White critical efforts to make meaning of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria have sought to anchor it to the big names among white Australian novelists. Such moves presume to make Wright indebted to these literary ‘masters’, assessing the significance of her text…

Because the apocalypse did not occur, but the time of linear progress did come to a crashing halt. Because the post-modern rumours of utter temporal fragmentation seem quite silly. Because although we are very good at wearing watches, are positively…

In his 2006 Australia Day address to the National Press Club in Canberra, the then prime minister, John Howard, told journalists that ‘people come to this country because they want to be Australians’. However, as Howard himself admitted, ‘The irony…

This article explores the politicisation of environmental knowledge on rural Australia, in an analysis of discourse on the lived experience of drought. It draws on research conducted in dryland farm communities in the Mallee wheat-belt of Victoria – where rural…

One of the most common Aboriginalist representations of Indigenous Australian people is, as Indigenous female performer Lou Bennett points out, ‘basically a man, out in the desert, black skin, flat nose with a lap-lap on, standing on one leg, resting…

Philosophers, social theorists and cultural theorists have generally followed Mauss in assuming that gifts entail obligatory exchanges between distinct parties who give, receive and reciprocate, and, that the social emerges through this sequence of obligations. It is the obligation to…

Discussions about what constitutes ‘the rural’ invariably focus on notions of spatial location – of inhabiting spaces apart from that of the metropolitan. Deeply embedded in our images of what it means to be Australian, nonetheless our intellectual framing of…

Foucaultian understandings of power have come to be highly influential in the how we analyse and write up rural cultural research. However, despite the extensive application of his work, Foucault’s retheorisation of power has been less consistently applied to how…

This article considers the benefits a cultural studies perspective can offer debates around rural and regional telecommunications provision. It begins with a critique of the metrocentrism dominant in recent scholarship of new media, arguing that academic, business and government discourses…

Drier conditions in Australia have compelled governments to implement projects such as the desalination plant in the South Gippsland town of Wonthaggi. The desalination plant is still under construction, but South Gippsland is already host to wind turbines and marine…