| Review of: |
Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia edited by Graeme Davison, Marc Brodie
Monash University E-Press, Clayton, Victoria, 2005
Pages: xvi+173. $34.95 |
| Reviewed By: |
Kate Hunter |
| Reviewed in: |
Australian Journal of Politics and History |
| Date accepted online: |
14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 53, Issue 03, Pages 465-504 |
Book Reviews
I feel it is ironic that the genesis and production of this excellent collection of rural history essays was spurred by some of our best known urban historians. But if the quality of the work exhibited in this collection is anything to go by, we should whole-heartedly welcome our colleagues to the field (in all senses of the word). Struggle Country is the product of a conference and, as such, the essays are fairly loosely connected but as individual pieces of work, they are rigorous, engaging and innovative. Some are about the links, rather than the differences between urban and rural communities, rectifying the dearth of research into what Megan Blair calls "clues [...] regarding the potential and actual porousness of any partition that exists between city and country" (07.2-3). David Cameron's essay on closer settlement in Queensland brings a little-known and little-understood part of that state's history to greater prominence. Jill Tacon extends scholarship on the "management" of waterways with her contribution about the Wimmera River in Western Victoria. Others deal with decline in various forms, most particularly economically, and yet allude to the robustness of community even in the face of this decline. Both Marc Brodie and Monica Kenely make this point, but in the different contexts of the interwar parallels between British politicisation of the "Conservative countryside" and a similar nostalgia in Australia, and the inevitability of economic decline in small country towns during the same period. Helen Doyle's essay on the theme of decline in local history is one of the highlights of the collection. She intertwines the overwhelming colonial narrative of progress with the centrality of decline to local histories produced from the 1880s onwards. She argues: "Colonial writers [...] adopted a sentimental attitude towards the decline of the pioneers and expressed serious concern that 'old Australia' - both its old ways and its old landscape - were disappearing" (04.5). The other two exceptional essays in this collection are those by Joy McCann on history and memory in the wheatlands and Jaime Phillips' on the West Australian settlement of Rock Gully. Both manage to convey the complexity of rural history. McCann communicates the paradox of the modernising narrative for rural dwellers, that modernisation often increased women's social isolation, diminished the size of the rural workforce while increasing the size of farms, and essentially was the beginning of the end for rural communities of the idealised kind. Phillips brings the questions and methods of cultural and environmental histories to bear on the story of Rock Gully, layering the history of the settlement with that of its indigenous inhabitants - some of whom as rural labourers were involved in the clearing of the land - and the emotional turmoil of exservicemen and their families who formed part of the community.
I am loath to label this collection "new rural history": it is what rural history at its best should be. With its premise of the particularity of the rural location, rural history has always been concerned with place, land, those who lived there and how they lived. Its failings - a tendency to relegate indigenous people to a colonial frontier, and a failure to recognise the significance of the environment (including water) as an "actor" or force, rather than simply the backdrop - have been mitigated here, and I look forward to more work, most particularly from the young scholars in this collection.
