher but given that I simply did the job I was meant to doI was not using
a workplace presence to meet interviewees or surreptitiously interviewover
time people did talk to me much as they would to another temporary worker
in that role. I soon extended this worker-ethnography approach to places other
than schools. I worked in pubs and licensed clubs, in town libraries, cafs and
once in a youth centre. I volunteered with local groups. And of course I didnt
always work. I simply spent time, alone or with others, in parks, cafs, pubs
and clubs, malls and shops, cinemas, and at beaches, pools and local events.
Sometimes I made friends and joined local workplace or family groups.
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
12
In the end I have taken both my learning curves and my own convoluted
attachment to the idea of Australian country girlhood as assets for this research.
I take courage from Renato Rosaldos caution that,
Although the doctrine of preparation, knowledge, and sensibility contains much
to admire, one should work to undermine the false comfort that it can convey.
At what point can people say that they have completed their learning or their
life experience? The problem with taking [the expected] mode of preparing the
ethnographer too much to heart is that it can lead to a false air of security, an
authoritative claim to certitude and fnality than our analyses cannot have. All
interpretations are provisional; they are made by positioned subjects who are
prepared to know certain things and not others. (1993: 8)
My own preparedness to know certain things and not others in the course of this
research is powerfully shaped by feeling myself to be simultaneously inside and
outside the experiences of country girlhood from the beginning. If any book
about country girlhood risks romanticism, nostalgia, and even sentimentality, my
use of autoethnography makes the whole business as sticky as trying to discuss
Nans photograph with detachment. I begin with autoethnography in Chapter 1
but each chapter moves further away from that position (although it makes a
brief return in the conclusion), prioritizing different sources of information
and different kinds of expertise, including a critical vocabulary drawn from
theories of cultural production and subject formation that has been invaluable
at times in fnding a way through my own attachments and biases, and ways to
work with the attachments and biases of others.
In closing this introduction I want to offer a brief sketch of the eight
feldwork locations I will discuss in this book: two in South Australia, fve in
New South Wales, and one in Victoria. Part of my ethical commitment to all the
girls I mention here, and the towns in which they were living, is that I conceal
their identities, both in order to have them talk more openly to me and because
theres no reason they should be attached by publication to their opinions and
situations at this time in their lives. Both girls and towns have pseudonyms here
and Ive shifted and blended details to make them less readily identifable on a
local scale. My work in these towns/centres has varied in many ways, involving
one to three visits ranging from a couple of weeks to many months residence.
I never aimed for a more regular method as I do not think easy comparability
between them, or between girls lives in them, could be established by my
research. This also allowed me to take on even the most irregular new encounter
with country girls and country girlhood as part of this project. Sketching these
locations offers some important context for what follows.
Just Inland Town has a population of around 5,000. Once an important
pastoral centre, it maintains some local agricultural activity and remains a local
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INTRODUCTION
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government centre. However it has only a single high school, a small shopping
centre and no major transport, media or entertainment facilities (although it is
within half an hour of a swimming beach). Its nearest regional centre is on the
coast almost an hour away.
Northern Beach-Town has a population of over 5,000. It is the largest town
in its immediate region but not the local government centre. It has only one
high school but also a cinema and an indoor mall because its attractive beaches
and waterways have helped make it a small-scale tourist centre. Located on a
once economically and politically signifcant river mouth, its primary industries
are now only residual. Its population is dominated by retirees and its economy
by tourism and support facilities for aged care (although it has no hospital).
It also has some facilities for a relatively large Aboriginal population in the
region, having once been the site of a colonial mission. Although it is closely
linked to several nearby towns, residents regularly make the hour-long trip to
the nearest regional centre to access more diverse resources.
Inland Centre has a population of over 20,000, a railway station and an
airport. It serves as an inland economic hub for pastoral activity and as a local
government, educational and cultural hub for a broad inland region. It locates a
regional university, several local media outlets, multiple malls and a cinema, and
a range of high schools including multiple boarding schools.
River-Town has a population of over 5,000. Once it provided river access to
pastoral lands and timber resources, and economically it still depends on some
activity of these kinds. It also locates a railway station now principally used to
access a tourist centre half-an-hours drive away on the coast. Once the local
government hub for this valley, River-Town is now highly dependent on this
larger centre, where locals access a cinema, several shopping centres, beaches
and some other entertainment and cultural facilities as well as most social
services. It retains few independent institutional resources except a relatively
large high school servicing the upper river valley.
Small Central Town is a remote town with a population of around 2,000.
At an intersection of rivers and highways it was once a transport and economic
hub for far-fung pastoral and other primary industries. It maintains some
government and social service institutions but its population is highly mobile,
affected by seasonal labour and relatively high rates of poverty and crime. It
locates a single school combining all grades and adult education facilities and
particularly targeting the large Aboriginal population. The nearest regional
centre (with a population over 40,000) is almost three hours drive away.
Small Southern Town has a population of over 3,000. Once a mining boom
town, with some secondary agricultural activity, these economic activities have
sharply declined. The town is now overshadowed by a series of smallish coastal
towns with which it has become almost continuous as a cheaper residential
location within reach of the coast. Although it maintains a high school it has
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THE AUSTRALIAN COUNTRY GIRL: HISTORY, IMAGE, EXPERIENCE
14
few other institutional resources independent of this regional network (it has
no public hospital). There are currently no regional centres closer than the state
capital two hours away.
Southern Inland Centre has a population of around 20,000. About an
hours drive from the state capital it also has a train station that facilitates
some commuter use but the town resists being incorporated into the capitals
hinterland insofar as it operates as an economic and government hub for the
region to its north. It has a cinema, a mall and a range of social services and
institutions, including public and private high schools.
Finally, Southern River-Town has a population of around 10,000. Featuring
a railway station and an airport it operates as a small regional centre for
agricultural, economic and government activities in the surrounding area and
has a modest tourist fow centred on the river and its history. It has multiple
high schools, shopping centres and social services being around two hours from
the nearest larger regional centre (which has a population over 80,000).
I offer this blunt overview because the following book is divided into seven
chapters which each aim to bring country girlhood into view as a particular
kind of object, and the initial chapters deal only occasionally with these sites.
The earlier chapters draw principally on textual analysis, archival research,
and cultural theory, while ethnography comes to the foreground in Part III.
As a whole these chapters are organized less as case studies than as shifting
points of focus, aiming to balance the generic dimension of my object against
recognition of differences between country girls. Class and other forms of
economic distinction are, for example, crucial to every chapter, although there
is no chapter on class. It is at the intersection of history, image and experience
that I want to locate the Australian country girl as an amorphous and yet
familiar idea, and one with special importance for anyone who experiences
themselves in its representation.