Outbacks: the popular construction of an emergent landscape

Abstract

What is an ‘outback’? Why is the term being applied to landscapes bearing little resemblance to the Australian interior? Based on a survey of the rising international use of this term, and a case study from Ohio, it is suggested that outbacks are discursively produced: (a) where post-industrial relationships between an urban place and its much larger, contiguous periphery have matured; (b) where economic shifts have resulted in patchy but recognizable re-naturalization of erstwhile fields or industrial badlands; (c) by rural groups, who recognize and promote the ‘environmental power’ of their changing landscapes; and (d) when proximate urbanites consume these landscapes as accessible, nostalgic, multi-use recreational getaways. The outback concept, then, offers a framework for exploring a new type of re-greened, post-industrial landscape through its discursive production by citizens, in a way that encompasses multiple forms of social, economic and ecological change. Where landscape scholars tend to explore these issues in isolation, simultaneous ‘outbacking’ of different landscapes around the world draws attention to popular articulation of commonalities in rural experience.

Keywords:

• Outback
• rural restructuring
• ecological transition
• Ohio
• landscape

Notes

Correspondence address: Kendra McSweeney, Department of Geography, 1036 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1341, USA. Email: [email protected]

Bridge (2001) does use discursive strategies to describe and analyse the construction of (often rural) ‘primary commodity supply zones’, but he does not do so specifically in terms of their residents' apprehension of their image.

We turned to popular media, beginning with a keyword search of the World Wide Web using the search engine Google. We narrowed our focus to English-language uses, and to cases where the term is used to denote a given place (e.g. ‘the Nebraska outback’), as distinct from its frequent use as an adjective (e.g. college football's ‘Outback Bowl’). Successful ‘hits’ included tourist promotion sites, travellers' web logs, chat rooms, and a host of other electronic resources, largely but not exclusively from US sources. We also consulted print media specifically by searching English-language news sources using the LexisNexis bibliographic search engine.

For example, the Colorado outback comprises the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver—once a major site of chemical weapons production and now heavily polluted—which was long surrounded by a no-go security buffer. After the site was decommissioned in the 1990s, it was found to be teeming with wildlife, and has now been renamed the Rocky Mountain National Wildlife Refuge (RMA, 2003). Similarly, former Department of Energy (DoE) lands at Hanford, Washington, were found to support surprising floral diversity (Mercer, 2002).

Most would fail on the basis of one or more of the following criteria: (a) their disturbance histories; (b) the abundance or dominance of exotic species—the Australian outback is particularly compromised in this regard (Letnic, 2000; Symanski, 1994); (c) road densities: most outbacks in the US exceed the minimum roadless area required by The Wilderness Act of 1964.

In this, American outback residents appear closely allied with Australian pastoralists, “who consider their livelihoods to be more threatened by … conservationists” and who are highly “suspicious of external management” (Letnic, 2000, 303–304).

Government lands are, in turn, placed under a host of different jurisdictions. In the US, these include the Department of Defense, Indian Trust lands, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and state and local parks/preserves systems.

Scepticism at the existence of an Ohio outback was displayed in an exchange within an Internet ‘chat room’ run by Outside Magazine, in which US National Parks expert Bob Howells responded to an Ohioan's request for information about nearby outdoor experiences. The reply: “Boy, if you're not willing to move, you sure limit my options, not to mention your own”. The exchange was facetiously titled “In search of the great Ohio Outback” (Outside Online, 2002).

In 1964, the state of Ohio proposed “stimulating Recreation, Resort, and Retirement development” in the southeast (Wilson, 1964, p. 1), but recognized that a major obstacle to this form of economic growth was the “hillsides … stripped of timber; land … unwisely cultivated; strip mines … not re-forested, and landscaped farmsteads abandoned. These are depression signs …” (p. 6).