THE AUStRaLIaN COUNtRY GIRL: HIStORY, IMagE, EXPERIENcE For my mother, Judith Mary Driscoll, and all the other country girls The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience

CatHERINE DRIScOLL , Australia Fir st published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Driscoll, Catherine. The Australian country girl : history, image, experience / by Catherine Driscoll. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-4688-0 (hardback) 1. Rural girls–Australia. 2. Rural women–Australia. 3. Country life–Australia. 4. Rural-urban relations–Australia. 5. Women–Australia–Identity. 6. Sociology, Rural–Australia. I. Title. HQ792.A85D75 2014 3.05.40994–dc23 2014005354 ISBN 9781409446880 (hbk) Contents

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements ix

Introduction: ‘The Australian Country Girl’ 1

PART I ASSEMBLiNG AUSTRALiAN COUNTRY GiRLHOOD

1 Becoming a Country Girl (Gough, Kate, the CWA, and Me) 17

2 Miss Showgirl (Rural Girlhood and Representation) 37

PART II HiSTORY, IMAGE, EXpERiENcE

3 The Bush-Girl (a Pastoral) 63

4 The Country Town Girl (a Soap Opera) 89

PART III PLAcE AND PRAcTicE

5 Subjects of Distance: (Country) Girl Culture Capital 113

6 Home Economics (Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Do) 137

7 Ex-Country Girls (a Human Geography) 161

Bibliography 179 Index 193 This page has been left blank intentionally List of Illustrations

I.1 Family photograph, Ada Sheather, c.1928. © C. Driscoll 3

2.1 Family photograph, Peggy Sheather at The Show, c.1951. © C. Driscoll 49 2.2 Family photograph, Judith Sheather on Skettie at Ellenborough Gymkhana, with Anne Duffy, c.1960. © J. Driscoll 55

3.1 Rex Dupain, Girl by the Pool, 1996. © Rex Dupain 70 3.2 ‘The Girl Who Found the Moon.’ Cover of Mary Grant Bruce, The Stone Axe of Burkamukk, 1922 (London: Ward, Lock & Co.). © Orion Publishing Group 77 3.3 George Lambert, The Squatter’s Daughter, 1923–1924. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased with the generous assistance of James Fairfax AO and Philip Bacon AM and the people of Australia in 1991 79

4.1 Television still. Vicky and Simon, A Country Practice, 1981. Channel ATN7. © JNP Productions 98

5.1 Film still. Freya and Danny, The Year My Voice Broke, 1987. © Kennedy Miller Mitchell 129 This page has been left blank intentionally Acknowledgements

The research for this book was funded by the Australian Research Council: centrally through a Discovery Project on Australian country girlhood (2004–2007). Before that a Small Grant (2000–2001) helped establish the premises of this project and, later, a collaborative Discovery Project on cultural sustainability in Australian country towns (2009–2013)—shared with Kate Bowles, Kate Darian-Smith, Chris Gibson, David Nichols and Gordon Waitt— materially contributed to its final form. A version of Chapter 1 has previously appeared in Mary Kearney’s edited collection on Mediated Girlhoods (Driscoll 2011) and an essay based on Chapter 4 appeared in the journal (Driscoll 2012). I want to particularly thank Claire Jarvis at Ashgate for her interest in this project and her patience while I wrote and rewrote it. I wanted this book to give a primary place to country girls’ lives and yet not claim to fully represent them; to be neither overwhelmed by theoretical discussion nor overly simplistic. Claire made my best attempt at that juggling act possible. It was initially difficult to accept that as I was writing for an academic readership I was inevitably writing about the people I met during this research in ways that would seem alien to most of them. I have tried to be responsible to many stories of Australian country girlhood here, including my own, but I know that I have nevertheless written a book in which we have all become examples. Since 2003 many people have contributed to this work, most materially the country girls and ex-country girls who were collectively my most important resource. In keeping with ethical commitments for my fieldwork I have taken care not to identify participating individuals or groups in what follows except by pseudonyms. I have also given pseudonyms to the locations in which I worked, given that in smaller communities only a little specificity works to identify people. This means, however, that I can only issue a general thanks for the hospitality and generosity with which people mostly met my interest in their ideas about and experiences of Australian country girlhood. I owe warm thanks to the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. I am especially grateful there to Elspeth Probyn, who urged me to take on this project when I felt it would be too personally challenging; to , who has shaped my thinking on all the questions it raised; and to Tess Lea, who helped immeasurably with problems in the final stages. For advice and feedback along the way I am also grateful to Andrew THE AUStRaLIaN COUNtRY GIRL: HIStORY, IMagE, EXPERIENcE

Gorman-Murray, Anna Hickey-Moody, Mary Kearney, Stephen Muecke and Katrina Schlunke. Jane Simon provided valuable early research assistance. Finally, I can hardly list the family and friends who have helped shape what I think and could write about Australian country girlhood, but special thanks are due to Sean Fuller, for proof-reading and other support, to Ruth Talbot-Stokes, for constant encouragement, and to my grandparents, Neville and Ada Sheather, who gave me my own country town life. But this book is dedicated to my mother, whose particular blend of country belonging and city promise was more influential on me and on this book than I could ever adequately acknowledge.

x 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 it’s hard to pin down when I first 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 fields of girls studies, rural studies, and Australian cultural studies. The first 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.’ I’d answered his question about where I’d flown in from—a small inland city where I’d conducted some pilot interviews—and he replied that he’d 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. They’re friendly; they don’t take themselves too seriously; they’re not ‘snobs.’ I was both amused and sincerely flattered 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. It’s 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 driver’s idea of country girlhood comes from a similar place. By his own account he had never been ‘out of the city’ much, although he’d always ‘meant to.’ Our mutual recognition of and investment in a country girl type depends on a significant Australian history. My second moment is far more scholarly. I was in the library in 1994, reading Meaghan Morris’s 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 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE of being something like a country bumpkin. I was stopped short by a couple of sentences in which Morris reflects on ‘an imaginary text I’ve 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 Morris’s 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 she’d done many times before, and handed over one I’d 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 there’s no other occasion for this photograph. It is a photograph of Ada’s beautiful hair and in her eighties she still remembered and handled the picture that way. But in the moment I’m 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 influential 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 first time, this photograph represented for me Nan’s entry to an in-between zone where she was no longer really a child—although she would very soon be a mother—just 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 fiction, film, histories and exhibition materials, media archives, photography, policy documents, statistical representations of the demographic makeup of country Australia

2 Figure I.1 Family photograph, Ada Sheather, c.1928. © C. Driscoll THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE and television. I bring these historical materials together with ethnographic fieldwork 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 field of country girl experiences. A long-popular romantic image of girlhood is brought into view by my story about Nan’s photograph. According to this image, the girl is an icon of fleeting possibilities, an ephemeral value poised between childhood innocence and another kind of beauty. Even for my private engagement with Nan’s memory of her own girlhood this is a seductive trap. Even recalling the apparently unanswerable full-stop on Nan’s 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 difficult conditions doesn’t escape that romanticism. Such romanticization transforms the girl into something static—into 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 define 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 influential 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 defined against the city continues to influence Australian policy, popular culture, research trajectories, and everyday life. The country girl plays a more significant 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 girl’s 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

4 INtROdUctiON 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. Morris’s essay struck me forcefully because it doesn’t 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 scenes—like domesticity and shopping—widely 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 sufficiently 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 degree—no single project can do everything—and certainly acknowledge my conceptual debt to ’s 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 records—this is how it was, then—and through a narratively satisfying language of cause and effect naturalizing whatever seems to follow. For understanding how the institutions and practices that today define, 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: 419–20) we also agree on the importance

5 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE of ‘what Meaghan Morris calls “unsettling empirical surprises.”’ (Bellanta 2010: 422) Indeed, I take support for my approach from Morris’s 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 Morris’s 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 significant 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 field 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 specific 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 first attempts to interview and survey high school girls, in 2000–2001, were motivated by my not wanting to leave all the power of defining girlhood to people who were not girls. This fieldwork confirmed my sense that girlhood is a particularly self-reflexive experience. As I put it inGirls , 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-reflection 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 difficulty 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

6 INtROdUctiON 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 field of girls studies. There’s been a ‘fruitful’ conjunction of rural studies and cultural studies in Australia (Gorman-Murray 273) across the years in which I’ve 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 don’t 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 ethnographers—especially anthropologists, who have a special institutional investment in the value of ethnography—have 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 scientific 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 mediate—‘transform, 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 fieldwork 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

7 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE

School studies that remain so prominent in histories of cultural studies. Jane Kenway, Anna Kraack and Anna Hickey-Moody usefully foreground Paul Willis’s discussions of ethnography for cultural studies (Kenway et al. 38). Willis and Mats Trondman define 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 flow 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 flows dryly recorded from the outside as “structures” and “trends.”’ (395) In incorporating critical approaches into both ethnography and history I want neither the ‘flat’ realm of data nor the ‘empty’ realm of ‘big ideas,’ to paraphrase Willis’s The Ethnographic Imagination. This approach ‘seek[s] to deliver analytic and illuminating points not wholly derivable from the field but vital to conceptualising its relationships.’ (Willis xi) In ‘throwing concepts at things’ in Willis’s 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 xi–xii)—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 filling 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.’ I’ve 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: 1.1–2, 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 inflections 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

8 INtROdUctiON for addressing specific 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 field that calls itself rural studies—dominated by sociology and geography—has heatedly contested its own definitions 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 Little’s 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 affirmed new scholarly directions. This set of papers, which I will discuss again in Chapter 6, was sparked by Philo’s 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 classifications of ‘the rural’ both impose and stabilize meanings of the rural. In response to Philo’s 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 representer’s 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.

9 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE they can offer a mythic justification for why certain services are or aren’t 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 Philo’s 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 experience—like the difference between women and girls—or 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 sufficiently complex uses of those experiences to have identities worth studying. Both are exacerbated by the idea that country lives involve simpler, more limited experiences (316–17). Taking up Little and Leyshon’s points, and emphasizing the perspective country girls have on their own lives, I am less interested in uncovering one of Philo’s ‘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 significant 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 Alston’s 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.

10 INtROdUctiON

Murdoch and Pratt exhort researchers to focus on the difference encountered by rural research instead of setting aside dominant discourses for a focus on Philo’s ‘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: 64–5, 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 insignificance 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 do—I was not using a workplace presence to meet interviewees or surreptitiously interview—over 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, cafés and once in a youth centre. I volunteered with local groups. And of course I didn’t always work. I simply spent time, alone or with others, in parks, cafés, 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.

11 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE

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 Rosaldo’s 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 finality 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 Nan’s 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 finding 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 fieldwork locations I will discuss in this book: two in South Australia, five 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 there’s 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 I’ve shifted and blended details to make them less readily identifiable 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

12 INtROdUctiON 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 significant 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-hour’s 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-flung 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

13 THE AUStRaLiaN COUNtRY GiRL: HiStORY, IMagE, EXPERiENcE 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 hour’s drive from the state capital it also has a train station that facilitates some commuter use but the town resists being incorporated into the capital’s 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 flow 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.

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