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 University of Sydney, Australia Fir st published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Catherine Driscoll 2014 Catherine Driscoll has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. 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 Cultural Studies (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 Meaghan Morris, 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 University of Melbourne 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.