Up where I belong: doing cultural studies in the deep north of Australia

Abstract

Recent editions of Australian Humanities Review (2008) and Cultural Studies Review (2010) mapped an emerging field of cultural studies devoted to rural Australia, uncovering the ways metropolitan biases tended to underpin studies of rural change. This paper builds upon that work by canvassing the mediation of meaning and interests that can occur when doing cultural studies in a wildly non-urban place. It draws on a new study of the lived experience of cyclone in Far North Queensland, where the people are allegedly ‘bred tough’ – and where the researcher grew up. While producing an oral-historical account that centres upon the voices of ‘survivors’, the project also reinterprets ‘cyclone’ as a cultural site, where stories of survival, both symbolic and literal, intersect. In that context, this paper examines the tensions involved in critiquing discursive and material histories and realities through embedded rural research practice, here depicted as a dialogic interchange with place.

Notes

1. As Frow (2005) pointed out, ‘what counts as cultural studies overlaps substantially with media and communication studies, cultural history, cultural geography, the sociology of culture, cultural policy studies, and even certain forms of auto-ethnographic anthropology’.

2. This phrase is borrowed from Read’s (1996) Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, which examines the ways Australians relate to and value country of significance.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Monash University Faculty of Arts.