The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience

Catherine Driscoll

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317040897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience offers a detailed analysis of the experience and the image of Australian country girlhood. In Australia, 'country girl' names a field of experiences and life-stories by girls and women who have grown up outside of the demographically dominant urban centres. But it also names a set of ideas about Australia that is surprisingly consistent across the long twentieth century despite also working as an index of changing times. For a long period in Australian history, well before Federation and long after it, public and popular culture openly equated 'Australian character' with rural life. This image of Australian-ness sometimes went by the name of the 'bush man', now a staple of Australian history. This has been counterbalanced post World War II and increased immigration, by an image of sophisticated Australian modernity located in multicultural cities. These images of Australia balance rather than contradict one another in many ways and the more cosmopolitan image of Australia is often in dialogue with that preceding image of 'the bush'. This book does not offer a corrective to the story of Australian national identity but rather a fresh perspective on this history and a new focus on the ever-changing experience of Australian rural life. It argues that the country girl has not only been a long-standing counterpart to the Australian bush man she has, more importantly, figured as a point of dialogue between the country and the city for popular culture and for public sphere narratives about Australian society and identity.

Part I
Assembling Australian Country Girlhood

Chapter 1

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

Despite the significance of the rural/urban distinction, contemporary cultural research and theory have focused little attention on it. One reason for this neglect is the lack of a conceptual vocabulary for articulating the blend of psychic, cultural, and ‘real’ geography that concerns us here.

– Gerald Creed and Barbara Ching

I remember, as a young girl, standing at the window of a darkened bedroom looking out over the regional centre of Armidale in country NSW. Compared to my small home town, that field of twinkling lights offered a spectacle which I was not sure I understood but was sure I wanted. It was a constellation that outshone the stars I was used to at home, a material sign that the hugely populous world that I understood vaguely from books and radio really did exist. The attractions of ‘city lights’ are often mentioned in studies of rural youth but how that attraction works is not discussed in terms that would seem relevant to thinking about country girl’s desires. In practice this attraction is less about differences between the country and the city than about lines drawn between them. My Armidale city lights would have often thought of themselves as ‘the country.’

Both ‘country’ and ‘girl’ are imprecise terms, defined more clearly by what they are not than by any positive quality. Every encounter with country girls, or ex-country girls, nevertheless reminds me that, despite the slipperiness of the terms, something we share remains vital. Confronted by the difficulty of expressing this something we share, I finally decided to try and pin down the specificity of my own country girlhood as a way of being better equipped to encounter that experienced by others. It’s not an easier task.

The differences between various experiences of Australian country girlhood are undeniably important. A girl from a station in central Queensland does not have the same country girlhood as one from a small NSW river town. I didn’t even have the same country girlhood as Becky, an Aboriginal girl who sat in another classroom at school and lived in a different part of town. Becky appears in a photograph of my sister’s eighth birthday party, smiling over the rungs of a chair as if she sat happily at our dining table quite often, although I’m sure that’s not true. Memory is a tricky thing, and even what seems like empirical evidence of the past, like that photograph, can be misleading. The more fine-grained the historical fact, the harder it is to pin down what it meant in context. I remember not being allowed to play with Aboriginal girls in a way entirely contradicted by Becky’s presence in that photograph. Nevertheless, my experience of my own girlhood still must be richer and fuller than my experience of anyone else’s.

In important ways I learned to see myself as a country girl from the outside, through reinterpretation of my own memories and in relation to representations of country girlhood around me. Approaching country girlhood through this experience makes this chapter also, in part, a discussion of the 1970s. This was a period of dramatic social and cultural change in Australia, especially for women and girls affected by the new public visibility and success of feminism (see Arrow and Spongberg), but the role of ‘the country’ in those changes hasn’t been sufficiently emphasized. I came to understand myself as a country girl in the 1970s in relation to the production of a (at least rhetorically) cosmopolitan and multicultural Australia, the reimagining of Australia’s relation to primary production (see Davison and Brodie), and the emergence of a self-conscious feminist movement. But these changes reached me in translation, and appeared at a point of conflict between two very different forces. The first is a long continuity in Australian country life: the imperative to name the local. Every local country paper, radio station, and meeting of any kind is compelled to name itself as simultaneously where and who it is. Images of a new Australia in the 1970s often seemed to threaten such localization. The second force is, instead, a site of discontinuity: a wave of changes to communications industries and practices flowing from the expansion of television through ‘regional,’ meaning nonmetropolitan, Australia.

While local media seemed to name a highly specific constituency to which girls were somewhat marginal, television had non-local forms that addressed girls specifically. This chapter dwells on the importance of popular culture to Australian country girlhood the importance of its relations to technological and social change. Because the literal training and management of girls and mass culture for girls equally prioritize the emulation of ideals and group belonging, popular culture has a particular authority over modern girls’ lives. Across the history of ‘Australia,’ moreover, most of the popular reference points for girls tell stories of the city, and are consumed by country girls with a clear sense that they come from somewhere else. Country girlhood becomes what I will call an experience of distance. This is an experience shared across locations and generations.

This distance is both spatial and temporal and depends on a grand concept which, although widely discussed, often eludes definition—‘modernity.’ The next chapter takes on the task of saying something about what modernity means for thinking about Australian country girlhood. For now I will make do with saying that representations of modernity and the country are frequently at odds. The country is widely associated with traditions that modern life and modernization are presumed to disrupt or displace. In modernity, the country came ‘to stand for the past … and in particular for the past persisting in the present.’ (Driscoll 2010: 154) This idea of the country is endlessly engaged in and by dialogues about modernization, as Raymond Williams argues in The Country and the City and as Heather Goodall also suggests with specific reference to Australia, ‘where colonization began after the processes of European “modernization” had taken hold’ and ‘the impact of modernity is as much rural as urban.’ (22)

Country Australia’s claims to cultural distinctiveness are nevertheless both articulated against modernity and with continual reference to the idea that the country has unequal access to the resources needed for a properly contemporary life. That is, while access to amenities of many kinds is presumed to be an ongoing problem in many country areas, these same limitations are used to heighten its claims to community and a sense of place. The traffic is terrible in the city; people know one another’s names in the country. The image of rural lack often produced by emphasizing the disparity between country and city access to socio-cultural resources can thus be misleading.

As Williams suggests, in modernity ‘the country’ is often a sign of loss; a site of change in which some innate value, perhaps place or community, has always just been lost, ‘Just back, we can see, over the last hill.’ (1973: 9) In just this way, narratives about rural decline are continually recycled in Australian public and popular culture. The tendency for young people to move away from country Australia, especially girls, has been important to these stories about the imminent extinction of an authentically Australian country identity. Of course it is significant that so many country girls, myself included, move away from the country, and questions concerning why and how girls leave the country return many times across this book. But this chapter focuses on the process of becoming a country girl, suggesting that it is not simply a matter of being born in the country or of living there in one’s youth. Country girl is an identity that can be imposed on or required of girls whether they identify with it or not, and I think we need to better understand this process. The influence of a media landscape on how I understood myself as a country girl was not at all self-evident. In fact, I came to the story I will tell about myself here by considering the importance of a communications history for understanding the country girlhood of others.

1973

Focusing on a particular time and place makes a more layered cultural history possible and also suggests some significant questions about how geography affects the workings of identification. It’s with television rather than any landscape that I think my country girlhood begins. The markers I have chosen for my country girl experience of 1973 are Elizabeth Reid, Bellbird, and Number 96. None particularly represent what I did or liked as a girl, or even my personal relationships. Instead they represent a period when the world that I didn’t know began to seem important, and a time when my capacity to express preferences—even to play in particular ways—was constrained by other people. Outside Australia, these three markers will be generally unknown. Even within Australia, Number 96, a successful television soap opera set in a city apartment building and centred on sensational stories about new Australian identities and changing gender norms, and Bellbird, another soap opera, this time set in a quiet country town, will be far more widely known than a briefly significant political figure like Elizabeth Reid. But all point to two crucial influences on my learning that I was a country girl: feminism and television. Both seemed to emerge in the city and to mark the difference of country girlhood. They also came into my life together.

Why Elizabeth Reid? ‘Country girl’ is partly a political identity, and at least semi-consciously so. By the middle of 1973, feminism was a word given extra currency where I lived by the appointment of Reid, a girl from the next valley, as the first Women’s Adviser to the Prime Minister. It was a small moment of national relevance, though nothing to equal a Hometown boy signing to a Sydney rugby league team. Ms. Reid became part of a national political debate about Australian women and feminism still evident in the one page press statement about her appointment: ‘Ms. Reid’s salary,’ it reads, ‘will be in excess of $10,000 a year.’ (‘Press Release’) The salaries of male political advisers don’t seem to have required such publication, and certainly they were not discussed around me.

Many studies of rural society suggest that countercultural discourses are less visible in non-urban communities, which are widely understood to be dominated by conservative narratives about proper social roles. Johanna Wyn, John Stafford and Helen Stokes, in a 1998 summary of research on rural Australia, representatively argue that country gender relations are based on narrower ideas of what constitutes masculine and feminine behaviour (14–19). Margaret Alston reinforces this claim across a number of publications, and many other scholars suggest that the conservatism of rural communities is a consequence of their being more isolated and inward-looking. So if I had a political consciousness before I went to high school, and if I understood that to be broadly countercultural, how did that happen? One answer might be that the media showed me perspectives different than those apparent around me. This is only part of the truth. My mother and other family members came and went between our town and other places, sometimes representing uncommon ideas. We travelled too, as country people often do. But popular media did importantly represent a sense that other things were going on in Australian society elsewhere.

By the middle of 1973, most of the children at my school lived with television. The rise to cultural superiority of every child in a television-equipped house was rapid, and television brought with it new modes of knowledge, including new ways of knowing about the difference between the country and the city. The first television program I specifically recall was one I didn’t see till I was in my thirties and would never have been allowed to watch when it mattered to me. Like those city lights and their vague promise of a star-like life, Number 96 (1972–1977) was a glimpse of another world.

Television commenced for metropolitan Australia in 1956, with a national public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and two commercial stations launching in time to cover Australia’s first Olympic Games that year. Television thus connoted not only the national and urban but the transnational, expressly tying Australia to global cultural flows. The demand for regional television networks arising alongside this launch was simultaneously about access, modernization and representation. ABC television was from the outset committed to gradually covering rural areas, as ABC radio had done since 1932 (see Inglis). But television and radio not only have different histories, they relate differently to that powerful country discourse on the local. At home, my family had usually listened to the local commercial radio station since it became available in the 1930s. The exceptions were cricket broadcasts and horseracing that I recall as ABC programming and also as my grandfather’s specific choices as he moved between his bird-aviary-come-shed and the house depending on the weather, the time of day, and the temperament of the house in general. The house in general meant my grandmother, for the most part, who selected all family programming, including news broadcasts, and commanded the radio in the kitchen/living room. The household identification with this station survived its 1980 relocation from a neighbouring inland town to a more tensely rival coastal town despite complaints about finely detected changes. ABC radio wasn’t perceived as local in the same way, having less local content in news bulletins and lacking the specific local content of advertising and obituaries. Despite the ABC’s mandate to represent the rural and its famous ‘Country Hour,’ I grew up understanding ABC radio as a city view of Australia.

ABC television entered Australian schools with pedagogical purpose (Inglis 209–10). The children’s current affairs series Behind the News (1963–2003, 2005–), for example, was a feature of my primary school education. It came, along with a new television, to our school assembly hall in 1973 in the wake of the new Federal government’s agenda of equitably resourcing schools filtering down through the states. It was part of a suite of reforms that singled out country girls as a special cause for concern. In 1975, the Girls, School and Society report to the Schools Commission noted that:

Improved educational levels among country girls may often result in a situation where the alternatives are to leave the area (a decision not open to married women as independent agents), or to remain and cope with the frustrations associated with the absence of employment appropriate to the educational level reached and those of concealed unemployment among women … These are important questions requiring investigation along with the educational needs of country girls and women. (McKinnon 7)

The continuity between this report and subsequent commentary on the possibly counterproductive consequences of culturally resourcing the country is remarkable and I will return to this theme several times. Here I want to stress that policy developments regarding education, ‘women’s affairs,’ and the extension of dense media networks into country Australia were entwined. This is important to understanding how it is via Number 96, rather than Behind the News, that the city and feminism entered my life. They were not news headlines to me but unified stories about desire, relayed by girls with more access to television’s currency of cool alongside strategies for getting to watch television.

From 1970, ABC television was distributed by microwave link and accessible to most of Australia. In practice this reinforced a sense that what the country had less access to was not television per se but commercial programming as the epitome of consumer culture. The ABC was what everyone (potentially) had; it was used by schools and widely permitted by families as relatively ‘good for you.’ Commercial programs, especially those we had to wait to see, suggested that city television was more about pleasure than was ours. The image of being up-to-date with what screened in the city was an important marketing tactic for regional television. GLV10, ‘Gippsland’s own Independent Television Station,’ typically advertised itself as offering ‘the latest programs running ahead of other Australian stations’ when promoting a weekly primetime lineup that featured American series like Peyton Place, Lost in Space, and I Dream of Jeannie. TV presented as the latest thing in such marketing was often produced overseas, but in 1973 Number 96 was the most popular program on Australian television and I not only knew that but understood it represented a sophisticated Australian-ness as opposed to everyday life around me.

Colour television was available by the time there was finally a television in my home. Ours was not colour, but like the early family cars my grandmother could recollect in detail over 50 years after they’d become outmoded I can remember that television very distinctly—a curvaceous chunk of cream plastic and faux tweed. Like the car for earlier generations, television shifted what was exotic for country girls and manifested a distinctive change in the media flows shaping their experience. Media industries are what cultural studies and communications scholars call ‘cultural technologies,’ (O’Regan 1990) the effects of which might be compared to other technologies, like the train or the car, that are not explicitly representational.

There’s a photograph of my grandmother as a young teenager, half-smiling behind an oriental fan, wrapped in someone’s dressing gown recast as a kimono for a concert at which she fondly remembered having been complimented for her performance of foreign feminine charm. There is a photograph of one of my aunts, about 19, curled up smiling on a beach towel with her bakelite radio, perm, and sexy swimsuit, straight out of a Gidget film. Like the arrival of cars or television as ordinary components of girls’ lives, and like the newspaper ads for the once central town cinema which attest that in the 1930s and 40s it screened predominantly generic overseas films, these photographs map particular interactions between girls in my town and circulating popular images of girlhood.

I am therefore not claiming that the arrival of television in the 1970s locates a greater transformation for the lives of country girls than the arrival of earlier technologies like the railway and the movies in the 1910s. When the Hometown railway station opened in 1915 with a line from a regional centre it was just as important. The first school in 1868 and the post office in 1883 also brought transformative lines of communication to town. I might say that my grandmother’s girlhood was the girlhood of ‘country rail’ as mine was the girlhood of ‘regional television.’ Linda Garcia argues that the emergence of mass media ‘reinforced the development of a national marketplace, exacerbating,’ in close articulation with mass transport systems, ‘the growing disparity between rural and urban areas.’ (123)

As I will discuss below, this disparity is actually a product of making the country and the city visible to each other in new ways. For Garcia, the impact of mass media resembles ‘road building,’ which ‘Brought rural and urban areas closer together’ but ‘forced many small communities to deal with urban values for the first time’ and ‘facilitated massive rural out-migration.’ (124) A communications history of Australian country life would need to trace overlapping waves of change rather than naming any transformative breaks. The relative density of coastal settlements, which locate most of the nonmetropolitan Australian population, means service provision and communication along the eastern-seaboard long preceded any highway network.

It’s an apparently straightforward historical fact that once important cultural differences in Australia were narrowed by the 1970s expansion of communication networks. But this may be too simple. As a young girl, my grandmother lived an apparently significant distance from the nearest regional centre and a very substantial journey from the closest metropolis where new venues for young people’s engagement with popular culture were most visibly clustered. But the Hometown cinema opened in 1923 when she was only seven years old and the movies were an expected part of town life which fascinated her in much the way that television fascinated me in the 1970s.

Up to the end of World War II (WWII) the Saturday night pictures were key community events in Hometown (see Tomsic; Bowles). The cinema served an array of social functions, more like a community hall than the 1920s picture palaces where women and young people particularly congregated in urban cinema histories (for example, Matthews 50–62). But they were still associated with the modern worl...