Cultural Sustainability in Rural Communities: Rethinking Australian Country Towns

There has been a recent expansion of interest in cultural approaches to rural communities and to the economic and social situation of rurality more broadly. This interest has been particularly prominent in Australia in recent years, spurring the emergence of an interdisciplinary field called 'rural cultural studies'. This collection is framed by a large interdisciplinary research project that is part of that emergence, particularly focused on what the idea of 'cultural sustainability' might mean for understanding experiences of growth, decline, change and heritage in small Australian country towns. However, it extends beyond the initial parameters of that research, bringing together a range of senior and emerging Australian researchers who offer diverse approaches to rural culture. The essays collected here explore the diverse forms that rural cultural studies might take and how these intersect with other disciplinary approaches, offering a uniquely diverse but also careful account of life in country Australia. Yet, in its emphasis on the simultaneous specificity and cross-cultural recognisability of rural communities, this book also outlines a field of inquiry and a set of critical strategies that are more broadly applicable to thinking about the "rural" in the early twenty-first century. This book will be valuable reading for students and academics of Geography, History, Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, introducing rural cultural studies as a new dynamic and integrative discipline.

Table of Contents:
1. Rethinking Australian country towns Catherine Driscoll, Kate Darian-Smith and David Nichols Part I: Place 2. On boredom: hometown Prudence Black 3. Music and community in Australian country towns: choir singing, belonging and emotion Chris Gibson and Andrea Gordon 4. Cultural progress in a rural community: the Swan Hill Shakespeare Festival Kate Darian-Smith, David Nichols and Jane Grant 5. Farm lit: reading narratives of love on the land Imelda Whelehan and Barbara Pini 6. Deceptive Darwin, the country capital Tess Lea Part II: Experience 7. Hometown: sustainable queerness in the more-than-human country town Katrina Schlunke 8. ‘A special Australian country thing’: the small hall in Australian country life David Nichols, Kate Bowles and Gordon Waitt 9. Sticky places: temporality, affect and gender in Australian country towns Anna Hickey-Moody and Jane Kenway 10. Talk of the town in drought country Deb Anderson Part III: Progress 11. Broome’s economy: renaturalising neoliberalism? Stephen Muecke 12. Fostering equality, maintaining hierarchy: problems of race and class in the Country Women’s Association of New South Wales, 1956–1970 Jennifer Jones 13. Gender relations in a rural community Margaret Alston 14. Something to play every day: rural retirement culture Catherine Driscoll