Alcohol, Violence, Frontier Masculinities and the Australian Mining Boom

Internet Journal of Criminology© 2016 ISSN 2045 6743 (Online) Alcohol, Violence, Frontier Masculinities and the Australian Mining Boom Kerry Carrington, Queensland University of Technology Russell Hogg, Queensland University of Technology John Scott, Queensland University of Technology Abstract While the economic impacts of mining in Australia have been widely discussed, the social impacts of mining are subject to much speculation. In the social sciences, the impacts of mining have largely been understood with through a social disorganization lens, with population instability being linked to social disorder. Recently, critical criminology has also linked violence and fear of crime in mining regions with work patterns associated with supercapitalism and an overreliance on non-resident workforces. This paper draws on data from in-depth interviews and focus groups from three mining regions in Australia. We argue that the criminogenic impacts of mining must be understood in relation to both the ecological aspects of rural and/or isolated communities and the power relations that exist in these communities. In particular, we contextualize the criminogenic impacts of mining with reference to gender relations in mining communities and what we refer to as monologic expressions of masculinity. The paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on violent crime in diverse rural settings. Key words: Boomtowns, power relationships, alcohol abuse, masculinity, Introduction Regarded by many critics as the best Australian film ever made, Wake in Fright [aka Outback] (1971) sits firmly within the genre of what has been referred to as Australian Gothic or, more broadly, rural horror (Bell, 1997). The film is a Faustian tale of a city teacher, John Grant, who is posted to the small and isolated outback town of Tiboonda. Grant plans to travel to Sydney and visit his girlfriend for the Christmas holidays, but finds himself stranded in the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba (known as “The Yabba”) after succumbing to various social degradations involving gambling, violence, and sexual licentiousness, during the course of a three-day alcohol- fuelled binge. The film culminates in Grant attempting suicide and returning to Tiboonda for the new school year, having never reached Sydney. Against an outback landscape, posters for the film ran the tagline, “Have another drink, mate? Have another fight, mate? Have a taste of dust and sweat, mate? There’s nothing else here.” Australian audiences baulked at the film on its initial release—its brutal portrayal of Australian culture being at stark odds with a cultural canon that had largely mythologized the outback and rural life. During an early screening, a clearly disturbed Australian audience member stood up and yelled, “That’s not us!” To which one of the films stars, Jack Thompson, yelled, “Sit back down, mate. It is us!” (Roland, 2014). Having been “lost” for many years, the film was remastered and re-released in 2009. The timing could not have been better. Australia was experiencing unprecedented growth in mineral exports, www.internetjournalofcriminology.com 94 Internet Journal of Criminology© 2016 ISSN 2045 6743 (Online) which would not peak for another three years. The hedonism of The Yabba resonated in media stories of mining boomtowns. The film’s deconstruction of masculinity also resonated in an Australia where terms such as “poofta” seemed archaic. We had just received national funding to investigate masculinity and violence in rural Australia. The study had largely scoped places that could be considered “agricultural,” but it became increasingly apparent, having visited an outback mining town, that a comprehensive understanding of violence in rural places was not possible without close attention to mining towns, a significant gap in the existing research. This article draws on interview data collected from several mining towns at the height of the Australian mining boom in 2010, as part of that larger research project. While the economic impacts of the boom are well documented and known, the same cannot be said of the social impacts and very little is known about criminogenic factors associated with mining. In particular, we examine how the contemporary architecture of mining communities, especially work and leisure practices, may accommodate violent crime. This paper extends our previous research, which argued that “supercapitalism” has created anomic environments with brutalizing effects on workforces and destructive ramifications for community stability (Carrington et al., 2011, 2012, and 2013; Scott et al., 2012). In particular, we examine how violence presents as a strategy to symbolically and physically resolve contradiction and conflict within a highly gendered rural social order. Literature Review As has been the case elsewhere, criminology in Australia has largely been concerned with urban articulations of crime and criminality (Felson, 1994; Shaw and McKay, 1931; Tönnies, [1887] 1955). Early research into rural crime largely confirmed the view of rural communities as embodying Gemeinschaft qualities based on dense local networks, strong social bonding capital, and organic forms of solidarity (see O’Connor and Gray, 1989). Some of the rural neglect can be put down to the way in which bucolic agricultural centers approximate what has been termed “the idyll” (Bell, 1997, 2006) and the revelation that crime exists in such places challenges core modern assumptions about the nature of crime (Barclay et al., 2007; Hoge and Carrington, 2006). In contrast, mining towns approximate Gessellschaft relations and present as the frontier—a place of becoming and transformation—rather than a static site of community (Scott et al., 2012). Conventional social science has represented mining towns as “distinctly deviant,” associated with capitalism and the destruction of nature, especially when contrasted with agricultural sites. Mining, grounded in luck, risk, and chance, is the quintessential other to farming, which is seen as the normative occupation, its natural rhythms opposed to the social disruption that emerges from mining (Lahiri-Dutt, 2012). While Australian agricultural communities have been cleansed of their violent histories, especially with regard to race relations, the bloody history of Australian mining regions is more readily acknowledged.1 1 Crime in mining regions may be considered as something that is historical and associated with frontier periods, especially to the extent that “vice” would often be firmly regulated in such places as they morphed into settler communities. Nonetheless, there is much in Australian folklore, from the fabled Eureka Stockade Rebellion to Gold Field race riots, that suggests that violence is a fundamental part of the history of mining in Australia. www.internetjournalofcriminology.com 95 Internet Journal of Criminology© 2016 ISSN 2045 6743 (Online) Mining communities remain places of transformation in the national psyche. They are not “communities” but temporary, chimeric places. Yet mining towns have rarely figured as places for the study of crime, as it is popularly understood. What is absent, even in the histories of mining places, is an understanding of violence as an everyday event, or any appreciation of the sociocultural dynamics of such violence. And while mining and agricultural communities may differ in terms of economics and politics, they notably share a social order that is grounded in rigid gendered norms. A growing body of critical research contradicts romantic images of a crime-free rural life (Carrington, 2007; Deller and Deller, 2011, 2012; Donnermeyer and DeKeseredy, 2014; Hogg and Carrington, 2006; Wells and Weisheit, 2004). Attention has also been directed at the relationship between mining and violent crime (see, for example, Carrington et al., 2011). The rural social order is also a product of power relations, and gender has been a significant feature in rural structuration, not only in the extent to which it divides men and women, but also in the way in which it creates gendered hierarchies among men (Carrington and Scott, 2008). Following US research into rural crime, early Australian research on rural crime adopted social disorganization theories as a way of understanding rural crime patterns (Donnermeyer et al., 2013). However, the social disorganization frameworks mostly developed in mid-western US contexts (see Weisheit et al., 1995), which were a long-way removed from Australian conditions, especially isolated mining communities. To this extent, the neglect of mining regions in formulating an account of violent crime in Australia certainly reflects the way in which a “Northern” agenda can define the margins of research in the global South (see Carrington et al., 2015). Social disorganization starts with the fundamental assumption that places with high levels of cohesion and solidarity have lower rates of crime, while places with less order and more disorganization display more crime (Kubrin, 2009; Sampson, 2012). To a great extent, social disorganization has sought to identify social strains (residential instability, ethnic/race heterogeneity, family instability, etc.) or sought to test the mediating influences that a rural locality’s structure has on crime as measured by official police statistics (Donnermeyer et al., 2013). While some of this research challenged the assumption that crime rates were lower in rural places, this was typically evidenced with reference to property crime, including farm crime (see Barclay, 2002).

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