Articoli di riviste sul tema "Urbanisme et société"

Resumé La sociologie a considéré que l’espace et son architecture sont une création originale, empreints de caractéristiques sociétales et historiques. Dans une diversité problématique, elle a mis à l’épreuve du territoire et de l’espace de vie la conceptualisation de pratiques sociales, de processus de socialisation, de mécanismes décisionnels, signes du fonctionnement des sociétés. L’analyse du lien entre social et spatial a nourri des débats théoriques sur l’explication des usages. Pour les uns l’essentiel est dans la façon dont les individus, les groupes, les institutions, la société, investissent l’espace à partir des règles du jeu social ; d’autres privilégient l’importance des dimensions physiques, architecturales et urbanistiques, choix qui a mis l’accent sur les formes matérielles pour expliquer les pratiques. Une telle liaison n’était guère problématique pour de nombreux auteurs pour comprendre les sociétés et les mouvements qui les traversent. A partir des années 1970, en France, le lien formes – sociétés a été approfondi à partir de croisements disciplinaires entre anthropologie, sociologie, architecture et urbanisme. Les modes d’appropriation des espaces de vie ont posé avec force la question des rapports entre conception architecturale et usagers mobilisant la recherche architecturale et urbaine sur le rôle des concepteurs et experts qui projettent et matérialisent les aspirations des sociétés, des groupes et des habitants (Pinson, 1992 ; Conan, 1991). Pour développer les principes et les apports de cette sociologie de l’espace, nous présentons ses fondements théoriques à partir d’un choix personnel et limité d’auteurs ; puis, un regard sur trois expériences résidentielles majeures en France montre sa pertinence.

On a un peu souvent tendance à opposer pratiques et théories sociales. La première seule ayant pouvoir d’influer sur la réalité, la seconde étant tout juste bonne à nourrir les colloques et autres rencontres universitaires. N’est-ce pas plutôt l’idéologie qu’on assimile à la réflexion théorique, refusant dès lors toute approche empirique, toute théorie incorporée. C’est notamment pour cette raison qu’en France on assimile si souvent a priori l’intervention communautaire, en santé, en psychiatrie, en travail social, en urbanisme au «communautarisme». Il me semble pourtant que cette peur de l’intervention communautaire, dans une société qui voit au contraire le ressurgissement des valeurs communautaires (sous forme d’un néotribalisme) risque de voir se développer, sous forme perverse, un renfermement communautariste. C’est pour cela qu’il paraît à la fois plus réaliste et plus pertinent de s’intéresser à nouveau aux techniques d’intervention communautaire.

<p>Um dos dilemas recorrentes na sociologia da arte tem sido como balancear abordagens <em>internalistas</em> e <em>externalistas</em> dos fenômenos estéticos (isto é, explicações estéticas e sociais); ou o que este artigo caracteriza como a necessidade de sair de um modelo “<em>ou arte ou sociedade”</em> para um modelo de lógica “<em>tanto arte quanto sociedade</em>”. Nos últimos anos, os dilemas conceituais foram intensificados por uma tendência de o capitalismo se tornar um fenômeno mais explicitamente cultural. Ao mesmo tempo, os conhecimentos sobre arte e estética saíram da esfera da <em>grandiosidade</em> e da alta cultura para o mundo prosaico do dia a dia. Este artigo propõe que a solução para os dilemas em curso da sociologia da arte, e para o atual desafio das bases da arte e do conhecimento estético é adotar um paradigma textural, ao invés de um modo de pensar textual. O paradigma textural foi desenvolvido primeiramente no pensamento sobre lugar e é adequado para pensar os problemas da sociologia da arquitetura e do urbanismo – incluindo o problema de como o tecido urbano, às vezes, começa a desemaranhar; ou porque alguns estilos arquitetônicos improváveis voltam à moda (como, por exemplo, o brutalismo pós-guerra).</p><p>BOTH-AND: ON THE NEED FOR A ‘TEXTURAL’ SOCIOLOGYOFART</p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>One of the recurring dilemmas in the sociology of art has been how to balance ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ accounts of an esthetic phenomena (i. e., a esthetic and social explanations); or, what this paper terms the necessity of moving from an either-or model of art and society to adopting a both - and logic. In the last few years, the conceptual dilemmas have been further heightened by developments such as capitalism becoming more explicitly cultural; and knowledges about art and aesthetics moving from there almof the ‘grand’ and the high cultural to the more prosaic and the every day. This paper proposes that a solution to the ongoing dilemmas of the sociology of art, and the current challenge of the proliferation of arts/aesthetics-knowledge bases, is to adopt a textural rather than textural mode of thinking. The textural paradigm was first developed in thinking about place and is well-suited to thinking through problems in the sociology of architecture and urbanism – including the problem of how the urban fabric, at times, starts to unravel; or why some unlikely architectural stillest age comebacks (e. g., post-war brutalism).</p><p>Keywords: textures; sociology of art; Ingold; Lefebvre; architecture and urbanism.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>SUR LA NECESSITE D'UNESOCIOLOGIE DE LA TEXTURE DE L'ART</p><p class="Standard"><strong>Resumé </strong></p><p class="Standard">L'un des dilemmes le plus récurrent dans la sociologie de l'art c'est de savoir comment équilibrer les approches internalistes et externalistes des phénomènes esthétiques (c'est-à-dire des explications esthétiques et sociales); ou ce que cet article définit comme la nécessité de sortir d'un modèle «d'un art ou d'une société» pour un modèle logique «à la fois l'art et société». Au cours des dernières années, les dilemmes conceptuels ont été aggravés par la tendance du capitalisme à devenir un phénomène plus explicitement culturel; au même temps, la connaissance de l'art et de l'esthétique est passée de la sphère de la grandeur et de la haute culture au monde prosaïque de la vie quotidienne. Cet article propose que la solution aux dilemmes actuels de la sociologie de l'art et au défi actuel des fondements de la connaissance de l'art et de l'esthétique consiste à adopter un paradigme textural plutôt qu'un mode de pensée textuel. Le paradigme de la texture a été développé pour la première fois en pensant sur le lieu et convient aux problèmes sociologiques de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme, y compris comment, le tissu urbain commence parfois à se démêler; ou comme certains styles architecturaux improbables sont revenus à la mode (comme le brutalisme d'après-guerre).</p><p class="Standard"><strong> </strong><strong>Les mots-clés:</strong> textures; sociologie de l'art; Ingold; Lefebvre; architecture et urbanisme.</p><div><div><div><p> </p></div></div></div>

Le suicide dans les sociétés traditionnelles africaines est depuis longtemps sujet d’interrogations multiples et de fantasmes divers. Existe-t-il ? Prend-il une forme particulière ? Les peuples traditionnels d’Afrique possèdent-ils des mécanismes de protection ? Si oui, quels sont-ils ?Sur le plan épidémiologique, la rareté des études nous force à rester dans des conjectures. Mais les six articles scientifiques que nous présenterons ([1,2]…) convergent vers des caractéristiques statistiques « classiques » du suicide – avec toutefois un très jeune âge moyen retrouvé, probablement plus reflet de la pyramide des âges africaine que d’une caractéristique en soi du « suicide à l’africaine ».Dans un second temps, nous nous pencherons sur les caractéristiques traditionnelles sociales et anthropologiques des sociétés traditionnelles africaines qui pourraient faire penser à une appréhension différente de cet acte autodestructeur. Nous aborderons le rôle des religions monothéistes et animistes, la place du suicide dans l’histoire traditionnelle et les légendes, et le récit d’un reporter occidental au long cours en Afrique [3], pour nous rendre compte que les sociétés traditionnelles ne possèdent probablement pas plus d’amulette de protection contre le suicide que les sociétés occidentales. Le tabou est, lui, certainement plus fort.In fine, l’évolution de la société africaine vers une société urbanisée au tissu social de plus en plus globalisé et individualiste rendra la question de la teinte culturelle du suicide en Afrique sub-saharienne de plus en plus obsolète…

Pour marquer le passage des 30 ans de la revue, ce numéro spécial contribue à la mise en débat des grands défis auxquels l’élevage est confronté aujourd’hui et sans doute demain, et à la recherche de solutions pour son avenir, dans une agriculture qui devra produire, améliorer l’état de l’environnement aujourd’hui largement dégradé, et répondre aux attentes d’une société plus urbanisée et plus éloignée de la réalité agricole et biologique.

RÉSUMÉ La ville d’aujourd’hui est celle d’une société urbanisée, qui est à la conjonction des phénomènes de la modernité et de l’industrialisation et où la mobilité et la diversité valorisent les choix de l’individu. Cette situation transforme le rapport au religieux dans les domaines de la culture, des structures d’appartenance et surtout du projet individuel : on en voit plusieurs illustrations à partir du cas du Québec actuel. L’exercice de la mission du christianisme doit dès lors s’ajuster à ces déplacements et l’Église retrouver la dynamique de cet espace public qu’est l’unité de vie collective de la ville.

Plus de quatre personnes sur dix (41 %) des habitant·es de la Polynésie française vivent en ménage complexe, en cohabitation intergénérationnelle pour la plupart et entre pairs pour une minorité. Ces ménages hébergent des jeunes adultes et des personnes à la situation économique plus fragile en raison de leur niveau d’éducation (en moyenne plus faible) et de leur situation professionnelle (risque de chômage plus élevé). L’équipement de ces ménages complexes est similaire à celui des ménages composés de famille nucléaire. Ce mode de résidence en famille élargie persiste dans une société fortement urbanisée, où elle contribue à protéger de la précarité économique.

Sur la base de l’article d’A. Melucci, « Mouvements sociaux, mouvements postpolitiques », trois sociologues et un urbaniste entrent en débat. Les thèmes abordés concernent la notion d’« espaces de rassemblement » comme expression des nouveaux mouvements sociaux qui caractériseraient les sociétés capitalistes avancées, la question même de savoir si ces mouvements sont vraiment « nouveaux », la symbolique culturelle que véhiculent ces mouvements, le renversement de l’analyse que met de l’avant Melucci en insistant sur la nécessité de partir de l’action collective, des conflits et de leurs enjeux plutôt que des acteurs et de leurs caractéristiques structurelles.

Our research comes to shed light on Iraqi literature as literature that arose in special circumstances alongside foreign literature. Using comparative research methods, we chose to highlight two distinguished writers, who have their mark in the world of literature. The first is the Iraqi writer Maysaloun Hadi, who is considered an icon of Iraqi feminist literature, and the second is the French writer Le Clézieu, who won the Nobel in 2008. We will see through the research how the two authors expressed their views of modernity and urbanism. And how each of them separately portrayed the psychological and moral projections that formed the essence of man today. Résumé Notre recherche abord un des points inconnus au monde entier, celui de la littérature irakienne. En utilisant les procédés de la littérature comparée, nous abordons les œuvres de deux écrivains brillants: Maysloon Hadi et J. M. G. Le Glézio. Les deux ont leur propre regard vis-à-vis la modernité et l'acte humain. De fait, Maysaloon Hadi représente l'icône de la littérature féminine irakienne. Quant au deuxième écrivain, c'est Le Glézio, l'écrivain qui remporte le noble en 2008. Nous allons découvrir ci-dessus les idées ainsi que les visions que les deux portent envers leur société.

Le cheval, moyen principal de déplacement des hommes sur terre jusqu'au XIXe siècle, a été supplanté par l'automobile. Grâce au mouvement olympique, l'équitation a survécu dans les stades. Les sociétés urbanisées recherchent maintenant la pratique de l'équitation dans les campagnes. Aquitaine et Midi-Pyrénées, deux régions du Sud- Ouest, présentent deux profils de pratiques équestres. L'Aquitaine maintient une équitation classique et Midi-Pyrénées anticipe une équitation alternative. Cette dichotomie traduit des comportements sociaux différents alors qu'une interactivité est nécessaire pour les aménagements du territoire.

Rousseau&rsquo;s description of the pure state of nature and the natural man in his <em>Discours<br />sur l&rsquo;Origine et les Fondements de l&rsquo;In&eacute;galit&eacute; parmi les Hommes</em> (1755) has been a controversial topic in Rousseau studies. Natural man has no stable human relationships, language or developed reason, and does not recognise other humans as akin to him. How is it possible to reconcile Rousseau&rsquo;s views on the pure state of nature with his speculative history of humanity? How could mankind even begin to develop? Why did Rousseau create such a seemingly disharmonious and disagreeable construct? This article introduces a new strategy of interpretation. Instead of proposing a single interpretation of the pure state of nature, it proposes to view Rousseau&rsquo;s understanding of human nature as a literary device which allowed him to address many questions at once. His insistence on the solitude and ignorance of natural human beings is examined as a part of his critique of other philosophers. This, however, does not explain another tension within the depiction of the pure state of nature. Sometimes natural human beings are ignorant, incapable of learning or surpassing their instincts, but, at other times, they seem very smart and resourceful. This article shows that the latter sections of his work imply a critique of contemporary societies. In these sections, Rousseau introduces his analysis of urban life.

La fécondité de la population canadienne-française est célèbre. Parmi les populations connues, « celle qui a eu la fécondité la plus élevée paraît être celle de la province de Québec vers 1850 » . Depuis cette époque le Québec s'est urbanisé et industrialisé. Le comportement des familles en matière de fécondité a beaucoup changé. Le nombre moyen d'enfants par famille complète, de 8.39 qu'il était au début du XVIIIe siècle, passe en 1850 à 7.96 et doit se situer actuellement aux environs de 2.5. Il ressort de cette constatation que la population canadienne-française cesse de se singulariser et adopte le comportement démographique des sociétés modernes. Si nous connaissons les points de départ et d'arrivée de ce mouvement, par contre nous ne savons pas autre chose des diverses étapes de cette évolution. Quand a-t-elle commencé? Où a-t-elle pris naissance? Seules des recherches historiques permettront de répondre à cette question. Sans avoir la prétention de résoudre ces problèmes, l'étude entreprise ici se situe dans cette perspective.

Résumé: Les villes haïtiennes s’accroissent dans l’irrespect des normes urbanistiques globalement depuis les années 1980 et, parallèlement, le climat d’Haïti se réchauffe progressivement et de façon non négligeable en perturbant la régularité de la température, des saisons et du niveau de la mer. Dans le but de mettre en rapport les changements climatiques et la croissance urbaine de Port-au-Prince, tout en mettant l’accent sur leurs impacts sur les ressources en eau, nous avons réalisé des observations de terrain, des entretiens avec des chercheurs (hydrologues), des analyses des documents écrits et iconographiques (cartes, images satellites). En effet, les résultats montrent que l’eau fait face à des problèmes à différents niveaux tant sur le plan quantitatif que sur le plan qualitatif. Le débit de nombreuses sources diminue considérablement et l’eau est contaminée tant au niveau du système d’adduction d’eau potable, des nappes phréatiques, des cours d’eau qu’au niveau de la mer. Outre la pollution des eaux souterraines, marines et de surface qui compromet la santé et la biodiversité marine, la population fait face aussi au risque d’inondation et de houle causant des dégâts de plus en plus importants et inquiétants. Dans cette situation de crise notamment urbaine et climatique qui menace les ressources hydriques sans lesquelles aucune société humaine ne peut exister, les acteurs concernés doivent envisager des stratégies efficacement adaptées à ces problèmes afin d’envisager la croissance de la ville de Port-au-Prince et celles d’Haïti en général face aux changements climatiques, sur une base de développement durable et à travers une approche holistique. Abstract: Haitian cities have been growing without regard for global urban planning standards since the 1980s. Simultaneously, Haiti’s climate is gradually and significantly warming, as measured through disruptions of long-observed patterns of temperature, seasons, and sea levels. Recognizing that climate change and urban growth in Port-au-Prince both impact water resources as separate but interlinked forces, we carried out field observations, interviews with researchers (specifically hydrologists), and analyses of written documents as well as maps, satellite images, etc., to understand how these phenomena are linked and mutually exacerbating. Effectively, study results indicate a range of problems with water quantity and quality: the flow of numerous crucial water sources has considerably diminished, and water is widely contaminated, from drinking water to groundwater to rivers, watersheds, and the ocean. Besides the pollution of marine, ground, and surface water, which impacts biodiversity, human health, and marine health, the Haitian population also faces increasingly high risks of flooding and the stresses of related damage. This situation of urban and climate crisis threatens the water resources necessary for human existence. In order to find strategies that are effectively adapted to these problems, we propose a holistic approach that considers the growth of the Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities in connection with climate change, on a basis of sustainable development.

Résumé L’article décrit, en la replaçant dans son contexte, l’évolution moderne du leadership et de la structure d’autorité dans l’alévisme turc. Au siècle dernier, à la faveur des processus d’urbanisation et de sécularisation, l’alévisme turc a subi de profondes transformations. Formant traditionnellement une communauté socioreligieuse endogame en marge de la société turque du point de vue géographique, politique et religieux, les alévis participent depuis vingt ans, comme jamais auparavant, aux débats publics en Turquie, orchestrant ainsi un renouveau de l’alévisme et forçant l’État et la population à reconnaître leur différence par rapport à l’islam sunnite dominant. Cependant, l’adaptation à des milieux urbains, marquée par un processus interne de sécularisation, a fait de la redéfinition de l’alévisme une tâche passablement difficile. De plus, en entrant dans l’arène publique, les alévis doivent rendre leur demande de reconnaissance conforme au discours socioreligieux reconnu qui est implicitement sunnite. Compte tenu de ce contexte, l’article se concentre sur les débats internes des alévis au sujet de la transformation de l’institution au coeur de l’alévisme traditionnel, le dedelik, c’est-à-dire la fonction de leader fondée sur la descendance et le charisme. L’auteur montre comment le dedelik, qui traditionnellement sous-entendait un leadership dans les domaines à la fois socioreligieux et représentatif, est en voie d’être divisé pour s’adapter à un milieu institutionnellement sécularisé où il devient impossible de fusionner la direction des rituels et de la communauté. Par conséquent, le dedelik confie ses fonctions non rituelles à une nouvelle élite alévie séculière qui organise et représente le mouvement aléviste, aujourd’hui largement urbanisé et transnational. En comparant les débats internes des alévis sur la nécessité d’avoir un « dedelik moderne » et sur la portée de ce changement, débats qui se déroulent en Turquie et dans la diaspora allemande, l’article veut contribuer à une meilleure compréhension non seulement de la redéfinition des structures d’autorité des alévis, mais aussi de la façon dont les discours légaux et publics sur la religion influent sur le déroulement de cette redéfinition.

La situation de la Guyane-Française, département français d’Amérique, est un exemple fort de l’exigence de prendre en compte les paramètres transculturels pour comprendre et agir sur la prévention du suicide. On distingue, dans cette région, la population vivant sur le littoral ayant accès aux principales ressources et la population vivant dans les communes de l’intérieur. En effet, les peuples de la Guyane sont irrégulièrement répartis sur 84 000 km2. Certains villages sont éloignés des structures de soins et de santé parfois de plusieurs jours de pirogues. Les dernières études de l’OMS démontrent que les risques du suicide croissent avec l’éloignement des centres urbanisés. La population résidant sur les deux fleuves de la Guyane et à l’Intérieur (espace forestier amazonien) présente une vulnérabilité au suicide supérieure à tous les autres segments de la société guyanaise et française. Ces suicides sont essentiellement le fait de jeunes. La question du suicide chez les populations autochtones de la Guyane révèle un mal être profond qui dépasse la simple conception médicopsychologique du risque de passage à l’acte. Les causes de ce phénomène sont pluridimensionnelles et regroupent entre autres des facteurs psychologiques, sociaux, anthropologiques, écologiques et politiques. Si les passages à l’acte sont dans la majorité des cas liés à une consommation excessive d’alcool et déclenchés par des motifs au premier abord anodins (différends familiaux, obstacle à l’achat de produits de consommation), ils résultent plutôt de la manifestation extrême d’un mal-être bien plus profond. Pertes de repères liés à la modification brutale des modes de vie, déstructuration de la cellule familiale, inactivité en particulier chez les jeunes, échecs scolaires, absence de perspectives d’avenir et isolement sont des motifs qui peuvent expliquer le comportement suicidaire. Un partenaire majeur dans cette réflexion est le CCPAB (Conseil consultatif des populations amérindiennes et Bushininge de Guyane), instance auprès de la future collectivité unique, siégeant à la Préfecture, spécifique aux DOM, qui fait du suicide des autochtones un axe prioritaire de lutte. C’est une démarche intégrative de ces dimensions pour une évaluation globale avec des outils spécifiques que nous construisons au sein de l’équipe Inserm (Ipsom) à laquelle est adossée la CeRMEPI (cellule régionale pour le mieux être des populations de l’intérieur) créée par le préfet. Cette prise en charge holistique permettra d’aider le travail plus spécifiquement médical de prévention et de soins qui est actuellement effectué par les services de psychiatrie de Guyane grâce aux équipes mobiles et à la CUMP (cellule d’urgence médicopsychologique).

Las ciudades no son sólo uno más de los lugares donde pueden presentarse riesgos. La urbanización modifica las condiciones originales de un sitio, en ocasiones incrementando su peligrosidad, e incluso generando nuevos peligros en su apropiación del territorio. En una búsqueda por integrar la problemática de los riesgos y desastres a la planeación urbana y territorial, las sociedades se dotan de leyes, normas y reglamentos, que expresan la adopción de un enfoque de política en particular. En este texto se revisan los marcos reglamentarios en México y en Francia en materia de prevención de riesgos y desastres, con un énfasis en sus lazos con la planeación urbana. En el primero se ha privilegiado la orientación hacia la protección civil, mientras que en el segundo se han condicionado las decisiones de urbanismo a la observación de las disposiciones preventivas. Los enfoques de política son distintos en cada caso y la revisión de ambas experiencias permite prefigurar los elementos que un sistema ideal de gestión de riesgos urbanos podría contener.Abstract: Cities are not the only place where risks exists. The urbanization modifies the original conditions of a site, some times increasing the dangers or even creating new ones during its appropriation of territory. In search for integrating the problematics of risks and disasters to the urban planning, societies have developed laws, procedures and regulations, which are the expression of the prevailing policy approach. This article reviews the regulatory frames in Mexico and France regarding risks and disasters prevention, with an emphasis on its links with urban planning. In the first case, a civil protection approach has been adopted, while in the second one, the decisions on urban planning are submited to the existant preventive regulations. Policy approaches are different in each case and the review of both experiences let the reader see the elements that an ideal system of urban risks management should include.Résumé : La ville est bien plus que le lieu où les risques surviennent : l’urbanisation modifie les éléments géographiques du site, parfois en augmentant sa dangerosité et même en créant des nouveaux dangers au cours de son appropriation du territoire. À la recherche d’une intégration de la problématique des risques et catastrophes à la planification du territoire, les sociétés se sont dotées de lois, normes et procédures où s’exprime l’orientation principale de la politique adoptée. L’article fait une lecture des cadres réglementaires au Mexique et en France concernant la prévention des risques et catastrophes, en soulignant ses liens avec l’urbanisme. Dans le premier cas, une approche de protection civile est privilégiée, alors que dans le deuxième les décisions en matière d’urbanisme sont conditionnées au respect des dispositions préventives. Les approches de politique sont différentes dans les deux cas et la relecture des expériences permet de préfigurer les éléments devant être inclus dans un système idéal de gestion de risques urbains.

L'étude qui suit découle d'une recherche entreprise en 1965 sur les chambres de commerce. Elle fait suite à l'intérêt que suscita chez l'auteur la communication de Jean-Charles Falardeau sur L'origine et L'ascension des hommes d'affaires dans la société canadienne-française au Ve Colloque de l'Association internationale des sociologues de langue française tenu, au lac Beauport, en 1964. Analysant l'accès des hommes d'affaires au statut de catégorie dirigeante, Jean-Charles Falardeau soulignait l'importance des chambres de commerce en tant que laboratoires de leurs attitudes et de leurs idéologies et en tant que cadres professionnels d'organisation. Bien que l'auteur partage l'opinion exprimée par Jean-Charles Falardeau quant à l'intérêt que présenterait une histoire de ce mouvement dans le Québec, cet exposé n'a rien d'un essai historique. Son propos est tout autre; on sait que traditionnellement les chambres se sont donné comme objectif de «favoriser et d'améliorer le commerce et le bien-être économique, civique et social» de leur district. À un moment où le gouvernement cherche à mettre sur pied des conseils économiques régionaux et où se poursuivent des expériences comme celle du B. A. E. Q., il n'est certes pas sans intérêt d'étudier les réactions des chambres de commerce. Celles-ci sont généralement reconnues comme des organismes représentant les hommes d'affaires. Par ailleurs, il est vrai que, dans plusieurs régions, elles ont présidé à la formation de conseils économiques. Il y a néanmoins lieu de se demander si l'hypothèse de Jean-Charles Falardeau est valable pour l'ensemble des chambres de commerce; nous serions portés, quant à nous, à faire l'hypothèse que certaines chambres, épousant les tensions socio-économiques du milieu, s'apparentent à des coopératives de développement plus qu'à des groupes de pression. Au reste, Jean-Charles Falardeau n'écarte pas cette possibilité. Il reconnaît, à la suite de Fernand Ouellet, que la Chambre de Québec, au gré d'une participation accrue des francophones québécois, en vint à se préoccuper essentiellement d'intérêts proprement locaux et régionaux. En effet, devant contrer les difficultés que posait l'évolution économique du milieu, elle entreprit de grossir ses effectifs en élargissant ses critères d'admission. D'organisme de défense et de promotion économique, elle se transforma de la sorte en organisme de promotion communautaire. Nos recherches nous ont conduits à poser le problème de la cohérence dans la diversité au sein d'une organisation regroupant environ 270 chambres de commerce constituant 32 régionales. Toutefois, dans le cadre de cet exposé, nous nous appliquerons plutôt a faire ressortir une certaine correspondance entre la diversité de l'action des chambres et l'axe de développement rural-urbain. À cette fin, nous procéderons en trois étapes. Dans une première, appliquant au Québec un modèle regroupant les facteurs de différenciation de l'action, nous tenterons de formuler quelques hypothèses relatives à l'interrelation entre le niveau de développement de divers milieux et le type d'action caractéristique des chambres dans ces milieux. L'élaboration d'une double typologie et les opinions recueillies auprès de militants permettront de contrôler la validité de ces hypothèses. Dans une seconde étape, nous limitant à quelques variables, nous montrerons en quoi se différencient les chambres des milieux hautement urbanisés et celles des autres milieux. Enfin, une troisième étape permettra de formuler quelques hypothèses quant aux problèmes que pose la participation des organismes appartenant à une même Fédération mais œuvrant dans des milieux dont le niveau d'urbanisation est très inégal.

Il faut remonter loin dans les archives de l’INRA, et plus précisément au numéro spécial du « Bulletin du CRZV de Theix » datant de l’année 1974 pour trouver un ouvrage entièrement dédié aux « vaches allaitantes »1. Quarante-trois ans plus tard, c’est avec plaisir que nous présentons ce nouveau dossier dans la revue INRA Productions Animales qui leur est entièrement consacré. Un tel regroupement d’articles sur cet animal et ce système d’élevage est donc assez rare et nous remercions chaleureusement les animateurs de la revue de l’avoir initié. Le numéro de 1974 constatait le développement soutenu des troupeaux allaitants en France qui accompagnait la tendance à la spécialisation des systèmes de production tant vers le lait que vers la viande. Les travaux de recherches engagés mettaient en avant les spécificités de ce système peu étudié jusque-là : la productivité de la femelle, biologiquement limitée à un veau par an, impose une stratégie générale de réduction des charges et des coûts de production et par là une maximisation de l’utilisation de l’herbe dans le système fourrager. Ils se démarquaient alors des travaux réalisés sur les vaches laitières. Et pour produire efficacement de la viande, disposer d’animaux tardifs de grands formats est un atout important par la capacité qu’ils ont à déposer efficacement de la masse musculaire. Les objectifs de sélection proposés alors ont ciblé le potentiel de croissance des veaux tout en améliorant les facilités de vêlage des vaches et le format des carcasses des vaches de réforme. Ces connaissances, développées par des chercheurs de renommée2, ont porté leurs fruits et accompagné la transformation constante du cheptel Français : le nombre de vaches allaitantes a presque été multiplié par deux (4,2 millions actuellement en France). Il est supérieur à celui des vaches laitières depuis l’année 2005 et la production de viande qui en est issue avoisine désormais 65% de la production nationale. Les vaches ont grandi et grossi (+ 5kg /an en moyenne), mais les troupeaux également. La productivité par travailleur a plus que doublé (Veysset et al 20153) sans que la productivité numérique des vaches n’en pâtisse trop. Mais cette réussite quantitative flagrante marque le pas, et ne suffit plus pour aborder sereinement l’avenir de la production. Au niveau des exploitations de nombreux signaux défavorables se sont allumés. Les revenus des éleveurs stagnent et restent parmi les plus bas des professions agricoles. L’image de l’élevage se dégrade dans notre société urbanisée. Les bovins en général sont aussi interrogés sur leur bilan environnemental qui est sujet à controverses, et désormais c’est la finalité première de production de viande de ces troupeaux allaitants qui est en débat. Ces constats sont maintenant bien connus, et rappelés brièvement dans les introductions des articles de M. Lherm et al, et d’A. Cerles et al. Ils provoquent des inquiétudes grandissantes à tous les niveaux de la filière. Que peuvent apporter aux débats en cours les recherches récentes ciblées vers les vaches allaitantes ? C’estce qui a motivé la réalisation de ce dossier qui vise à rassembler et synthétiser les connaissances récentes acquises, d’une part, à l’échelle de l’animal, et, d’autre part à celle du système de production.Pour introduire ce dossier, l’article de M. Lherm et al met en perspective les évolutions des « élevages allaitants » dans les quatre principaux pays européens producteurs : France, Royaume-Uni, Irlande et Espagne. L’analyse des trajectoires technico-économiques des élevages allaitants au cours des dernières décennies dans ces quatre pays montre que les choix d’investissements, de mécanisation, et d’agrandissement des structures n’ont pas été partout semblables. Ensuite, ce dossier fait le point des avancées dans les disciplines et dans les onnaissances zootechniques de base pour la conduite des élevages bovins allaitants : l’amélioration génétique, la physiologie de lareproduction, les facteurs de variation de la production de lait des mères, la quantification de leurs besoins nutritionnels et de leur efficience alimentaire. L’article de L. Griffon et al discute de ce que l’on peut attendre des nouveaux outils génétique comme la génomique, et comment ils vont s’intégrer dans les nouveaux schémas d’amélioration. Les nouvelles connaissances physiologiques pour la maîtrise de la reproduction, pour la prévision de la courbe de lactation et pour la maîtrise de l’alimentation des vaches allaitantes sont détaillées successivement dans les articles de B. Grimard et al, de B. Sepchat et al et d’A. De La Torre et J. Agabriel. Ils fournissent de nouveaux indicateurs sur les aptitudes des animaux dont l’élevage du futur a besoin : robustesse, autonomie, efficience. Autant de propositions pour de nouvelles mesures de routine qui participeront à la détermination des nouveaux phénotypes. L’article de M. Doreau et al éclaire le débat sur l’empreinte environnementale de l’élevage allaitant en synthétisant les connaissances actuelles permettant d’établir le bilan de ses impacts positifs et négatifs. Les controverses sur le besoin en eau, les rejets de gaz à effet de serre ou d’azote pour produire un kg de boeuf par exemple, sont encore très fortes et nécessitent des apports scientifiques de fond pour les apaiser. Même s’il est acquis qu’élevage allaitant et prairie sont liés, et que ce lien conforterait une image favorable auprès des citoyens comme auprès des consommateurs, les interrogations sociétales demandent des réponses. Les travaux en cours permettent de les affiner. Enfin, l’article d’A. Cerles et al qui clôt ce dossier pose les fondements des futurs possibles pour l’élevage bovin allaitant à partir d’un travail de prospective pour les filières viandes réalisé sur le territoire du Massif central qui analyse les conséquences de cinq scénarios contrastés prenant en compte de puissants déterminants comme le changement climatique, l’évolution de la consommation de viande, les politiques agricoles et environnementales4. La bonne utilisation des surfaces herbagères, la maîtrise complète de la qualité des viandes sont de points incontournables à travailler dans les années à venir, et les acteurs devront faire émerger ensemble les opportunités de projets qui les aideront à avancer. Nous sommes persuadés que ces divers sujets par la manière exhaustive et synthétique dont ils ont été traités dans ce dossier, aideront les lecteurs dans leurs recherches personnelles et à se forger leur propre expertise. Nous remercions encore tous les auteurs, les relecteurs et le secrétariat de la revue pour leurs investissements qui ont permis de mener ce travail à son terme. J. Agabriel, R. BaumontInra, UMR Herbivores------------1 L’exploitation des troupeaux de vaches allaitantes. 6ème journées du Grenier de Theix. Supplément du Bulletin Technique du CRZV Theix. Numéro spécial 1974 : 398pp.2 On peut ainsi citer Claude Béranger, Michel Petit, Gilbert Liénard, François Ménissier et toutes leurs équipes d’alors.3 Veysset P., Lherm M., Roulenc M., Troquier C., Bebin D., 2015. Productivity and technical efficiency of suckler beef production systems: trends for the period 1990 to 2012. Animal 9, 2050-2059.4 Cerles A., Poux X., Lherm M., Agabriel J., 2016. Étude prospective des filières viandes de ruminants du Massif central, horizon 2050. INRA Centre Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. http://www.ara.inra.fr/Le-centre-Les-recherches/projets-et-actualites/ProspectiveViande

Abstract. The plains of northwest South Asia receive rainfall during both the Indian summer (June–September) and winter (December–March) monsoon. Researchers have long attempted to deconstruct the influence of these precipitation regimes in paleoclimate records, in order to better understand regional climatic drivers and their potential impact on human populations. The mid–late Holocene transition between 5.3 and 3.3 ka is of particular interest in this region because it spans the period of the Indus Civilization from its early development, through its urbanization, and onto eventual transformation into a rural society. An oxygen isotope record of the surface-dwelling planktonic foraminifer Globigerinoides ruber from the northeast Arabian Sea provided evidence for an abrupt decrease in rainfall and reduction in Indus River discharge at 4.2 ka, which the authors linked to the decline in the urban phase of the Indus Civilization (Staubwasser et al., 2003). Given the importance of this study, we used the same core (63KA) to measure the oxygen isotope profiles of two other foraminifer species at decadal resolution over the interval from 5.4 to 3.0 ka and to replicate a larger size fraction of G. ruber than measured previously. By selecting both thermocline-dwelling (Neogloboquadrina dutertrei) and shallow-dwelling (Globigerinoides sacculifer) species, we provide enhanced detail of the climatic changes that occurred over this crucial time interval. We found evidence for a period of increased surface water mixing, which we suggest was related to a strengthened winter monsoon with a peak intensity over 200 years from 4.5 to 4.3 ka. The time of greatest change occurred at 4.1 ka when both the summer and winter monsoon weakened, resulting in a reduction in rainfall in the Indus region. The earliest phase of the urban Mature Harappan period coincided with the period of inferred stronger winter monsoon between 4.5 and 4.3 ka, whereas the end of the urbanized phase occurred some time after the decrease in both the summer and winter monsoon strength by 4.1 ka. Our findings provide evidence that the initial growth of large Indus urban centers coincided with increased winter rainfall, whereas the contraction of urbanism and change in subsistence strategies followed a reduction in rainfall of both seasons.

L’easyjet-setting, ou tourisme urbain de court séjour, nocturne et festif, est une pratique sociale émergente qui marque un tournant dans les comportements touristiques. La recherche du plaisir « ici et maintenant » (par le clubbing) prime sur les autres aspects de la ville, la dimension borderline (le sublime effrayant) l’emporte sur l’intégration dans la société d’accueil et la configuration spatiotemporelle des city-breakers est poussée à l’extrême (par un comportement hypermoderne). Symbole de la troisième modernité, cette pratique modifie la relation au cadre urbain – devenu un espace métapolitain – et à l’urbanité – devenue hypertexte. La politique foncière et du micro-événementiel, en faveur de cette pratique, permettrait d’améliorer l’attractivité d’une ville et de profiter de ses retombées économiques, grâce à un urbanisme soft. Cependant, de véritables questionnements se posent sur l’impact urbain (en termes de démographie, de banalisation, etc.) et sur le rapport à l’Autre (en termes d’hospitalité urbaine, de cohabitation, etc.). Scientifiquement, interroger une pratique sociale a priori marginale, dans le contexte spécifique de Berlin, nous permet de critiquer les catégories d’analyse classiques (des champs du tourisme et de l’urbain) et de les enrichir. Repenser les unes à la lumière des autres nous permettrait de mieux comprendre la complexité des évolutions du tourisme urbain, donc, de la société actuelle.

Le film Les Illusions tranquilles relate l’histoire d’une élection municipale dans un village du Québec. L’élection oppose un notable traditionnel à un technocrate, maire sortant, futur perdant. Au-delà de cet événement, c’est toute une représentation de l’évolution sociale nationale qui est mise en scène : la « fin du règne des technocrates », le retour des forces de conservation. À partir du film, un débat s’amorce entre le réalisateur du film, un fonctionnaire, un politicologue, une sociologue et un urbaniste. Il permet la confrontation d’interprétations différentes non seulement de la conjoncture actuelle du pouvoir local mais aussi du sens de l’évolution des forces sociales et politiques depuis la Révolution tranquille. L’échec du maire technocrate n’est-elle que l’expression du rejet dont finit toujours par être victime tout groupe « étranger » qui s’installe dans une communauté locale ? Ou faut-il la rattacher à la crise économique qui aurait contribué à précipiter l’échec d’un projet de modernisation misant sur les politiques centralisatrices de l’État ? Mais cette opposition entre notables traditionnels symbolisant les forces de conservation et technocrates « étatistes » représentant les forces de changement, n’est-elle pas chose du passé ? Les planificateurs ont appris à composer davantage avec les forces du milieu et les élites traditionnelles sont sorties de leur immobilisme. Le milieu local et la société dans son ensemble ne sont donc pas dans cette impasse que présente le film. Par contre il faudra peut-être se faire à l’idée que le changement ne soit plus guidé par de grands projets de société.

Le film Les Illusions tranquilles relate l’histoire d’une élection municipale dans un village du Québec. L’élection oppose un notable traditionnel à un technocrate, maire sortant, futur perdant. Au-delà de cet événement, c’est toute une représentation de l’évolution sociale nationale qui est mise en scène : la « fin du règne des technocrates », le retour des forces de conservation. À partir du film, un débat s’amorce entre le réalisateur du film, un fonctionnaire, un politicologue, une sociologue et un urbaniste. Il permet la confrontation d’interprétations différentes non seulement de la conjoncture actuelle du pouvoir local mais aussi du sens de l’évolution des forces sociales et politiques depuis la Révolution tranquille. L’échec du maire technocrate n’est-elle que l’expression du rejet dont finit toujours par être victime tout groupe « étranger » qui s’installe dans une communauté locale ? Ou faut-il la rattacher à la crise économique qui aurait contribué à précipiter l’échec d’un projet de modernisation misant sur les politiques centralisatrices de l’État ? Mais cette opposition entre notables traditionnels symbolisant les forces de conservation et technocrates « étatistes » représentant les forces de changement, n’est-elle pas chose du passé ? Les planificateurs ont appris à composer davantage avec les forces du milieu et les élites traditionnelles sont sorties de leur immobilisme. Le milieu local et la société dans son ensemble ne sont donc pas dans cette impasse que présente le film. Par contre il faudra peut-être se faire à l’idée que le changement ne soit plus guidé par de grands projets de société.

Naskah ini mengakaji tentang pemikiran M. Arkoun yang mana sederet karya yang bersangkutan dapat di lihat diantaranya adalah; (1) The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic; (2) Thought, 2002, London; (3) The Aga Khan Award as a Process of Thinking, 1998; (4) L'immigration: défis et richesses, LXXIIe session des Semaines sociales de France, Paris and Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, 1997; (5) Spirituality in Architecture, 1995; (6) Rethinking Islam: common questions, uncommon answers, Boulder, Col. 1994; (7) Les cultures del Magreb, 1994; (8) L'Islam et les musulmans dans le monde, 1993; (9) La passione del conoscere Preta, Lorena, 1993; (10) Architectural Alternatives in Deteriorating Societies, 1992; (11) The Meaning of Cultural Conservation in Muslim Societies, 1990; (12) A Policy for Architectural Conservation, 1990; (13) Muslim Character: The Essential and the Changeable, 1989; (14) Current Islam Faces its Tradition, 1989 (15) L'islam, morale et politique, 1986; (16) Pour une critique de la raison islamique, 1984; (17) Islam, Urbanism, and Human Existence Today, 1983; (18) Building and Meaning in the Islamic World, 1983 )19) L'Islam, religion et société, 1982; (20) Lectures du Coran, 1982; (21) La Pensée arabe, 1975; (22) Essais sur la pensée islamique, 1973; (23) Les Musulmans. Consultation islamo-chrétienne entre Muhammad Arkoun [et al.] et Youakim Moubarac. Postface par M. Kamel Hussein et par Daniel Pézeril, 1971; (24) Contribution à l'étude de l'humanisme arabe au 4e/10e siècle, 1969/1970

Naskah ini mengakaji tentang pemikiran M. Arkoun yang mana sederet karya yang bersangkutan dapat di lihat diantaranya adalah; (1) The Unthought in Contemporary Islamic; (2) Thought, 2002, London; (3) The Aga Khan Award as a Process of Thinking, 1998; (4) L'immigration: défis et richesses, LXXIIe session des Semaines sociales de France, Paris and Issy-les-Moulineaux, France, 1997; (5) Spirituality in Architecture, 1995; (6) Rethinking Islam: common questions, uncommon answers, Boulder, Col. 1994; (7) Les cultures del Magreb, 1994; (8) L'Islam et les musulmans dans le monde, 1993; (9) La passione del conoscere Preta, Lorena, 1993; (10) Architectural Alternatives in Deteriorating Societies, 1992; (11) The Meaning of Cultural Conservation in Muslim Societies, 1990; (12) A Policy for Architectural Conservation, 1990; (13) Muslim Character: The Essential and the Changeable, 1989; (14) Current Islam Faces its Tradition, 1989 (15) L'islam, morale et politique, 1986; (16) Pour une critique de la raison islamique, 1984; (17) Islam, Urbanism, and Human Existence Today, 1983; (18) Building and Meaning in the Islamic World, 1983 )19) L'Islam, religion et société, 1982; (20) Lectures du Coran, 1982; (21) La Pensée arabe, 1975; (22) Essais sur la pensée islamique, 1973; (23) Les Musulmans. Consultation islamo-chrétienne entre Muhammad Arkoun [et al.] et Youakim Moubarac. Postface par M. Kamel Hussein et par Daniel Pézeril, 1971; (24) Contribution à l'étude de l'humanisme arabe au 4e/10e siècle, 1969/1970

Prehistory and Protohistory ; Sarah C. Murray, The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy. Imports, Trade and Institutions 1300–700 BCE / Chrysanthi Gallou, Death in Mycenaean Laconia. A Silent Place /James C. Wright and Mary K. Dabney (with contributions by Phoebe Acheson, Susan F. Allen, Kathleen M. Forster, Paul Halstead, S.M.A. Hoffman, Anna Karabatsoli, Konstantina Kaza-Papageorgiou, Bartłomiej Lis, Rebecca Mersereau, Hans Mommsen, Jeremy B. Rutter, Tatiana Theodoropoulou, and Jonathan E. Tomlinson), The Mycenaean Settlement on Tsoungiza Hill (Nemea Valley Archaeological Project III) – Oliver Dickinson ; Gioulika-Olga Christakopoulou, To Die in Style! The Residential Lifestyle of Feasting and Dying in Iron Age Stamna, Greece – John Bintliff ; Archaic to Hellenistic ; Oliver Hülden, Das griechische Befestigungswesen der archaïschen Zeit. Entwicklungen – Formen – Funktionen – Hans Lohmann ; Peter van Alfen and Ute Wartenberg (eds) (with Wolfgang Fischer-Bossert, Haim Gitler, Koray Konuk, and Catharine C. Lorber), White Gold: Studies in Early Electrum Coinage – Keith Rutter ; Marta González González, Funerary Epigrams of Ancient Greece: Reflections on Literature, Society and Religion – Fabienne Marchand ; Robert S. Wagman, The Cave of the Nymphs at Pharsalus. Studies on a Thessalian Country Shrine – Maria Mili ; Natascha Sojc (ed.), Akragas. Current Issues in the Archaeology of a Sicilian Polis – Johannes Bergemann ; Roman to Late Roman ; Laura Pfuntner, Urbanism and Empire in Roman Sicily. – Michalis Karambinis ; Walter Scheidel, Escape from Rome. The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity – Bryan Ward-Perkins ; Rinse Willet, The Geography of Urbanism in Roman Asia Minor – Mark P.C. Jackson ; Medieval to Postmedieval ; Charalambos Bouras, Byzantine Athens, 10th-12th Centuries / Nickephoros I. Tsougarakis and Peter Lock (eds), A Companion to Latin Greece / Joanita Vroom (ed.), Medieval and Post-Medieval Ceramics in the Eastern Mediterranean - Fact and Fiction. / Joanita Vroom, Yona Waksman and Roos van Oosten (eds), Medieval Masterchef. Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on Eastern Cuisine and Western Foodways – John Bintliff ; Multiperiod ; María-Paz de Hoz, Juan Luis García Alonso and Luis Arturo Guichard Romero (eds), Greek paideia and local tradition in the Graeco-Roman east – Dorothea Stavrou ; John Ellis Jones and Ourania Kouka, Elis 1969. The Peneios Valley Rescue Excavation Project: British School at Athens Survey 1967 and Rescue Excavations at Kostoureika and Keramidia 1969 / Effie Photos-Jones and Alan J Hall, Eros, mercator and the cultural landscape of Melos in antiquity: The archaeology of the minerals industry of Melos – John Bintliff ; Bleda S. Düring and Claudia Glatz (eds), Kinetic Landscapes, the Cide Archaeological Project: Surveying the Turkish Western Black Sea Coast – James Crow ; J. Rasmus Brandt, Erika Hagelberg, Gro Bjørnstad and Sven Ahrens (eds), Life and Death in Asia Minor in Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Times: Studies in Archaeology and Bioarchaeology – Willem M. Jongman ; Caroline Arnould-Béhar and Véronique Vassal (eds), Art et archéologie du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain. Les circulations artistiques entre Orient et Occident Vol.1 / Caroline Arnould-Béhar and Véronique Vassal (eds), Art et archéologie du Proche-Orient hellénistique et romain. Les circulations artistiques entre Orient et Occident Vol. 2 – Andrew Erskine ; Historiography and Theory ; John Boardman, A Classical Archaeologist’s Life: The Story So Far. An Autobiography – Robin Osborne

With the emergence and expansion of post-manufacturing knowledge economies, formerly industrial inner cities in the West have become intensified staging grounds for a range of spatial claims. Among these are processes of residential gentrification, the cultural politics of heritage preservation, the struggles for community development, and the growth of creative industries, such as art, design, architecture, publishing and film, which I focus on here.1 Throughout the last two decades in the UK, inner cities and central city fringe districts have been subject to an assortment of strategies that have endeavored to revitalize them economically and socially. Prominent among these attempts has been the encouragement of new, and the incubation of existing, small-scale creative enterprises. Regeneration executives choose these enterprises for a range of reasons. Creative activities are associated with popular culture that disaffected, unemployed youth find appealing; they are able to occupy and rehabilitate underused existing building stock and to sensitively recycle historic buildings, thereby preserving urban scales; and, as a number of scholars have pointed out, they exhibit transaction-rich, network-intensive organization (Castells 1992; Lash and Urry 1994; Scott 2000). As a result, concerted efforts to design creative industry quarters have sprung up across the UK, including Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, and Birmingham. In London, a whole band of formerly industrial, inner-city districts from King's Cross, down through Clerkenwell, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Spitalfields, and along the wharves of the Thames's South Bank, are being or have been revitalized in part through the strategic deployment of creative industries. Certainly, how creative industries and economies develop varies. At King's Cross, nonprofit and commercial creative companies have emerged quietly in a context of protracted struggle over the future of the Railway Lands, which will be reshaped by the coming terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. At Spitalfields, high-profile conversions of Truman Brewery and the Spitalfields Market site into artisanal stalls, creative businesses, and leisure (café, restaurant, and sport) facilities are generating a new local creative economy, bringing in visitors and creating new customer bases for Spitalfields' Bangladeshi restaurant keepers and garment entrepreneurs.2 Whatever the conditions for growth, creative industries have been aided by the rhetoric of Cool Britannia and New Labour's cultural -- or more accurately --creative industrial policy. I would even put forth that, in the form of the creative quarter, the creative industries represent the urbanist logic of Cool Britannia, threatening to elaborate, following the other logics of BritArt and BritPop, a BritSpace. Now, according to some of Britain's foremost cultural critics, Cool Britannia was born sometime in 1996 in the Sunday Times, and died two years later, soon after a piece in the New Musical Express that showcased young musician discontent with New Labour creative industrial policy (Hewison 1996; McRobbie 1999, 4). Yet, before we close the casket, I want to suggest that Cool Britannia be understood as a symptom of a range of 'causes' that have been transforming the idioms of politics, governance, culture, citizenship, social organization; and, as the creative quarter evokes, the city. An itinerary of these causes would include: the expansion of a consumer-driven service/knowledge economy; the growth and globalization of communication and information technologies; the 'flexibilization' of regimes of production; the mutation of the function of the welfare state and corresponding meaning of citizenship; and, the dominance of intellectual property notions of culture. While these shifts are transforming societies around the world, in the UK, they became closely identified with New Labour and its attempts to institutionalize the rhetoric of the Third Way during the late 1990s (e.g., Blair 1998; Giddens 1998). In imagining itself as a force of change, New Labour capitalized on two events that gave birth to Cool Britannia: (1) the glamorization of British art and young British artists in the mid-1990s; and (2) the emergence of a discourse of 'rebranding' Britain, disseminating from reports from brand specialists Wolff Olins and think tank Demos (Bobby 1999).3 The first, producing the nBA (new British Art) and the yBAs (young British Artists) are media events with their own genealogies that have received copious critical attention (e.g., Ford 1996; McRobbie 1999; Roberts 1996, 1998; Stallabrass 1999; Suchin 1998). This glamorization involved the discovery of the artists by the mainstream media and a focus on artistic entrepreneurship in creating, shaping and responding to an enlarged market for cultural products. In the process, some of these artists effectively became brands, authoring, legitimating and licensing a certain kind of ironic, post-political art that was palatable to the international art market.4 The second cause stems from responses to anxiety over post-imperial Britain's future in a post-manufacturing, globalized, knowledge economy. For both the Demos thinkers and Wolff Olins consultants, these were centered on the need to re-imagine British national subjectivity as if it were a commercial brand. The discourse of branding is tangential to that of intellectual property, in which brands are value codings managed through networks of trademarks, patents, copyrights and royalties. Rosemary Coombe (1998) has written, albeit in a different political context, on the increasing dominance of notions of culture defined through intellectual property, and adjudicated by international trade experts. Indeed, New Labour creative industrial policies, as demonstrated in former Culture Secretary, Chris Smith's, essays that linked creativity, entrepreneurship and economic growth (Smith 1998) and initiatives under the Creative Industries Mapping Document (DCMS 2001) reveal how the relationship between the state and national culture is being renegotiated. Less meaningful is the state that served as sponsor or patron of cultural activities for its citizens. Rather, under New Labour, as Nikolas Rose argues (1999), and critics of New Labour cultural policy interrogate (Greenhalgh 1998; Littler 2000), the state is an enabler, partnering with entrepreneurs, small-scale firms, and multinational enterprises to promote the traffic in cultural property. How such a shift affects the production of urban space, and the future meanings attached to the British city remain to be explored. In the context of the American city, M. Christine Boyer (1995), elaborates how an iterative regime of architectural styles and planning ethics functions as a late capitalist cultural logic of urbanism that discards elements, often in decaying and abandoned sections, that cannot be easily incorporated. Borrowing on Kevin Lynch's (1960) notion of the imageable city, she writes: physically, these spaces are linked imaginatively to each other, to other cities, and to a common history of cultural interpretations (82). Within this scenario, the elements of the creative quarter copy, print, art supply and film developing stores, hip cafes and restaurants, galleries, studios, loft conversions and street furniture are gradually linked together to form a recognizable and potentially iterative matrix, overlaid on the disused former industrial district. Moreover, as a prominent, coordinated technique in the revitalization strategies of British cities, and given the aftermath of Cool Britannia, the creative quarter must be seen also as a symptom of a symptom. For, if Cool Britannia is itself produced through the application of branding discourse to the level of national subjectivity, and to the glamorization of the artist, then it is only a short step to contemplate the urbanist logic of the creative quarter as BritSpaceâ„¢. Notes 1. A creative industry is one that has its origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which [has] a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. I am following the definition of creative industries used by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport. It was first used in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, released in November 1998 and was maintained in the second, more extensive mapping exercise in February 2001. The list of activities designated as creative are: advertising, architecture, art and antiques, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and computer services, television and radio. 2. I discuss the emergence of creative enterprises at King's Cross and Spitalfields at length in my doctoral dissertation (Deckha 2000). 3. As Bobby (1999) reports, the Wolff Olins consultants commented that looking at business attitudes towards national identity and UK industry found that 72% of the world's leading companies believe a national image is important when making purchase decisions. In light of this, and worryingly for British business, only 36% of our respondents felt that a 'made in the UK' label would influence their decision positively. 4. Lash and Urry describe this process of branding in the creative or cultural industries: What (all) the culture industries produce becomes increasingly, not like commodities but advertisements. As with advertising firms, the culture industries sell not themselves but something else and they achieve this through 'packaging'. Also like advertising firms, they sell 'brands' of something else. And they do this through the transfer of value through images (1994, 138). References Blair T. (1998) The Third Way: New Politics for a New Century. The Fabian Society, London. Bobby D. (1999) Original Britain' could succeed where 'Cool Britannia' failed Brand Strategy November 22: 6. Boyer M C. (1995) The Great Frame-Up: Fantastic appearances in contemporary spatial politics, Liggett H., Perry D. C., eds. Spatial Practices. Sage, New York. 81-109. Castells M. (1992) The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford. Coombe R. (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties. Duke University Press, Durham, NC. Deckha N. (2000) Repackaging the Inner City: Historic Preservation, Community Development, and the Emergent Cultural Quarter in London. Unpublished MS, Rice University. Department of Culture, Media and Sport [DCMS]. (2001) Creative industries mapping document [http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/p...] Ford S. (1996) Myth Making Art Monthly March: 194. Giddens A. (1998) The Third Way. Polity, Cambridge. Greenhalgh L. (1998) From Arts Policy to Creative Economy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, 87, May: 84-94. Hewison R. (1996) Cool Britannia Sunday Times, 19 May. Lash S. and Urry J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. Sage, London. Littler J. (2000) Creative Accounting: Consumer Culture, The 'Creative Economy' and the Cultural Policies of New Labour in Bewes T. and Gilbert J. eds. Cultural Capitalism. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 203-222. Lynch K. (1960) The Image of the City. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. McRobbie A. (1999) In the Culture Society. Routledge, London. Roberts J. (1996) Mad for it!: Philistinism, the everyday and new British art Third Text, 35 (Summer): 29-42. Roberts J. (1998) Pop Art, the Popular and British Art of the 1990s in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 53-78. Rose N. (1999) Inventiveness in politics: review of Anthony Giddens, The Third Way Economy and Society, 28.3: 467-493. Scott A.J. (2000) The Cultural Economy of Cities. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Smith C. (1998) Creative Britain. Faber and Faber, London. Stallabrass J. (1999) High Art Lite. Verso, London. Suchin P. (1998) After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art in McCorquodale D. et al, eds. Occupational Hazard. Black Dog, London. 95-110. Links http://www.culture.gov.uk/creative/pdf/part1.pdf Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deckha, Nityanand. "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php>. Chicago Style Deckha, Nityanand, "Britspaceâ„¢?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deckha, Nityanand. (2002) Britspaceâ„¢?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/britspace.php> ([your date of access]).

Cohesion as a term connotes attraction, unity, and commonness amongst discrete entities. Considering cohesion as a concept is timely with the recent rise of network culture, which comes with both subtle and radical changes in how people connect with, position themselves in relation to, and understand other constituents of society (cf. Varnelis; Castells; Jenkins et al.). Such dis- and inter-connections signify an imminent and immanent epistemological challenge we must confront: how can we understand inherently multi-faceted subjects, components of which are in constant transformation? For researchers, disciplinary complexity is one of the main implications of this situation. While disciplinary integration may be an effective or vital component in pursuit of knowledge (cf. Nicolescu) it may also impart significant conceptual and pragmatic conflicts. What are possible ways to coalesce multiple dimensions of reality that can lead to conceptually cohesive and useful knowledge production? This issue of M/C Journal attempts to answer this question by looking at different perspectives on the notion of cohesion across topical and disciplinary boundaries. Our premise for exploring ‘cohesion’ in this issue is two-fold: first, there is a need to understand the conceptual and experiential significance of social cohesion in the increasingly urbanised and networked contemporary world. In the 1997 OECD report, Societal Cohesion and the Globalising Economy, Michalski, Miller, and Stevens attribute ‘strains of the fabric of OECD societies’ to global economic and political changes, as well as the rapid technological progress. The World Bank places social cohesion as a metonym for social capital; they argue that social cohesion is ‘critical for societies to prosper economically and develop sustainably,’ and that it is ‘the glue’ that holds constituents of the society together. While it is true that the need to build bonds between human beings, and to bring together otherwise disparate experiences and aspirations is evermore crucial to a sustainable future for the world, we doubt that the current pervasive view of cohesion as a measurable parameter for ideal harmony and unity. Rather, in this uncertainty we see opportunities for re-examining the existing definitions of cohesion and further shaping different versions of social/community strengthening. If social cohesion is inherent in the relationships between and amongst entities, ideologies or experiences disagreement and difference or transition are as important or integral as shared ideas. Anheier, Gerhards and Romo have re-imagined Bourdieu’s view of positions individuals inhabit within social spaces as a ‘network, or a configuration, of objective relations among positions.’ From this view the merging of individuals or groups into a cohesive whole becomes less important than the coming together, sometimes only briefly, of ideas into a dynamic and complicated matrix – in other words, the shaping of togetherness through temporary adhesive connections amongst individuals managing various such adhesive networks. We are not necessarily questioning the obvious advantages of a unified society. Rather, we are suggesting a need to enquire into new ways of approaching cohesion, and subsequent implications in viewing, governing, and living in society today, and tomorrow. The second reason for considering cohesion is the development of network technologies, which are embedded in everyday life. Network technologies engender and accentuate multiplicities: multifaceted self-identity, multitasking, and multisensorial experience via interactive media, for example. As we transition from the current network era towards that of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), our social and technological systems and practices become modular-like (Choi, Foth and Hearn), resonating with what Stone calls ‘continuous partial attention.’ Practice of multi-media communication – for example, concurrently watching television while chatting on Skype on the computer and texting on the mobile phone; another example is Habuchi’s notion of ‘telecocoon’ in which a multitude of constant and partial connections with small, insular social relations are maintained through always-on network technologies. The spatio-temporal zone that is made available, created, and extended by network technologies for expression of the self and communication with others is an inherently in-between space bridging what can be generally considered dichotomous. In this environment, it is cohesion that validates a networked entity by giving it a unified form and/or voice amongst its distributed constituents. The scale of such cohesive process varies from small (individual) to large (collective); examples include individual and community, respectively. As Castells (7) notes, while technology is not entirely responsible for social change, it embodies the capacity for change. Cohesion then, is perhaps best understood as inherently transformative. Thus examining cohesion as a phenomenon should not be focused on the ‘connections’ amongst individual entities but should concern what triggers, sustains, and suspends adhesive interactions, and how such processes relates to overall cohesion within the concerned subject. This notion resonates with the connection – access relation in understanding network culture. As Choi asserts, ‘in a network environment where the connection is a primal element, connection itself cannot be the rationale for interaction; rather, it is access – the act of accessing and being accessed – that becomes the prime motive for participation in network interactions’ (104). This issue of M/C Journal brings together diverse articles that explore the dynamic and challenging concept of cohesion in the current era, where technological, cultural, and structural conditions rapidly co-evolve through communicative networks, thereby reshaping the ontological and epistemological dimensions of various societies. The feature article by Holmes Cohesion, Adhesion and Incoherence explores the creation of a cohesive visual identity for a collective via digital and print-media. Her paper illustrates the ways in which Flickr participants communicate with each other, and how it is possible for networks to come together in an organically cohesive way, if only temporarily. Holmes also provides and insight into the process of and obstacles to establishing and maintaining a cohesive group identity. This feature article provides a framework for the issue as whole that shows how cohesive identity is created through ‘negotiation’ confirms our view that it’s in constant transformation. It also serves as a launching pad for the other articles to continue deconstructing cohesion as a cohesive concept. Glover turns the focus to policy making in the cultural sector. In his paper Failed Fantasies of Cohesion he examines the fantasy of cohesion as fundamental to whole-of-government cultural policy-making undertaken within Arts Queensland in the 1990s and 2000s. The emphasis in this paper is the complexity of cohesion as a critical factor in cultural policy making, and also the paradox that cohesion presents. In the quest for cohesion the potential for important and rich dissent can be discouraged. As Glover eloquently argues, when cohesion is lost all is not lost. This embracing of both the flaws in and potential of cohesion is carried in Publish or Perish. Martin puts forward possible strategies for university presses to work as a cohesive force between emerging writers and the writing industry. He examines the inter-relationship between university presses and the broader publishing industry, and asks whether broader access and sustained co-operation between creative writing departments and university publishing houses or presses could result in a new version of cohesion in the Australian literary landscape. He presents a holistic contour of the contemporary literary industry, using the University of Western Australia and the University of Western Sydney as examples of how entities with competing agendas can come together in a mutually beneficial and innovative way. Leder and colleagues bring the focus to the individual techno-social experience, as exemplified in their ToTeM (Tales of Things and Electronic Memory) project. This project addresses social cohesion through combining personal narratives with Web2.0 and tagging technologies to create a network of shared object-related memories. This paper accentuates the pluralistic nature of cohesion and thus calls for a multiplicity of approaches to cohesion. This issue closes with an artistic piece by Kari Gislason. His personal essay Independent People provides an exploration of Iceland’s financial collapse and its disconnection with the European Union, and calls into question whether a cohesive relationship with its neighbours is possible for or even desired by the Icelandic people. This discussion is played out against the backdrop of competing national identities in his own life and the search for unity. It is in this problematising and challenging of cohesion as a static or permanent state of agreement that this issue found its own cohesive thread. References Anheier, Helmut, Jurgen Gerhards, and P. Romo. “Forms of capital and social structure in cultural fields: Examining Bourdieu’s Social Topography.” The American Journal of Sociology 100.4 (1995) 859-903. Bordieu, Pierre. “Social Space and Symbolic Power.” Sociological Review 7.1 (1989) 14-25. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong. "The City, Self, and Connections: Transyouth and Urban Social Networking in Seoul." Youth, Society and Mobile Media in Asia. Eds. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Theresa Anderson and Damien Spry. London, New York: Routledge, 2010. 88-107. Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong, Marcus Foth, and Greg Hearn. "Site Specific Mobility and Connection in Korea: Bangs (Rooms) between Public and Private Spaces." Technology in Society 31.2 (2009). Habuchi, Ichiyo. "Accelerated Reflexivity." Personal, Portable, Pedestrian : Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. Eds. Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. 165-82. Jenkins, Henry, et al. "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century". 2006. 6 Nov. 2006. ‹http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2108773/apps/nl/content2.asp?content_id=%7BCD911571-0240-4714-A93B-1D0C07C7B6C1%7D&notoc=1 >. Michalski, Wolfgang, Riel Miller, and Barrie Stevens. "Economic Flexibility and Societal Cohesion in the Twenty-First Century." Societal Cohesion and the Globalising Economy. Ed. OECD. Paris: OECD, 1997. 7-26. Nicolescu, Basarab. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. Trans. Karen-Claire Voss. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. Stone, Linda. "Attention: The *Real* Aphrodisiac." O'Reilly Media Emerging Technology Conference. Varnelis, Kazys. Networked Publics. Ed. Annenberg Center for Communication, University of Southern California. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. World Bank. "Social Capital: The Glue Holding Society Together". 2001. March 18 2010. ‹http://www.worldbank.org/html/prddr/trans/augsepoct00/boxpage31.htm >.

When historian Graeme Davison famously declared that “Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban” (98), he was clearly referring to Melbourne or Sydney, but certainly not Brisbane. Although the Brisbane of 2011 might resemble a contemporary, thriving metropolis, its genealogy is not an urban one. For most of its history, as Gillian Whitlock has noted, Brisbane was “a place where urban industrial society is kept at bay” (80). What distinguishes Brisbane from Australia’s larger southern capital cities is its rapid morphology into a city from a provincial, suburban, town. Indeed it is Brisbane’s distinctive regionalism, with its sub-tropical climate, offering a steamy, fecund backdrop to narratives of the city that has produced a plethora of writing in literary accounts of the city, from author David Malouf through to contemporary writers such as Andrew McGahan, John Birmingham, Venero Armanno, Susan Johnson, and Nick Earls. Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition makes its transformation unique among Australian cities. Its rapid population growth and urban development have changed the way that many people now live in the city. Unlike the larger cities of Sydney or Melbourne, whose inner cities were established on the Victorian model of terrace-row housing on small lots, Brisbane’s early planners eschewed this approach. So, one of the features that gives the city its distinction is the languorous suburban quality of its inner-city areas, where many house blocks are the size of the suburban quarter-acre block, all within coo-ee of the city centre. Other allotments are medium to small in size, and, until recently, housed single dwellings of varying sizes and grandeur. Add to this a sub-tropical climate in which ‘green and growth’ is abundant and the pretty but flimsy timber vernacular housing, and it’s easy to imagine that you might be many kilometres from a major metropolitan centre as you walk around Brisbane’s inner city areas. It is partly this feature that prompted demographer Bernard Salt to declare Brisbane “Australia’s most suburban city” (Salt 5). Prior to urban renewal in the early 1990s, Brisbane was a low-density town with very few apartment blocks; most people lived in standalone houses.From the inception of the first Urban Renewal program in 1992, a joint initiative of the Federal government’s Building Better Cities Program and managed by the Brisbane City Council (BCC), Brisbane’s urban development has undergone significant change. In particular, the city’s Central Business District (CBD) and inner city have experienced intense development and densification with a sharp rise in medium- to high-density apartment dwellings to accommodate the city’s swelling population. Population growth has added to the demand for increased density, and from the period 1995–2006 Brisbane was Australia’s fastest growing city (ABS).Today, parts of Brisbane’s inner city resembles the density of the larger cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Apartment blocks have mushroomed along the riverfront and throughout inner and middle ring suburbs. Brisbane’s population has enthusiastically embraced apartment living, with “empty nesters” leaving their suburban family homes for the city, and apartments have become the affordable option for renters and first home purchasers. A significant increase in urban amenities such as large-scale parklands and river side boardwalks, and a growth in service industries such as cafes, restaurants and bars—a feature of cities the world over—have contributed to the appeal of the city and the changing way that people live in Brisbane.Urbanism demands specific techniques of living—life is different in medium- to high-density dwellings, in populous places, where people live in close proximity to one another. In many ways it’s the antithesis to suburban life, a way of living that, as Davison notes, was established around an ethos of privacy, health, and seclusion and is exemplified in the gated communities seen in the suburbs today. The suburbs are characterised by generosity of space and land, and developed as a refuge and escape from the city, a legacy of the nineteenth-century industrial city’s connection with overcrowding, disease, and disorder. Suburban living flourished in Australia from the eighteenth century and Davison notes how, when Governor Phillip drew up the first town plan for Sydney in 1789, it embodied the aspirations of “decency, good order, health and domestic privacy,” which lie at the heart of suburban ideals (100).The health and moral impetus underpinning the establishment of suburban life—that is, to remove people from overcrowding and the unhygienic conditions of slums—for Davison meant that the suburban ethos was based on a “logic of avoidance” (110). Attempting to banish anything deemed dangerous and offensive, the suburbs were seen to offer a more natural, orderly, and healthy environment. A virtuous and happy life required plenty of room—thus, a garden and the expectation of privacy was paramount.The suburbs as a site of lived experience and cultural meaning is significant for understanding the shift from suburban living to the adoption of medium- to high-density inner-city living in Brisbane. I suggest that the ways in which this shift is captured discursively, particularly in promotional material, are indicative of the suburbs' stronghold on the collective imagination. Reinforcing this perception of Brisbane as a suburban city is a history of literary narratives that have cast Brisbane in ways that set it apart from other Australian cities, and that are to do with its non-urban characteristics. Imaginative and symbolic discourses of place have real and material consequences (Lefebvre), as advertisers are only too well aware. Discursively, city life has been imagined oppositionally from life in the suburbs: the two sites embody different cultural meanings and values. In Australia, the suburbs are frequently a site of derision and satire, characterized as bastions of conformity and materialism (Horne), offering little of value in contrast to the city’s many enchantments and diverse pleasures. In the well-established tradition of satire, “suburban bashing is replete in literature, film and popular culture” (Felton et al xx). From Barry Humphries’s characterisation of Dame Edna Everage, housewife superstar, who first appeared in the 1960s, to the recent television comedy series Kath and Kim, suburbia and its inhabitants are represented as dull-witted, obsessed with trivia, and unworldly. This article does not intend to rehearse the tradition of suburban lampooning; rather, it seeks to illustrate how ideas about suburban living are hard held and how the suburban ethos maintains its grip, particularly in relation to notions of privacy and peace, despite the celebratory discourse around the emerging forms of urbanism in Brisbane.As Brisbane morphed rapidly from a provincial, suburban town to a metropolis throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, a set of metropolitan discourses developed in the local media that presented new ways of inhabiting and imagining the city and offered new affiliations and identifications with the city. In establishing Brisbane’s distinction as a city, marketing material relied heavily on the opposition between the city and the suburbs, implying that urban vitality and diversity rules triumphant over the suburbs’ apparent dullness and homogeneity. In a billboard advertisement for apartments in the urban renewal area of Newstead (2004), images of architectural renderings of the apartments were anchored by the words—“Urban living NOT suburban”—leaving little room for doubt. It is not the design qualities of the apartments or the building itself being promoted here, but a way of life that alludes to utopian ideas of urban life, of enchantment with the city, and implies, with the heavy emphasis of “NOT suburban,” the inferiority of suburban living.The cultural commodification of the late twentieth- and twenty-first-century city has been well documented (Evans; Dear; Zukin; Harvey) and its symbolic value as a commodity is expressed in marketing literature via familiar metropolitan tropes that are frequently amorphous and international. The malleability of such images makes them easily transportable and transposable, and they provided a useful stockpile for promoting a city such as Brisbane that lacked its own urban resources with which to construct a new identity. In the early days of urban renewal, the iconic images and references to powerhouse cities such as New York, London, and even Venice were heavily relied upon. In the latter example, an advertisement promoting Brisbane appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald colour magazine (May 2005). This advertisement represented Brisbane as an antipodean Venice, showing a large reach of the Brisbane river replete with gondolas flanked by the city’s only nineteenth-century riverside building, the Custom’s House. The allusion to traditional European culture is a departure from the usual tropes of “fun and sun” associated with promotions of Queensland, including Brisbane, while the new approach to promoting Brisbane is cognizant of the value of culture in the symbolic and economic hierarchy of the contemporary city. Perhaps equally, the advertisement could be read as ironic, a postmodern self-parodying statement about the city in general. In a nod to the centrality of the spectacle, the advertisement might be a salute to idea of the city as theme park, a pleasure playground and a collective fantasy of escape. Nonetheless, either interpretation presents Brisbane as somewhere else.In other promotional literature for apartment dwellings, suburban living maintains its imaginative grip, evident in a brochure advertising Petrie Point apartments in Brisbane’s urban renewal area of inner-city New Farm (2000). In the brochure, the promise of peace and calm—ideals that have their basis in suburban living—are imposed and promoted as a feature of inner-city living. Paradoxically, while suggesting that a wholesale evacuation and rejection of suburban life is occurring presumably because it is dull, the brochure simultaneously upholds the values of suburbia:Discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers who prefer lounging over latte rather than mowing the quarter acre block, are abandoning suburban living in droves. Instead, hankering after a more cosmopolitan lifestyle without the mind numbing drive to work, they are retreating to the residential mecca, the inner city, for chic shops and a lively dining, arts and theatre culture. (my italics)In the above extract, the rhetoric used to promote and uphold the virtues of a cosmopolitan inner-city life is sabotaged by a language that in many respects capitulates to the ideals of suburban living, and evokes the health and retreat ethos of suburbia. “Lounging” over lattes and “retreating to a residential mecca”[i] allude to precisely the type of suburban living the brochure purports to eschew. Privacy, relaxation, and health is a discourse and, more importantly, a way of living that is in many ways anathema to life in the city. It is a dream-wish that those features most valued about suburban life, can and should somehow be transplanted to the city. In its promotion of urban amenity, the brochure draws upon a somewhat bourgeois collection of cultural amenities and activities such as a (presumably traditional) arts and theatre culture, “lively dining,” and “chic” shops. The appeal to “discerning baby boomers and generation X’ers” has more than a whiff of status and class, an appeal that disavows the contemporary city’s attention to diversity and inclusivity, and frequently the source of promotion of many international cities. In contrast to the suburban sub-text of exclusivity and seclusion in the Petrie Point Apartment’s brochure, is a promotion of Sydney’s inner-city Newtown as a tourist site and spectacle, which makes an appeal to suburban antipathy clear from the outset. The brochure, distributed by NSW Tourism (2000) displays a strong emphasis on Newtown’s cultural and ethnic diversity, and the various forms of cultural consumption on offer. The inner-city suburb’s appeal is based on its re-framing as a site of tourist consumption of diversity and difference in which diversity is central to its performance as a tourist site. It relies on the distinction between “ordinary” suburbs and “cosmopolitan” places:Some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney’s blessed with Newtown — a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of more than 600 stores, 70 restaurants, 42 cafes, theatres, pubs, and entertainment venues, all trading in two streets whose origins lie in the nineteenth century … Newtown is the Catwalk for those with more style than money … a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul, where Milano meets post-punk bohemia, where Max Mara meets Doc Marten, a stage where a petticoat is more likely to be your grandma’s than a Colette Dinnigan designer original (From Sydney Marketing brochure)Its opening oppositional gambit—“some cities are cursed with suburbs”—conveniently elides the fact that like all Australian cities, Sydney is largely suburban and many of Sydney’s suburbs are more ethnically diverse than its inner-city areas. Cabramatta, Fairfield, and most other suburbs have characteristically high numbers of ethnic groups such as Vietnamese, Korean, Lebanese, and so forth. Recent events, however, have helped to reframe these places as problem areas, rather than epicentres of diversity.The mingling of social groups invites the tourist-flâneur to a performance of difference, “a parade where Yves St Laurent meets Saint Vincent de Paul (my italics), where Milano meets post-punk bohemia,” and where “the upwardly mobile and down at heel” appear in what is presented as something of a theatrical extravaganza. Newtown is a product, its diversity a commodity. Consumed visually and corporeally via its divergent sights, sounds, smells and tastes (the brochure goes on to state that 70 restaurants offer cuisine from all over the globe), Newtown is a “successful neighbourhood experiment in the new globalism.” The area’s social inequities—which are implicit in the text, referred to as the “down at heel”—are vanquished and celebrated, incorporated into the rhetoric of difference.Brisbane’s lack of urban tradition and culture, as well as its lack of diversity in comparison to Sydney, reveals itself in the first brochure while the Newtown brochure appeals to the idea of a consumer-based cosmopolitanism. As a sociological concept, cosmopolitanism refers to a set of "subjective attitudes, outlooks and practices" broadly characterized as “disposition of openness towards others, people, things and experiences whose origin is non local” (Skrbis and Woodward 1). Clearly cosmopolitan attitudes do not have to be geographically located, but frequently the city is promoted as the site of these values, with the suburbs, apparently, forever looking inward.In the realm of marketing, appeals to the imagination are ubiquitous, but discursive practices can become embedded in everyday life. Despite the growth of urbanism, the increasing take up of metropolitan life and the enduring disdain among some for the suburbs, the hard-held suburban values of peace and privacy have pragmatic implications for the ways in which those values are embedded in people’s expectations of life in the inner city.The exponential growth in apartment living in Brisbane offers different ways of living to the suburban house. For a sub-tropical city where "life on the verandah" is a significant feature of the Queenslander house with its front and exterior verandahs, in the suburbs, a reasonable degree of privacy is assured. Much of Brisbane’s vernacular and contemporary housing is sensitive to this indoor-outdoor style of living, a distinct feature and appeal of everyday life in many suburbs. When "life on the verandah" is adapted to inner-city apartment buildings, expectations that indoor-outdoor living can be maintained in the same way can be problematic. In the inner city, life on the verandah may challenge expectations about privacy, noise and visual elements. While the Brisbane City Plan 2000 attempts to deal with privacy issues by mandating privacy screenings on verandahs, and the side screening of windows to prevent overlooking neighbours, there is ample evidence that attitudinal change is difficult. The exchange of a suburban lifestyle for an urban one, with the exposure to urbanity’s complexity, potential chaos and noise, can be confronting. In the Urban Renewal area and entertainment precinct of Fortitude Valley, during the late 1990s, several newly arrived residents mounted a vigorous campaign to the Brisbane City Council (BCC) and State government to have noise levels reduced from local nightclubs and bars. Fortitude Valley—the Valley, as it is known locally—had long been Brisbane’s main area for nightclubs, bars and brothels. A small precinct bounded by two major one-way roads, it was the locus of the infamous ABC 4 Corners “Moonlight State” report, which exposed the lines of corruption between politicians, police, and the judiciary of the former Bjelke-Petersen government (1974–1987) and who met in the Valley’s bars and brothels. The Valley was notorious for Brisbanites as the only place in a provincial, suburban town that resembled the seedy side of life associated with big cities. The BCC’s Urban Renewal Task Force and associated developers initially had a tough task convincing people that the area had been transformed. But as more amenity was established, and old buildings were converted to warehouse-style living in the pattern of gentrification the world over, people started moving in to the area from the suburbs and interstate (Felton). One of the resident campaigners against noise had purchased an apartment in the Sun Building, a former newspaper house and in which one of the apartment walls directly abutted the adjoining and popular nightclub, The Press Club. The Valley’s location as a music venue was supported by the BCC, who initially responded to residents’ noise complaints with its “loud and proud” campaign (Valley Metro). The focus of the campaign was to alert people moving into the newly converted apartments in the Valley to the existing use of the neighbourhood by musicians and music clubs. In another iteration of this campaign, the BCC worked with owners of music venues to ensure the area remains a viable music precinct while implementing restrictions on noise levels. Residents who objected to nightclub noise clearly failed to consider the impact of moving into an area that was already well known, even a decade ago, as the city’s premier precinct for music and entertainment venues. Since that time, the Valley has become Australia’s only regulated and promoted music precinct.The shift from suburban to urban living requires people to live in very different ways. Thrust into close proximity with strangers amongst a diverse population, residents can be confronted with a myriad of sensory inputs—to a cacophony of noise, sights, smells (Allon and Anderson). Expectations of order, retreat, and privacy inevitably come into conflict with urbanism’s inherent messiness. The contested nature of urban space is expressed in neighbour disputes, complaints about noise and visual amenity, and sometimes in eruptions of street violence. There is no shortage of examples in the Brisbane’s Urban Renewal areas such as Fortitude Valley, where acts of homophobia, racism, and other less destructive conflicts continue to be a frequent occurrence. While the refashioned discursive Brisbane is re-presented as cool, cultured, and creative, the tensions of urbanism and tests to civility remain in a process of constant negotiation. This is the way the city’s past disrupts and resists its cool new surface.[i] The use of the word mecca in the brochure occurred prior to 11 September 2001.ReferencesAllon, Fiona, and Kay Anderson. "Sentient Sydney." In Passionate City: An International Symposium. Melbourne: RMIT, School of Media Communication, 2004. 89–97.Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Regional Population Growth, Australia, 1996-2006.Birmingham, John. "The Lost City of Vegas: David Malouf’s Old Brisbane." Hot Iron Corrugated Sky. Ed. R. Sheahan-Bright and S. Glover. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. xx–xx.Davison, Graeme. "The Past and Future of the Australian Suburb." Suburban Dreaming: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Australian Cities. Ed. L. Johnson. Geelong: Deakin University Press, 1994. xx–xx.Dear, Michael. The Postmodern Urban Condition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.Evans, Graeme. “Hard-Branding the Cultural City—From Prado to Prada.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27.2 (2003): 417–40.Evans, Raymond, and Carole Ferrier, eds. Radical Brisbane. Melbourne: The Vulgar Press, 2004.Felton, Emma, Christy Collis, and Phil Graham. “Making Connections: Creative Industries Networks in Outer Urban Locations.” Australian Geographer 14.1 (Mar. 2010): 57–70.Felton, Emma. Emerging Urbanism: A Social and Cultural Study of Urban Change in Brisbane. PhD thesis. Brisbane: Griffith University, 2007.Glover, Stuart, and Stuart Cunningham. "The New Brisbane." Artlink 23.2 (2003): 16–23. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Horne, Donald. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Ringwood: Penguin, 1964.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.Malouf, David. Johnno. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975. ---. 12 Edmondstone Street. London: Penguin, 1986.NSW Tourism. Sydney City 2000. Sydney, 2000.Salt, Bernard. Cinderella City: A Vision of Brisbane’s Rise to Prominence. Sydney: Austcorp, 2005.Skrbis, Zlatko, and Ian Woodward. “The Ambivalence of Ordinary Cosmopolitanism: Investigating the Limits of Cosmopolitanism Openness.” Sociological Review (2007): 1-14.Valley Metro. 1 May 2011 < http://www.valleymetro.com.au/the_valley.aspx >.Whitlock, Gillian. “Queensland: The State of the Art on the 'Last Frontier.’" Westerly 29.2 (1984): 85–90.Zukin, Sharon. The Culture of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1995.

Introduction Over the past two decades the Cairns landscape has transformed from a remote tourist town beside the Great Barrier Reef to an international, tropical city with a new focus on culture and the arts. A number of important urban design projects have enabled this transformation, including key waterfront redevelopments, the addition of a large shopping mall and convention centre, a renovated museum, and now a new performing arts precinct and proposed ‘gallery precinct’ for the people of Cairns to access new art forms and events. Anderson and Law (556) depict recent developments as a kind of “mayor’s trophy collection” or set of “must have” attractions Cairns needs to stay ‘competitive’. More generally they might be interpreted as ‘entrepreneurial urbanism’ (Harvey) and the attractors for Richard Florida’s creative class, although there is now more scepticism about how these projects fuel property speculation and benefit the middle classes rather than the ‘bohemians’ Florida saw as key to urban growth and transformation (Wainwright). The renovation of Munro Martin Park discussed here is a culture infrastructure project helping transform Cairns into the ‘arts and culture capital of the north’. Here we interrogate the winners and losers of the renovation, with a specific focus on how its heritage values are preserved. The identity of Cairns as an arts and culture hub is not new or unfounded, but the debate changed in emphasis with a proposed Cairns Entertainment Precinct (CEP) in 2011/2012. The then Mayor Val Schier had secured federal and state funding for the development of a $155 million arts precinct on the waterfront near the Cairns Port, as the city had outgrown its existing facilities at the nearby Cairns Civic Theatre and the venue was unable to host large performances. The CEP was to be a key cultural infrastructure project marking a new era of arts and culture activities in Cairns. The subsequent election became a referendum on the precinct, with its location and need being questioned. Bob Manning became the new Mayor with a mandate to scrap the CEP and instead renovate the existing Civic Theatre as part of a scaled-down vision. In 2016, the Cairns Civic Theatre was demolished to make way for a new Cairns Performing Arts Centre. The original Civic Theatre was constructed in the 1970s and was one of a small handful of buildings in Cairns designed in late Brutalist architectural style: its exterior walls were made of fluted grey concrete blocks. Popular from the 1950s to the 1970s, brutalist architecture celebrated Modernism translated into raw, exposed concrete. Despite a renewed popular interest in Brutalist buildings in many western cities, many “are being demolished and new, … homogenous (often glass and composite-clad) towers [are being] erected in their place” (Mould 701). The Cairns Civic Theatre was no exception. Munro Martin Park, directly across from the Cairns Civic Theatre, was folded into the plans for the area and the two were imagined together to form a new Cairns Performing Arts Precinct (CPAC). Munro Martin Park History Munro Martin Park (originally Norman Park) was gazetted as a recreational reserve for Cairns in 1882. The park was set aside soon after European settlement and became a space for outdoor recreation. Community attachment to the park grew over time as the park became known as a meeting place for sporting events, community celebrations, parades, and political rallies. Circuses began annual visits to the park from 1891 as it was the closest large area of open ground to the inner city. These physical features also facilitated other community events, such as public holiday celebrations including May Day and ANZAC Day. Attempts to beautify the park and create shade were made in the early 1880s and again in 1892. Trees were planted with the aim of establishing a botanical reserve, although many did not survive. Those that did – mangoes, figs, and other tropical species – created shade, provided fruit for eating fresh or making chutneys and sauces, and became roosts for local flying foxes and bats. A major change of use occurred when the park was taken over by the military during WWII, and it became a space for accommodation huts and military training. An Air Raids Precautions control centre was erected (today one of the few remaining examples, and heritage listed), and a radio tower. After the war the local authority had no control over the park until it was returned from the military. The park’s war infrastructure was mostly removed, and after the war the parkland was in decline and underutilised (Grimwade 21). Most sporting clubs had moved to new grounds and community gatherings were no longer associated with sporting events (Cairns Regional Council 804). In 1954 the Cairns community saw substantial redevelopment of the park with a bequest from well-regarded local philanthropists: the Munro Martin sisters. The Cairns City Council redeveloped and beautified the park and on completion it was renamed Munro Martin Park in recognition of the sisters. It quickly renewed its status as a place for community gatherings and organised events, and as a rallying point for parades and political protests. Although the park continued to be used, it was no longer the focus of sports, with the development of purpose-built sporting fields on the southside of town. Much of the passive activity in the park began moving to the Cairns Esplanade in the early 1960s, with multi-purpose recreation areas and a large open saltwater swimming baths. This trend continued as the land along the Esplanade was reclaimed from mudflats and turned into areas for recreation and swimming (McKenzie et al. 113). By 2014 no major work had been undertaken in the park for some time, and it again became underutilised. A report by Grimwade evaluating the park’s condition found much of the infrastructure in disrepair. While it was still used by circuses, festivals, May Day celebrations and political rallies, the group most often found there were homeless Indigenous people. Plans to redevelop the park once again occurred in 2015, and these were folded into the CPAC vision. Fig. 1: Aerial image of Munro Martin Park, 1970. (Source: Cairns Historical Society image P291110.) Fig. 2: Aerial image of Munro Martin Park, 2018. (Source: Creative Life – Cairns Regional Council.) Winners and Losers After its renovation and re-opening in 2016, Munro Martin Park became a new public space with an art focus for the Cairns community. It is beautifully landscaped and entices new audiences to enjoy the arts, including families who find it a safe and secure environment for leisure. The barriers often associated with entering arts and culture venues are displaced by egalitarian outdoor seating on blankets, and programming and casting are demographically inclusive, which in turn entices a diverse audience. In this way the park is important to community life, offers health benefits and social interactions, and is a place that welcomes regardless of social standing (Slater and Koo 99). At the same time, the new space reflects neoliberal sensibilities in regard to safety and anti-social behaviour, as the park reflects a wider city branding exercise for Cairns (Mercer and Mayfield 508). The need for controlled ticketing, for example, means the park is now fenced with restricted access. Prior to its renovation the park was a safe haven and meeting and waiting place for those travelling from Indigenous communities in Cape York and the Torres Strait Islands to Cairns. It was frequented by Rosie’s, a local charity providing meals for the homeless, and many used it as a place to sleep (Dalton, Cairns Post). These communities are now locked out during performances and every night at sunset (CCTV ensures they do not remain). This is unfortunate as the park is underutilised on a day-to-day basis as performances are sporadic; this is partly because it is costly to rent and access for community events. In this way the public space of the park has become commodified as part of a new political economy of the city and displaced its use as a refuge for the alienated or excluded. In other words, the park’s renovation raises familiar questions about the ‘right to the city’ (Marcuse). The park had been a place where people could just ‘be’ or dwell, but this was inevitably associated with homelessness (Mitchell 123). It is not uncommon for different groups of people to claim the same site at different times of the day. The important thing is that the users feel a strong enough connection and that it reflects their cultural or social needs so that they are likely to use the place (Barnes et al.). In addition to the displacement of a homeless community, the park also lost significant heritage trees that had survived from the late 1800s. Local environmental activists protested by sitting in – and refusing to come down from – some of the trees as the renovation commenced (Power, Cairns Post). The trees expressed heritage value but were also home to endangered bat colonies (Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management). Although Munro Martin Park trees are not the only flying fox habitats, their loss has contributed to their demise. On the other hand, and through the park’s addition of new trees, tropical plants and elaborate vined arbours, the park is an award-winning showcase of tropical urban greenery evoking civic pride. This revitalisation and beautification creates opportunities for new community attachments to place through new sensory perceptions (Hashemnezhad et al. 7). Community attachment to Munro Martin Park and its related social value has thus changed over time. The park’s social value, as understood by the Burra Charter, is the social quality which makes it a focus for spiritual, political, national, or other cultural sentiment. Jones (21) defines social value as encompassing “the significance of the historic environment to contemporary communities, including people's sense of identity, belonging and place, as well as forms of memory and spiritual association” (see also Johnston, 1). Fond memories of sporting days, school excursions, and the circus are held by the older community, but after 1970 these positive associations diminish as the park became known for anti-social behaviour and was avoided. The heritage value and community associations are now remembered with interpretive panels that recall political rallies, circuses and celebrations, and the military takeover – making this history more accessible to younger audiences. While the park is no longer a rally point for the start of the annual May Day march, and the circus has shifted outside the city centre, portrait panels remember the stories of people who had a connection with the park. An obelisk created in the memory of the Munro and Martin sisters has been restored, which is also a reminder of Eddie Oribin’s and Sid Barnes’s joint work as influential Cairns-based architects (who built the former neighbouring brutalist Cairns Civic Theatre). The World War Two Air Raids Precautions control room, which coordinated all the air raid wardens in the city, remains and is listed on the Queensland Heritage Register. It was reused as a Scouts shop and has a large fibreglass scout hat put on top. The redevelopment thereby acknowledges the past and makes it more accessible than it was from the 1970s to the 2000s. Old places need new uses and new uses need old places, as urban activist Jane Jacobs famously said (Chang 524). These new uses become a part of a new city narrative and imaginary, creating new community attachments as a part of an evolving story. As it the case with other parts of the city’s history, however, some histories of Cairns are silenced in urban renewal (Law), reflecting the multiple and sometimes conflicting social values at play. Fig. 3: Munro Martin Park as a WWII Command Centre, n.d. (Source: Cairns Historical Society, image P08730.) Fig. 4: WWII Command Centre as Scout Hut with hat, 2016. (Source: Cairns Historical Society, image P20692.) Conclusion The revitalisation of places through arts-led gentrification is well documented and understood. This article builds on critiques of gentrification, asking slightly different questions about memory, history, and the contested meanings of heritage in urban renewal. The social value of Munro Martin Park is situated in time and space and by different users, and community attachment has evolved over time. For older generations the park evokes memories of sports, circuses, political rallies, and the closeness of the war. These histories have been remembered and curated through new park signage reflecting a conservative middle-class past: No Sports on Sundays; Circuses and Celebrations; Rallying at the Park; Military Takeover. For younger generations, for whom the park was a place to be avoided – a dangerous place on the edge of the city centre inhabited by the homeless – the park is now a new cultural space promoting accessibility to the arts. The mangoes that were once shelter for the flying fox population have given way to a new venue, tropical vines and foliage, and new signage and programming will produce new social value over time. Whether its redevelopment will “herald a renaissance in Cairns cultural life” by delivering “fresh performing arts and botanic experiences” (Cultural Services 8) remains to be seen in the shadow of COVID-19. What we do know is that the history and social significance of the park as a space for the homeless or a stopover and waiting place for Indigenous people from the Cape and the Torres Strait Islands has been erased, and that the now dispersed homeless population is difficult to reach except for food trucks and shelters. Their use of the park, whether as shelter or meeting place, is now highly constrained to a small, unfenced corner of the park at the corner of Sheridan and Minnie Street (which is rarely used). Although the redevelopment of Munro Martin Park is part of a vision for Cairns as a hub for arts and culture activities, it is important to ask at what cost. The controlled and surveilled nature of the park no longer permits the use of the space for rough sleeping or informal community events, although its redevelopment has increased visitation and created a safe and inclusive public space for middle class residents to enjoy the arts and contemplate the city’s history. With Marcuse and Mitchell we think it is important to ask larger questions about whose right to the city, and to see the remaking of urban sites as ongoing struggles over public space. In a city with one of the highest rates of homelessness per capita in Queensland, the renovation of this site of refuge reflects neoliberal tendencies in the creative economy to remake the city without due attention to the exclusion of undesirables and growing spatial inequality. References Anderson, Allison, and Lisa Law. "Putting Carmona’s Place-Shaping Continuum to Use in Research Practice." Journal of Urban Design 20.5 (2015): 545-562. DOI: 10.1080/13574809.2015.1071656. Barnes, Leanne, et al. Places Not Spaces: Placemaking in Australia. Envirobook, 1995. Cairns Regional Council. "Planning Scheme Policy – Places of Significance." Cairns Regional Council, 2016. 801-805. Chang, T.C. "‘New Uses Need Old Buildings’: Gentrification Aesthetics and the Arts in Singapore." Urban Studies 53.3 (2016): 524-539. DOI: 10.1177/0042098014527482. Cultural Services. "Cairns Regional Council Strategy for Culture and the Arts 2022." Cairns Regional Council, 2018. Dalton, Nick. "Call to Shift Cairns' Charity Food Van Because of Appalling Drunks." Cairns Post, 2016. <https://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/cairns-food-van-offers-to-move-after-tempers-flare-over-itinerants/news-story/0a112da6109a9a5b4dcb1fd82b1d2013>. Florida, Richard L. The Rise of the Creative Class : And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books, 2004. Grimwade, Gordon. "Heritage Plan Munro Martin Park." Cairns Regional Council, 2013. 68. Harvey, David. "From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism." Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71.1 (1989): 3. DOI: 10.2307/490503. Hashemnezhad, Hashem, et al. "'Sense of Place' and 'Place Attachment'." International Journal of Architecture and Urban Development 3.1 (2013): 5-12. <http://ijaud.srbiau.ac.ir/article_581_a90b5ac919ddc57e6743d8ce32d19741.pdf>. Johnston, Chris. "What Is Social Value? A Discussion Paper." Australian Government Publishing Service, 1992. Jones, Siân. "Wrestling with the Social Value of Heritage: Problems, Dilemmas and Opportunities." Journal of Community Archaeology & Heritage 4.1 (2017): 21-37. DOI: 10.1080/20518196.2016.1193996. Law, Lisa. "The Ghosts of White Australia: Excavating the Past(s) of Rusty's Market in Tropical Cairns." Continuum 25.5 (2011): 669-681. DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2011.605519. Marcuse, Peter. "From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City." City: Cities for People, Not for Profit 13.2-3 (2009): 185-197. DOI: 10.1080/13604810902982177. McKenzie, J., et al. "Cairns Thematic History of the City of Cairns and Its Regional Towns." Cairns Regional Council, 2011. 150. <https://www.cairns.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/40888/CairnsThematic.pdf>. Mercer, David, and Prashanti Mayfield. "City of the Spectacle: White Night Melbourne and the Politics of Public Space." Australian Geographer 46.4 (2015): 507-534. DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1058796. Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford Press, 2003. Mould, Oli. "Brutalism Redux: Relational Monumentality and the Urban Politics of Brutalist Architecture." Antipode 49.3 (2017): 701-720. DOI: 10.1111/anti.12306. Power, Shannon. "Locals Angry Cairns Regional Council Has Removed Trees in Munro Martin Park." The Cairns Post, 2015. <https://www.cairnspost.com.au/news/cairns/locals-angry-cairns-regional-council-has-removed-trees-in-munro-martin-park/news-story/837cb6c0769f7651d884481bcf1e25e8>. Queensland Department of Environment and Resource Management. "National Recovery Plan for the Spectacled Flying Fox Pteropus Conspicillatus." 2010. Slater, Alix, and Hee Jung Koo. "A New Type of 'Third Place'?" Journal of Place Management and Development 3.2 (2010): 99. DOI: 10.1108/17538331011062658. Wainwright, Oliver. "‘Everything Is Gentrification Now’: But Richard Florida Isn't Sorry." The Guardian, 2017. <https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/oct/26/gentrification-richard-florida-interview-creative-class-new-urban-crisis>.

The Creative City Unlike the terms ‘creative industries’, which nobody ever quite understood, and ‘creative class’, about which actual ‘creatives’ were always ambiguous, the ‘creative city’ has been an incredibly successful global policy meme, to which cities across the world continue to aspire. From the early 1990s, faced with de-industrialisation, rising unemployment, and the increased global mobility of capital, professionals, and consumer-tourists, the ‘creative city’ became an essential part of the new urban imaginary for politicians, planners, local growth coalitions, and advocates and practitioners in art and culture. In the later 1980s and early 1990s, much of this policy and practice work had progressive intent; as decaying parts of the city acquired new artistic and cultural uses, and neo-bohemian lifestyles and pop-cultural aspirations seemed to provide the grounds for future-oriented urban identities. Whilst investment in iconic cultural buildings and refurbished heritage sites repositioned cities as destinations for global tourism and finance (Peck et al.), new forms of creative production would provide employment and catalyse the wider urban economy. The creative city was to be a benign economy of innovative small businesses, working in projects and acting in symbiosis with the transformed urban landscape of the city (Pratt; Scott). If at first such a “creativity fix” (Peck, Creativity) was permeable to new actors and radical visions, it rapidly became a codified “cookie cutter” approach (Oakley), primarily concerned with revalorising decaying urban built stock as ‘vibrant’ spaces for upmarket urban consumption. This has stretched from visual arts to popular music (Bennett; O’Connor Music). The “creative imaginary” of entrepreneurial subjects—working in flat networks clustered around zones or milieux of intensified creativity (O’Connor and Shaw; O’Connor and Gu)—was quickly localised in spaces of real estate-led consumption, with production corralled into the ‘managed workspace’ whose image value—a shiny ‘creative hub’—was usually worth far more than any actual production taking place inside of it (O’Connor, Art). From the turn of the millennium, this global “fast policy” flowed through elite circuits of ‘policy transfer’ (Peck, Scale): unevenly distributed nodes assembling politicians, public administrators, planners, ‘cool’ developers, cultural consultants, branded arts institutions, and creative ‘thought-leaders’ (De Beukelaer and O’Connor). Global agencies such as UNESCO, through its Creative Cities Network, or consultancies such as Charles Landry and BOP, have attempted to frame this in a benign narrative of ‘hands across the ocean’ cultural globalisation. But we now know from two decades of creative economy proselytising that culture is a “driver and enabler” of development, not a normative standard against which it might be judged. And however inclusive ‘culture’ is made to sound, the creative city agenda remains firmly in the hands of local elites attempting to harness global flows of finance, media images, tourists, and ‘creatives’ for local development opportunities (Novy and Colomb; Courage and McKeown). By 2008 the creative city was already in trouble, as an increasingly brutal wave of gentrification came to be seen as the necessary corollary of the gleaming images of creative clusters, hipster hangouts, and iconic arts infrastructure. Predicated on a “spatial fix” (Harvey) for the decaying landscapes of the industrial city, the creative city was already producing its own ruins, as culture-led investment projects failed (Brodie). Since 2008, as the paper-thin walls between art, creativity, and real estate capital dissolved, it became increasingly clear that, though the script remained, the utopian moment was dead and buried. For many critics, both inside the cultural sector and out, it was time to roughly bundle it into the catch-all of neoliberalism and ‘gentrification’ and throw it overboard. Creative City RIP. The Ordinary City This critical take was performed early on by geographers such as Ash Amin and others (Amin and Graham; Amin, Massey, and Thrift), who suggested we re-centre the ordinary city—the one in which most people live—rather than fetishise some high-growth, hi-tech, gleaming Creative City. It was reiterated more recently by the Foundational Economy Collective, who argue that it is the everyday infrastructures and services of our towns and cities—and their mundane local economies of nail bars, cafes, and auto-repair shops—that should form the basis of our urban economic thinking (FEC). Jamie Peck, an early critic of the Creative City, had already cast doubt on the real economic weight of ‘creative industries’ and saw the whole thing as cover for the ‘entrepreneurial (read: neoliberal) city’, and a new kind of culturally-inflected growth coalition (Peck and Ward; Peck, Struggling). Similar dissent could be found amongst those writing within the cultural field. For every new city on the global creative smorgasbord, there were local artists and community activists who could show you a whole other side, excluded from the glass boxes and white cubes, from the funding and the hyped-up narratives lavished on the creative city. This mostly targeted the big iconic developments, led by global brands sucking the funding and the imagination from the surrounding city—what we might call ‘the Bilbao effect’. This cynicism toward the Creative City overlapped with a rejection of a ‘high art’ establishment and its elitist forms of culture. The ‘ordinary city’ here did not set the mundane against art and culture but reframed these as part of an everyday creativity. This could mean small-scale, neighbourhood-embedded art and culture, proposed by those in favour of ‘community arts’ and indeed those seeking localised popular culture such as music scenes. But it could also mean a valorisation of creativity writ large; a generalised urban creativity in which imagination and experimentation, but also subversion and contestation permeate the everyday. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), critiques of the creative city concept became increasingly common. Oli Mould’s 2015 book Urban Subversion and the Creative City captures much of this, providing a distinction between the capitalised Creative City and the lower-case creative city. Mould distinguishes between the ‘Creative City’ ideology as extractive, and the ‘creative city’ as enabling citizenship. For Mould, the Creative City is “the antithesis of urban creativity” (Urban 4), and “shorthand for the capitalistic, paradigmatic (bordering on dogmatic) and meta-narrative view of how creativity can be used to economically stimulate and develop the city” (5). It is top-down creative planning at its worst. Against this, Mould evokes the lower-case concept of creative city, seeing some hope for it as a descriptor of urban spaces where “being creative is the very act of citizenship” (5). The Creative City imposed itself as a requirement of urban economic competitiveness (successful or not) and needs to be implacably opposed. Alternatively, the creative city persists in various forms of ‘urban subversion’, though whether the actual term—like creativity itself (Mould, Against)—can be freed from an association with its capitalised nemesis is, for Mould, still moot. Whilst Mould’s distinction allows us to evoke an urban creativity distinct from the commodified, extractive forms of the Creative City—one rooted in the ordinary, everyday creative practices of the city still open to themes of subversion and contestation centring cultural labour over cultural infrastructure—we also have some reservations. The C/creative couplet recalls de Certeau’s opposition of strategy and tactics, skyscraper and street, and has some of its problems. Baldly, this gives control of the city over to the powerful and condemns the rest of us to a game of endless evasion and subversion. For whilst the contemporary Creative City agenda may be largely as Mould describes it, its provenance is more complex than the extractive agenda which currently animates it. Understanding this provenance might give us some pointers beyond this binary impasse. Roots of the Creative City Although the Creative City eventually became integrated into the neoliberal urban script, the policy imaginary that birthed it emerged from the post-1960s rise of urban social movements, anti-development coalitions, new cultural practices (especially around popular music), artist co-ops, squats, and alternative cultures. Across the 1970s and 1980s one might say the C/creative City was an aspect of growing claims for cultural citizenship, the more explicit acknowledgement of a cultural dimension within T.H. Marshall’s ‘social citizenship’ (Marshall). The Greater London Council (GLC) of 1979-86 is exemplary here (Bianchini; Hatherley), but this was only the most visible case in which de-industrialising cities acquired aspirations to a different kind of city living. The utopian-romantic vision of a new kind of urban culture in which the transformative powers of art would abandon the ethereal world of the museum-gallery and take carnal form in the grotesque ruins of an industrial city was most literal in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire. It was there in Berlin and New York as it was in Melbourne and Manchester, and a hundred other such cities (Whitney). As an industrial urban civilisation no longer seemed viable in the Global North, ‘culture’ became a central stake in anticipating what might come next. What new forms of working and living might be possible? What new identities, pleasures, desires might it accommodate? A new generation, immersed in what Mark Fisher called ‘popular modernism’ (Fisher), sought new forms of artistic expression within popular culture, making demands on the formal cultural system, on the infrastructure of the city, and on how the city could be re-imagined. In short, the C/creative City was not simply an invention of neoliberalism. It carried within it a utopian promise that should not be discounted. Perhaps we can see this in that most vilified of concepts, the ‘creative class’. The (Not-So) Creative Class By the 2008 GFC, the concept of the ‘creative class’—positioned as the primary driver and beneficiary of the creative city—was already coming apart. Unaffordable housing, rent hikes, rising debts, welfare cuts, reducing returns to ‘educational capital’ and the dominance of asset economies, precarious employment, culture budget cuts, and the integration of large sections of creative production into new platform economies have accelerated since that time. Global development capital has now built high-end leisure, entertainment, accommodation, and amenities into its core business model, one that does not require a prior process of valorisation by local creatives. Mould suggests the Creative City was a Trojan Horse and the creative class the Greeks inside (Urban 8). But whilst policymakers and city marketers embraced this term, it was never a class for-itself, with the clear strategic focus of soldiers waiting to pounce. Florida’s statistical fantasy netted a massive chunk of the population—almost 40 percent—as ‘professional, managerial and scientific’ (Florida, Rise). Meanwhile actual ‘creatives’ were always a poor relation and lived very differently to those others, most of whom preferred the suburbs and ex-burbs to the bustling city. Artists were not the storm-troopers of gentrification but its dupes, eventually evicted from the city they helped conquer. Meanwhile, since the advent of Florida and Landry, developers didn’t even need to use these ‘storm-troopers’ to soften up places for gentrification. They could now work directly with compliant city authorities to do the work for them. Creative cities could be deployed by toolkit (Landry) and, of course, measured via economic impact studies and a variety of other econometrics weaponised by corporate consultancies for hire. This was the social and political landscape upon which the Global Financial Crisis dealt an especially severe form of austerity, disproportionately affecting the cultural sector, and exacerbating many of the problematic areas of ‘creative city’ policy that had previously been abated and ameliorated by a veneer of hipster cool. Nonetheless, the ‘creative class’ also articulated a utopian promise, especially in places outside of the ‘Global North’ where more traditional forms of political power, gender roles, and religion remain in play. In a period of rapid globalisation, as relatively insulated economies became integrated into global capital flows, and cities bore the brunt of disruptive social and cultural changes, the C/creative City could stand in for a global modernity with a future. It could make available a new set of aspirations and identities; for a younger, more educated few perhaps, yet still real despite this. De Beukelaer, in the Indonesian context, talks about the “productive friction” between the two C/creative Cities, where the gap between the universal abstract and the local reality can form a site of negotiation. The C/creative City licences an encounter between new aspirations and identities, and the more traditional elites; an unequal struggle to define or give further content to the neoliberal nostrums of creative modernity that emanate from the Creative City meme. Yet it is not clear just why this negotiation is only made possible by the ‘apolitical’ notion of ‘creative’, or what’s at stake in that term. Is it a merely a cypher—or McGuffin—for a more complex conflict of interests? In what form would the “re-politicisation” of the creative city, called for at the end of the article, consist? What Next? We are not then talking about The City & the City (Mieville), in which two cities occupy the same geographic space but codify their separation by routinely ignoring each other and that which is deemed to belong to the other city. They are always in some kind of negotiation and contestation, but around what? We would argue that the imaginary of the C/creative City was annexed by, but not necessarily created by, neoliberalism. If the C/creative City articulated a future beyond a Fordist industrial civilisation, then we must take care in rejecting it not to abandon at the same time the power to imagine a different future. So, too, in attempting to assert the ordinary everyday city, we must also keep hold of a sense of the creative imagination that art and culture articulates, rather than dismissing this as part of the shiny glass palace on the hill. The absence of art and culture from the new progressive social and economic agendas that are currently finding their way into the mainstream—green new deals, doughnuts, well-being, community and ecological economics, and so on—is telling (O’Connor, Reset). In part this reflects the capture of arts and cultural policy by neoliberalism. This is not just ‘economic rationalism’ or market fundamentalism, for in the ‘creative economy’ art and cultural policy fused with neoliberalism at a deep DNA level, and the creative city imaginary was part of this. Mould is right to doubt whether the notion of ‘creative’, so closely enmeshed, could ever be retrieved. But regardless of whether art and culture have been condemned by this close association, the collapse of its romantic-utopian promise into a consumer leisure economy has left a void. If Jameson’s contention that we cannot think the end of capitalism is no longer the case (Jameson; Morozov), then culture is not present at this new moment of transition. So much well-being, community, and ecological economics speaks of culture whilst barely naming it. For us, the rearticulation of the place of art and culture in the contemporary city is crucial. We would even suggest that without art and culture, a full transformation of the contemporary city would be impossible. But how to think this? Any democratic cultural policy would need to reclaim both the ordinary and the creative city. This would entail the creative city of dissent and subversion, so closely aligned with the broad social movements to which we must look, in large part, to transform the city. It would also mean the right to a full participation in the imaginary of the collective city in which we all dwell and where we can imagine different futures. For this to happen, art and culture needs to be taken out of the hands of real estate, tourism, and economic development, and reframed as part of public service and public value. Just as new movements seek to reframe economic growth in terms of sustainability, equity, and human flourishing (Raworth), a radical creative city would be one in which art and culture were constitutive of the social foundations and part of how we live together as citizens, not simply another engine of the consumption economy. This process of re-embedding art and culture in the everyday foundations of the ordinary city is certainly underway. The ‘new municipalism’ (Thompson) has begun to make space for culture, with cities such as Barcelona and organisations such as the UCLG making a lot of the running. Notions of cultural rights, both individual and collective, have returned to challenge the urban consumption model. Just as art and culture try to position themselves alongside other foundational services—health, education, welfare—they also need to engage with new approaches to urban design, where technologies and infrastructures have been repositioned as cultural rather than technological. This suggests both that art and culture engage with the wider ‘cultural’—as in the anthropological, ‘whole way of life’—but that it no longer ‘owns’ this culture. Art and culture are not to be seen, as in the 1980s, as the ‘key’ to a total social transformation, but as one element only, however crucial. So too ‘creative’ needs to be unpicked and reframed, away from its association with ‘progress’ and absolute self-creation towards ‘slowdown’ (Dorling), sustainability, custodianship, care, incrementalism, and restoration – the kinds of values we now associate with First Nations. The shared DNA between creativity and capitalist modernity runs deep. Conclusion The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated large areas of art and culture, putting a question mark next to the urban use patterns that underpinned so much of the creative city model (Banks and O’Connor; de Peuter et al.; Tanghetti et al.; Whiting and Roberts). The Creative City of consumption, commuting, tourism, and entertainment stopped. Though some construction continued, the very purpose of the city centre—which over three decades had been rebranded as the Central Business District—was called into question. But the creative city was devastated too. Not just the collapse in income for cultural workers and business owners, but so too the filigrees of creative connection, the rhizomic mica that underpin the ecosystem of the city. Creatives already made no money, but at least they could go to openings and stay out late. Not anymore. This knockout blow was followed by the recognition that, for all the creative rhetoric, it was construction spending that counted most towards cultural funding budgets (Pacella et al.). Whilst talk quickly became one of getting artists and creatives to kickstart urban activity and animate deserted main street properties—‘build back better’—it is not at all clear where this endless supply of artists is going to come from. Now might be the time to explore how we might rethink art, culture, and the city rather than business as usual. As Arundhati Roy suggested, “nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next” (Roy). If art and culture don’t form part of that search for the new world, they will end up simply defending this one. 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Traditionally, the country way of life, the country worldview -- the country culture -- has been understood differently to the city way of life. Notions of rural have been represented in terms such as 'Eden', 'Arcadia', 'Golden Age', and associated with beauty, fertility, moral uprightness and authenticity. In contrast, notions of urban have been characterised by pollution, sterility, degeneration and artificiality. In Australia, the culture of the first white settlers developed out of this tradition, but with its own distinctive characteristics. The harshness and indomitability of the landscape became the means by which unique character, unifying myths of belonging and societal significance were constructed and asserted. In contrast to the communities of the country's original inhabitants, which were perceived as passive, unproductive and disconnected, the new culture was characterised by notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous' and 'nationalistic' (Moore 54; Turner 6; Ward; White 16ff.). Defining the country worldview in contemporary Australia, however, is problematic. Question marks hang over the continued significance, even existence, of a specifically country culture. Post-war Australia has witnessed enormous economic and social changes, wrought by improved transport and communication networks, a shrinking rural population, and the decreasing importance of the agricultural industries. The steady decline in grass roots support for the National Party of Australia, traditional defender of the country way of life, suggests that the voting population no longer views the upholding of specifically pro-country policies as necessary to the well-being of the nation. Australia is now recognised as the most urbanised, sub-urbanised and multi-cultural of the western industrialised nations. Globalisation of the mass communications media has blurred the boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. Consequently, many argue that the differences between the country and city are now insignificant (for example, Aitkin 34-41). Yet notions of country that are distinct, even definitive, continue to be represented in various urban-based communications industries, cultural policies, and the discourses of environmental politics and nationalism. Examples include John Laws's very popular Across Australia radio talk-back programme which celebrates the outback, the farmer and 'battler', and the 'True Blue' music of country artist John Williamson; the push by the Green movement to separate and protect wilderness areas of 'natural' bushland from the corrupting influences of human cultivation; and the continued significance of the 'bush' and 'bushman' in divers constructions of national cultural identity. Share and Lawrence argue that such representations are a state of mind rather than a state of being, "in the imagination of the cosmopolis" only (Share & Lawrence 101). Imagined or otherwise, however, the evidence suggests that they are representations which are nevertheless there -- albeit constructed in varying ways, with varying emphases, and in a variety of settings. Tamworth: Country at Heart Jacka argues that it is the 'local', constructed by a specific set of forces and circumstances and operating within a particular time frame and place, that provides the best or most 'authentic' means of analysing notions of the 'country' (qtd. in Share & Lawrence 102). Tamworth, situated in North Western New South Wales, approximately four hundred kilometres from Sydney, is one such 'authentic' locality. The city of Tamworth and its surrounding hinterland is populated by some 55,000 people. Timber and farmland constitute 95% of its land use. Agricultural production generates the bulk of its net income. The Tamworth electoral district has been designated 'country' by the State Electoral Office. Promotional billboards erected by the Tamworth City Council and situated on all major highways into the city describe Tamworth as 'the heart of country'. Tamworth is renowned as 'the Country Music Capital of Australasia' and celebrates 'country' values annually through a highly successful Country Music Festival. Clearly, notions of country are significant in the shaping of how Tamworth is perceived as a community locally and nationally. These notions are an important component of the process of meaning generation, circulation and exchange inTamworth -- indeed, they are an important component of the essential fabric that constitutes the Tamworth culture. Analysis The Tamworth worldview was studied through an analysis of the coverage of the local NSW state election campaigns of 1995 and 1999 by Tamworth's only regional daily newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader. Regional daily newspapers are a useful means of analysing the major preoccupations of a culture. They contribute significantly to the construction and representation of the communities they serve: they are moulded by the specific needs of their communities; they are prominent influences of the norms, values and processes of these communities; they are the product of a community that is connected by common and local interests and knowledge, written with and by the people of this community (Mules et al. 242). The coverage of the 1995 and 1999 election campaigns represented a discrete sample of texts with a common focus. An important aspect of this focus was Mr Tony Windsor, Independent State Member for Tamworth. Windsor's Independent status was significant to the study. Firstly, it suggests that he was elected to office on his own merits or on the merits of his policies, as against any particular party affiliation. Papadakis and Bean argue that a vote for an Independent most often represents a protest vote against the dominant players in the political system rather than any systemic approval of the policy positions or other qualities of the recipient (109). This may well have been the case for Windsor's initial victory in 1991. However, in the 1995 election he won an unprecedented 83% of the primary vote, representing voters from right across the political spectrum. He further increased his majority in the 1999 election. Windsor's extraordinary popularity suggests that his appeal cut across the political boundaries into the social and cultural realms. As such, Windsor embodies a singular means of analysing the socio-politico-cultural preoccupations of those he represents. The study tracked story frequency and space, and analysed pictorial, headline and lead texts in terms of story focus, personal and thematic associations, and candidate agency. It was found that the Leader markedly privileged Windsor over his opponents in regards to story frequency and space. The pictorial and key word analyses identified Windsor's public persona as more active and more person-oriented than those of his opponents, and as associated more often with exterior settings, particularly those in or connected with 'bush' locations. This stood in contrast to the representations of his major ALP opponents. In both elections they were female, associated more with interior settings, and represented as speaking more than doing, passive more than active, and concerned more with their emotions and states of being than was Windsor. Overall, the Leader's representation of Windsor was found to comprise the six notions noted above as being characteristic of the traditional country worldview. Windsor's connections with and concerns for the land and country issues were significant. The construction of male and female gender roles was masculinist in nature. The absence of any signifiers associated with notions of 'Aboriginality', 'ethnicity', even 'diversity', indicated the existence of naturalised discourses of 'white' and 'homogeneity'. Notions of productivity were evident through Windsor's preoccupation with the business and industry. Nationalism was implied through Windsor's association with characteristics that epitomise traditional understandings of what it is to be an Australian. Two additional characteristics were also identified. The first of these was named 'Independent', as indicated through the significance placed upon Windsor's politically Independent status. It was defined by the traditional understandings of the country worldview and ideas of integrity, 'a fair go' for the country, and of giving power back to the people. In contrast, the major political parties, ALP and National Party, were associated with the city, corruption, interference, lack of democracy, the undermining of country values by city values, and a subordination of the country to the city. The second characteristic was named 'community'. It was indicated through ideas of belonging and like-mindedness, andWindsor's representation as friendly, person-oriented and concerned with the active provision of services for the people. Implications The Tamworth culture is characterised by the notions of 'land', 'masculinity', 'white', 'productive', 'homogenous', 'nationalistic', 'Independent' and 'community'. This very characterisation, however, is one that gives rise to a number of questions. What drove the Leader to construct and represent the Tamworth culture in this way? How did and does this particular characterisation serve the needs of the Tamworth people? How and why are these needs different to the needs of city people -- or even people in other rural communities? Perhaps the best answer lies with the demonstrated longevity of the essential nature of the Tamworth worldview. Traditional notions of country have remained distinctive, even definitive, despite Australia's urbanisation, suburbanisation, multiculturalism; despite the enormous economic and social changes that have been wrought by globalisation; despite the consequent blurring of boundaries between rural, urban, state and national. This traditional nature, it seems, is resistant to change. Yet there is also evidence that a blurring of boundaries, even change, has occurred in Tamworth. Examples include the fact that the combined income generated by secondary and tertiary industries in the Tamworth district is now greater than that generated by agriculture; Windsor, with whom the Leader so closely associates the land and other notions traditionally associated with the country, also holds a university degree in economics; the annual Country Music Festival is celebrated largely from within the confines of the city of Tamworth itself; Tamworth City Council and Country Music Festival both have sites on the World Wide Web, thereby connecting them with the very globalisation that the Leader would have them resisting. Although this may suggest that the country has actually appropriated, even assimilated many of the notions that are most often associated with change in today's society, it also seems that this assimilation is one that is on the country's terms only. Notions of the city are subordinated to notions of the country. Change is appropriated, but in a way that maintains the status quo -- that perpetuates the essential country worldview, both locally and nationally. Such evidence of change may also suggest that the Leader's representation of Windsor, of Tamworth, is perhaps a state of mind rather than a state of being. It is a representation that taps into the imagination of the people rather than their everyday existence. In so doing, it worked to position over 85% of the population into voting a particular way in the 1995 and 1999 NSW State elections. It may also work to draw the many people from around Australia who bring their tourist dollars into Tamworth each year to celebrate country values through the Country Music Festival. The Tamworth culture may well uphold a construction of Australian identity that is outside the direct experience of those who live on the coastal fringes, yet it provides an attractive, even desirable holiday destination for many. Perhaps this is because people, country and city alike, continue to see the country as a place that offers them a simple solution to tensions and conflicts that are otherwise unresolvable. Change produces anxiety -- especially a postmodern change in which all semblances of certainty have been removed. On the other hand, the study suggests that the country worldview represents that which does not change. Its definitive nature stands in contrast and provides an alternative to the relativism of the city. Notions of country represent a surety in a world that is otherwise uncertain. References Aitkin, D. "Countrymindedness: The Spread of an Idea." Australian Cultural History 4 (1985): 34-41. Moore, A. "The Old Guard and 'Countrymindedness' during the Great Depression." Journal of Australian Studies 27 (1990): 54. Mules, W., T. Shirato, and B. Wigman. "Rural Identity within the Symbolic Order: Media Representations of the Drought." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. 242. 6. Papadakis, E., and C. Bean. "Independents and the Minor Parties: The Electoral System." Australian Journal of Political Science 30 (1995): 109. Share, P., G. Lawrence. "Fear and Loathing in Wagga Wagga: Cultural Representations of the Rural and Possible Policy Implications." Communication and Culture in Rural Areas. Ed. P. Share. Wagga Wagga: Charles Sturt UP, 1995. Turner, G. Making It National. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Ward, R. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1958. White, R. Inventing Australia. Sydney:Allen & Unwin, 1981. 16ff. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Catherine Richardson. "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php>. Chicago style: Catherine Richardson, "The Politics of a Country Culture: State of Mind or State of Being?," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Catherine Richardson. (2000) The politics of a country culture: state of mind or state of being?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/country.php> ([your date of access]).

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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IntroductionAustralia is at a particular point in its history where there is a noticeable diaspora of artists and creative practitioners away from the major capitals of Sydney and Melbourne (in particular), driven in no small part by ballooning house prices of the last eight years. This has meant big changes for some regional spaces, and in turn, for the face of Australian cultural life. Regional cultural precincts are forming with tourist flows, funding attention and cultural economies. Likewise, there appears to be growing consciousness in the ‘art centres’ of Melbourne and Sydney of interesting and relevant activities outside their limits. This research draws on my experience as an art practitioner, curator and social researcher in one such region (Castlemaine in Central Victoria), and particularly from a recent interview series I have conducted in collaboration with art space in that region, Wide Open Road Art. In this, 23 regional and city-based artists were asked about the social, economic and local conditions that can and have supported their art practices. Drawing from these conversations and Bourdieu’s ideas around cultural production, the article suggests that authentic, diverse, interesting and disruptive creative practices in Australian cultural life involve the increasingly pressing need for security while existing outside the modern imperative of high consumption; of finding alternative ways to live well while entering into the shared space of cultural production. Indeed, it is argued that often it is the capacity to defy key economic paradigms, for example of ‘rational (economic) self-interest’, that allows creative life to flourish (Bourdieu Field; Ley “Artists”). While regional spaces present new opportunities for this, there are pitfalls and nuances worth exploring.Changes in Regional AustraliaAustralia has long been an urbanising nation. Since Federation our cities have increased from a third to now constituting two-thirds of the country’s total population (Gray and Lawrence 6; ABS), making us one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Indeed, as machines replaced manual labour on farms; as Australia’s manufacturing industry began its decline; and as young people in particular left the country for city universities (Gray and Lawrence), the post-war industrial-economic boom drove this widespread demographic and economic shift. In the 1980s closures of regional town facilities like banks, schools and hospitals propelled widespread belief that regional Australia was in crisis and would be increasingly difficult to sustain (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; Gray and Lawrence 2; Barr et al.; ABS). However, the late 1990s and early 21st century saw a turnaround that has been referred to by some as the rise of the ‘sea change’. That is, widespread renewed interest and idealisation of not just coastal areas but anywhere outside the city (Murphy). It was a simultaneous pursuit of “a small ‘a’ alternative lifestyle” and escape from rising living costs in urban areas, especially for the unemployed, single parents and those with disabilities (Murphy). This renewed interest has been sustained. The latest wave, or series of waves, have coincided with the post-GFC house price spike, of cheap credit and lenient lending designed to stimulate the economy. This initiative in part led to Sydney and Melbourne median dwelling prices rising by up to 114% in eight years (Scutt 2017), which alone had a huge influence on who was able to afford to live in city areas and who was not. Rapid population increases and diminished social networks and familial support are also considered drivers that sent a wave of people (a million since 2011) towards the outer fringes of the cities and to ‘commuter belt’ country towns (Docherty; Murphy). While the underprivileged are clearly most disadvantaged in what has actually been a global development process (see Jayne on this, and on the city as a consumer itself), artists and creatives are also a unique category who haven’t fared well with hyper-urbanisation (Ley “Artists”). Despite the class privilege that often accompanies such a career choice, the economic disadvantage art professions often involve has seen a diaspora of artists moving to regional areas, particularly those in the hinterlands around and train lines to major centres. We see the recent ‘rise of a regional bohemia’ (Regional Australia Institute): towns like Toowoomba, Byron Bay, Surf Coast, Gold Coast-Tweed, Kangaroo Valley, Wollongong, Warburton, Bendigo, Tooyday, New Norfolk, and countless more being re-identified as arts towns and precincts. In Australia in 2016–17, 1 in 6 professional artists, and 1 in 4 visual artists, were living in a regional town (Throsby and Petetskaya). Creative arts in regional Australia makes up a quarter of the nation’s creative output and is a $2.8 billion industry; and our regions particularly draw in creative practitioners in their prime productive years (aged 24 to 44) (Regional Australia Institute).WORA Conservation SeriesIn 2018 artist and curator Helen Mathwin and myself received a local shire grant to record a conversation series with 23 artists who were based in the Central Goldfields region of Victoria as well as further afield, but who had a connection to the regional arts space we run, WideOpenRoadArt (WORA). In videoed, in-depth, approximately hour-long, semi-structured interviews conducted throughout 2018, we spoke to artists (16 women and 7 men) about the relocation phenomenon we were witnessing in our own growing arts town. Most were interviewed in WORA’s roving art float, but we seized any ad hoc opportunity we had to have genuine discussions with people. Focal points were around sustainability of practice and the social conditions that supported artists’ professional pursuits. This included accessing an arts community, circles of cultural production, and the ‘art centre’; the capacity to exhibit; but also, social factors such as affordable housing and the ability to live on a low-income while having dependants; and so on. The conversations were rich with lived experiences and insights on these issues.Financial ImperativesIn line with the discussion above, the most prominent factor we noticed in the interviews was the inescapable importance of being able to live cheaply. The consistent message that all of the interviewees, both regional- and city-based, conveyed was that a career in art-making required an important independence from the need to earn a substantial income. One interviewee commented: “I do run my art as a business, I have an ABN […] it makes a healthy loss! I don’t think I’ve ever made a profit […].” Another put it: “now that I’m in [this] town and I have a house and stuff I do feel like there is maybe a bit more security around those daily things that will hopefully give me space to [make artworks].”Much has been said on the pervasive inability to monetise art careers, notably Bourdieu’s observations that art exists on an interdependent field of cultural capital, determining for itself an autonomous conception of value separate to economics (Bourdieu, Field 39). This is somewhat similar to the idea of art as a sacred phenomenon irreducible to dollar terms (Abbing 38; see also Benjamin’s “aura”; “The Work of Art”). Art’s difficult relationship with commodification is part of its heroism that Benjamin described (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79), its potential to sanctify mainstream society by staying separate to the lowly aspirations of commerce (Ley “Artists” 2529). However, it is understood, artists still need to attain professional education and capacities, yet they remain at the bottom of the income ladder not only professionally, but in the case of visual artists, they remain at the bottom of the creative income hierarchies as well. Further to this, within visual arts, only a tiny proportion achieve financially backed success (Menger 277). “Artistic labour markets are characterised by high risk of failure, excess supply of recruits, low artistic income level, skewed income distribution and multiple jobholding” (Mangset, Torvik Heian, Kleppe, and Løyland; Menger). Mangset et al. point to ideas that have long surrounded the “charismatic artist myth,” of a quasi-metaphysical calling to be an artist that can lead one to overlook the profession’s vast pitfalls in terms of economic sustainability. One interviewee described it as follows: “From a very young age I wanted to be an artist […] so there’s never been a time that I’ve thought that’s not what I’m doing.” A 1% rule seems widely acknowledged in how the profession manages the financial winners against those who miss out; the tiny proportion of megastar artists versus a vast struggling remainder.As even successful artists often dip below the poverty line between paid engagements, housing costs can make the difference between being able to live in an area and not (Turnbull and Whitford). One artist described:[the reason we moved here from Melbourne] was financial, yes definitely. We wouldn’t have been able to purchase a property […] in Melbourne, we would not have been able to live in place that we wanted to live, and to do what we wanted to do […]. It was never an option for us to get a big mortgage.Another said:It partly came about as a financial practicality to move out here. My partner […] wanted to be in the bush, but I was resistant at first, we were in Melbourne but we just couldn’t afford Melbourne in the end, we had an apartment, we had a studio. My partner was a cabinet maker then. You know, just every month all our money went to rent and we just couldn’t manage anymore. So we thought, well maybe if we come out to the bush […] It was just by a happy accident that we found a property […] that we could afford, that was off-grid so it cut the bills down for us [...] that had a little studio and already had a little cottage on there that we could rent that out to get money.For a prominent artist we spoke to this issue was starkly reflected. Despite large exhibitions at some of the highest profile galleries in regional Victoria, the commissions offered for these shows were so insubstantial that the artist and their family had to take on staggering sums of personal debt to execute the ambitious and critically acclaimed shows. Another very successful artist we interviewed who had shown widely at ‘A-list’ international arts institutions and received several substantial grants, spoke of their dismay and pessimism at the idea of financial survival. For all artists we spoke to, pursuing their arts practice was in constant tension with economic imperatives, and their lives had all been shaped by the need to make shrewd decisions to continue practising. There were two artists out of the 23 we interviewed who considered their artwork able to provide full-time income, although this still relied on living costs remaining extremely low. “We are very lucky to have bought a very cheap property [in the country] that I can [also] have my workshop on, so I’m not paying for two properties in Melbourne […] So that certainly takes a fair bit of pressure off financially.” Their co-interviewee described this as “pretty luxurious!” Notably, the two who thought they could live off their art practices were both men, mid-career, whose works were large, spectacular festival items, which alongside the artists’ skill and hard work was also a factor in the type of remuneration received.Decongested LivingBeyond more affordable real estate and rental spaces, life outside our cities offers other benefits that have particular relevance to creative practitioners. Opera and festival director Lindy Hume described her move to the NSW South Coast in terms of space to think and be creative. “The abundance of time, space and silence makes living in places like [Hume’s town] ideal for creating new work” (Brown). And certainly, this was a theme that arose frequently in our interviews. Many of our regionally based artists were in part choosing the de-pressurised space of non-metro areas, and also seeking an embedded, daily connection to nature for themselves, their art-making process and their families. In one interview this was described as “dreamtime”. “Some of my more creative moments are out walking in the forest with the dog, that sort of semi-daydreamy thing where your mind is taken away by the place you’re in.”Creative HubsAll of our regional interviewees mentioned the value of the local community, as a general exchange, social support and like-minded connection, but also specifically of an arts community. Whether a tree change by choice or a more reactive move, the diaspora of artists, among others, has led to a type of rural renaissance in certain popular areas. Creative hubs located around the country, often in close proximity to the urban centres, are creating tremendous opportunities to network with other talented people doing interesting things, living in close proximity and often open to cross-fertilisation. One said: “[Castlemaine] is the best place in Australia, it has this insane cultural richness in a tiny town, you can’t go out and not meet people on the street […] For someone who has not had community in their life that is so gorgeous.” Another said:[Being an artist here] is kind of easy! Lots of people around to connect—with […] other artists but also creatively minded people [...] So it means you can just bump into someone from down the street and have an amazing conversation in five minutes about some amazing thing! […] There’s a concentration here that works.With these hubs, regional spaces are entering into a new relevance in the sphere of cultural production. They are generating unique and interesting local creative scenes for people to live amongst or visit, and generating strong local arts economies, tourist economies, and funding opportunities (Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans). Victoria in particular has burgeoned, with tourist flows to its regions increasing 13 per cent in 5 years and generating tourism worth $10 billion (Tourism Victoria). Victoria’s Greater Bendigo is Australia’s most popularly searched tourist destination on Trip Advisor, with tourism increasing 52% in 10 years (Boland). Simultaneously, funding flows have increased to regional zones, as governments seek to promote development outside Australia’s urban centres and are confident in the arts as a key strategy in boosting health, economies and overall wellbeing (see Rentschler, Bridson, and Evans; see also the 2018 Regional Centre for Culture initiative, Boland). The regions are also an increasingly relevant participant in national cultural life (Turnbull and Whitford; Mitchell; Simpson; Woodhead). Opportunities for an openness to productive exchange between regional and metropolitan sites appear to be growing, with regional festivals and art events gaining importance and unique attributes in the consciousness of the arts ‘centre’ (see for example Fairley; Simpson; Farrelly; Woodhead).Difficulties of Regional LocationDespite this, our interviews still brought to light the difficulties and barriers experienced living as a regional artist. For some, living in regional Victoria was an accepted set-back in their ambitions, something to be concealed and counteracted with education in reputable metropolitan art schools or city-based jobs. For others there was difficulty accessing a sympathetic arts community—although arts towns had vibrant cultures, certain types of creativity were preferred (often craft-based and more community-oriented). Practitioners who were active in maintaining their links to a metropolitan art scene voiced more difficulty in fitting in and successfully exhibiting their (often more conceptual or boundary-pushing) work in regional locations.The Gentrification ProblemThe other increasingly obvious issue in the revivification of some non-metropolitan areas is that they can and are already showing signs of being victims of their own success. That is, some regional arts precincts are attracting so many new residents that they are ceasing to be the low-cost, hospitable environments for artists they once were. Geographer David Ley has given attention to this particular pattern of gentrification that trails behind artists (Ley “Artists”). Ley draws from Florida’s ideas of late capitalism’s ascendency of creativity over the brute utilitarianism of the industrial era. This has got to the point that artists and creative professionals have an increasing capacity to shape and generate value in areas of life that were previous overlooked, especially with built environments (2529). Now more than ever, there is the “urbane middle-class” pursuing ‘the swirling milieu of artists, bohemians and immigrants” (Florida) as they create new, desirable landscapes with the “refuse of society” (Benjamin Charles Baudelaire 79; Ley New Middle Class). With Australia’s historic shifts in affordability in our major cities, this pattern that Ley identified in urban built environments can be seen across our states and regions as well.But with gentrification comes increased costs of living, as housing, shops and infrastructure all alter for an affluent consumer-resident. This diminishes what Bourdieu describes as “the suspension and removal of economic necessity” fundamental to the avant-garde (Bourdieu Distinction 54). That is to say, its relief from heavy pressure to materially survive is arguably critical to the reflexive, imaginative, and truly new offerings that art can provide. And as argued earlier, there seems an inbuilt economic irrationality in artmaking as a vocation—of dedicating one’s energy, time and resources to a pursuit that is notoriously impoverishing. But this irrationality may at the same time be critical to setting forth new ideas, perspectives, reflections and disruptions of taken-for-granted social assumptions, and why art is so indispensable in the first place (Bourdieu Field 39; Ley New Middle Class 2531; Weber on irrationality and the Enlightenment Project; also Adorno’s the ‘primitive’ in art). Australia’s cities, like those of most developed nations, increasingly demand we busy ourselves with the high-consumption of modern life that makes certain activities that sit outside this almost impossible. As gentrification unfolds from the metropolis to the regions, Australia faces a new level of far-reaching social inequality that has real consequences for who is able to participate in art-making, where these people can live, and ultimately what kind of diversity of ideas and voices participate in the generation of our national cultural life. ConclusionThe revival of some of Australia’s more popular regional towns has brought new life to some regional areas, particularly in reshaping their identities as cultural hubs worth experiencing, living amongst or supporting their development. Our interviews brought to life the significant benefits artists have experienced in relocating to country towns, whether by choice or necessity, as well as some setbacks. It was clear that economics played a major role in the demographic shift that took place in the area being examined; more specifically, that the general reorientation of social life towards consumption activities are having dramatic spatial consequences that we are currently seeing transform our major centres. The ability of art and creative practices to breathe new life into forgotten and devalued ideas and spaces is a foundational attribute but one that also creates a gentrification problem. Indeed, this is possibly the key drawback to the revivification of certain regional areas, alongside other prejudices and clashes between metro and regional cultures. It is argued that the transformative and redemptive actions art can perform need to involve the modern irrationality of not being transfixed by matters of economic materialism, so as to sit outside taken-for-granted value structures. This emphasises the importance of equality and open access in our spaces and landscapes if we are to pursue a vibrant, diverse and progressive national cultural sphere.ReferencesAbbing, Hans. Why Artists Are Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2002.Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge, 1983.Australian Bureau of Statistics. “Population Growth: Capital City Growth and Development.” 4102.0—Australian Social Trends. 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New York: Schocken Books, 1969.Boland, Brooke. “What It Takes to Be a Leading Regional Centre of Culture.” Arts Hub 18 July 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://www.artshub.com.au/festival/news-article/sponsored-content/festivals/brooke-boland/what-it-takes-to-be-a-leading-regional-centre-of-culture-256110>.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984.———. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.Brown, Bill. “‘Restless Giant’ Lures Queensland Opera’s Artistic Director Lindy Hume to the Regional Art Movement.” ABC News 13 Sep. 2017. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-12/regional-creative-industries-on-the-rise/8895842>.Docherty, Glenn. “Why 5 Million Australians Can’t Get to Work, Home or School on Time.” Sydney Morning Herald 17 Feb. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/why-5-million-australians-can-t-get-to-work-home-or-school-on-time-20190215-p50y1x.html>.Fairley, Gina. “Big Hit Exhibitions to See These Summer Holidays.” Arts Hub 14 Dec. 2018. 1 Mar. 2019 <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/news/visual-arts/gina-fairley/big-hit-exhibitions-to-see-these-summer-holidays-257016>.Farrelly, Kate. “Bendigo: The Regional City That’s Transformed into a Foodie and Cultural Hub.” Domain 9 Apr. 2019. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.domain.com.au/news/bendigo-the-regional-city-you-didnt-expect-to-become-a-foodie-and-cultural-hub-813317/>.Florida, Richard. “A Creative, Dynamic City Is an Open, Tolerant City.” The Globe and Mail 24 Jun. 2002: T8.Gray, Ian, and Geoffrey Lawrence. A Future For Regional Australia: Escaping Global Misfortune. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.Hume, Lindy. Restless Giant: Changing Cultural Values in Regional Australia. Strawberry Hills: Currency House, 2017.Jayne, Mark. Cities and Consumption. London: Routledge, 2005.Ley, David. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.———. “Artists, Aestheticisation and Gentrification.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2527–44.Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Artistic Labor Markets: Contingent Works, Excess Supply and Occupational Risk Management.” Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. Eds. Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2006. 766–811.Mangset, Per, Mari Torvik Heian, Bard Kleppe and Knut Løyland. “Why Are Artists Getting Poorer: About the Reproduction of Low Income among Artists.” International Journal of Cultural Policy 24.4 (2018): 539-58.Mitchell, Scott. “Want to Start Collecting Art But Don’t Know Where to Begin? Trust Your Own Taste, plus More Tips.” ABC Life, 31 Mar. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/life/tips-for-buying-art-starting-collection/10084036>.Murphy, Peter. “Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia.” Transformations 2 (March 2002).Regional Australia Institute. “The Rise of the Regional Bohemians.” Regional Australia Institute 24 May. 2017. 1 Mar. 2019 <http://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/home/2017/05/rise-regional-bohemians-painting-new-picture-arts-culture-regional-australia/>.Rentschler, Ruth, Kerrie Bridson, and Jody Evans. Regional Arts Australia Stats and Stories: The Impact of the Arts in Regional Australia. Regional Arts Australia [n.d.]. <https://www.cacwa.org.au/documents/item/477>.Simpson, Andrea. “The Regions: Delivering Exceptional Arts Experiences to the Community.” ArtsHub 11 Apr. 2019. <https://visual.artshub.com.au/news-article/sponsored-content/visual-arts/andrea-simpson/the-regions-delivering-exceptional-arts-experiences-to-the-community-257752>.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

Special Care Notice This article contains images of deceased people that might cause sadness or distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers. Introduction Like many cities, Perth was founded on wetlands that have been integral to its history and culture (Seddon 226–32). However, in order to promote a settlement agenda, early mapmakers sought to erase the city’s wetlands from cartographic depictions (Giblett, Cities). Since the colonial era, inner-Perth’s swamps and lakes have been drained, filled, significantly reduced in size, or otherwise reclaimed for urban expansion (Bekle). Not only have the swamps and lakes physically disappeared, the memories of their presence and influence on the city’s development over time are also largely forgotten. What was the site of Perth, specifically its wetlands, like before British settlement? In 2014, an interdisciplinary team at Edith Cowan University developed a digital visualisation process to re-imagine Perth prior to colonisation. This was based on early maps of the Swan River Colony and a range of archival information. The images depicted the city’s topography, hydrology, and vegetation and became the centerpiece of a physical exhibition entitled Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands and a virtual exhibition hosted by the Western Australian Museum. Alongside historic maps, paintings, photographs, and writings, the visual reconstruction of Perth aimed to foster appreciation of the pre-settlement environment—the homeland of the Whadjuck Nyoongar, or Bibbulmun, people (Carter and Nutter). The exhibition included the narrative of Fanny Balbuk, a Nyoongar woman who voiced her indignation over the “usurping of her beloved home ground” (Bates, The Passing 69) by flouting property lines and walking through private residences to reach places of cultural significance. Beginning with Balbuk’s story and the digital tracing of her walking route through colonial Perth, this article discusses the project in the context of contemporary pressures on the city’s extant wetlands. The re-imagining of Perth through historically, culturally, and geographically-grounded digital visualisation approaches can inspire the conservation of its wetlands heritage. Balbuk’s Walk through the City For many who grew up in Perth, Fanny Balbuk’s perambulations have achieved legendary status in the collective cultural imagination. In his memoir, David Whish-Wilson mentions Balbuk’s defiant walks and the lighting up of the city for astronaut John Glenn in 1962 as the two stories that had the most impact on his Perth childhood. From Gordon Stephenson House, Whish-Wilson visualises her journey in his mind’s eye, past Government House on St Georges Terrace (the main thoroughfare through the city centre), then north on Barrack Street towards the railway station, the site of Lake Kingsford where Balbuk once gathered bush tucker (4). He considers the footpaths “beneath the geometric frame of the modern city […] worn smooth over millennia that snake up through the sheoak and marri woodland and into the city’s heart” (Whish-Wilson 4). Balbuk’s story embodies the intertwined culture and nature of Perth—a city of wetlands. Born in 1840 on Heirisson Island, Balbuk (also known as Yooreel) (Figure 1) had ancestral bonds to the urban landscape. According to Daisy Bates, writing in the early 1900s, the Nyoongar term Matagarup, or “leg deep,” denotes the passage of shallow water near Heirisson Island where Balbuk would have forded the Swan River (“Oldest” 16). Yoonderup was recorded as the Nyoongar name for Heirisson Island (Bates, “Oldest” 16) and the birthplace of Balbuk’s mother (Bates, “Aboriginal”). In the suburb of Shenton Park near present-day Lake Jualbup, her father bequeathed to her a red ochre (or wilgi) pit that she guarded fervently throughout her life (Bates, “Aboriginal”).Figure 1. Group of Aboriginal Women at Perth, including Fanny Balbuk (far right) (c. 1900). Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: 44c). Balbuk’s grandparents were culturally linked to the site. At his favourite camp beside the freshwater spring near Kings Park on Mounts Bay Road, her grandfather witnessed the arrival of Lieutenant-Colonel Frederick Irwin, cousin of James Stirling (Bates, “Fanny”). In 1879, colonial entrepreneurs established the Swan Brewery at this significant locale (Welborn). Her grandmother’s gravesite later became Government House (Bates, “Fanny”) and she protested vociferously outside “the stone gates guarded by a sentry [that] enclosed her grandmother’s burial ground” (Bates, The Passing 70). Balbuk’s other grandmother was buried beneath Bishop’s Grove, the residence of the city’s first archibishop, now Terrace Hotel (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Historian Bob Reece observes that Balbuk was “the last full-descent woman of Kar’gatta (Karrakatta), the Bibbulmun name for the Mount Eliza [Kings Park] area of Perth” (134). According to accounts drawn from Bates, her home ground traversed the area between Heirisson Island and Perth’s north-western limits. In Kings Park, one of her relatives was buried near a large, hollow tree used by Nyoongar people like a cistern to capture water and which later became the site of the Queen Victoria Statue (Bates, “Aboriginal”). On the slopes of Mount Eliza, the highest point of Kings Park, at the western end of St Georges Terrace, she harvested plant foods, including zamia fruits (Macrozamia riedlei) (Bates, “Fanny”). Fanny Balbuk’s knowledge contributed to the native title claim lodged by Nyoongar people in 2006 as Bennell v. State of Western Australia—the first of its kind to acknowledge Aboriginal land rights in a capital city and part of the larger Single Nyoongar Claim (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council et al.). Perth’s colonial administration perceived the city’s wetlands as impediments to progress and as insalubrious environments to be eradicated through reclamation practices. For Balbuk and other Nyoongar people, however, wetlands were “nourishing terrains” (Rose) that afforded sustenance seasonally and meaning perpetually (O’Connor, Quartermaine, and Bodney). Mary Graham, a Kombu-merri elder from Queensland, articulates the connection between land and culture, “because land is sacred and must be looked after, the relation between people and land becomes the template for society and social relations. Therefore all meaning comes from land.” Traditional, embodied reliance on Perth’s wetlands is evident in Bates’ documentation. For instance, Boojoormeup was a “big swamp full of all kinds of food, now turned into Palmerston and Lake streets” (Bates, “Aboriginal”). Considering her cultural values, Balbuk’s determination to maintain pathways through the increasingly colonial Perth environment is unsurprising (Figure 2). From Heirisson Island: a straight track had led to the place where once she had gathered jilgies [crayfish] and vegetable food with the women, in the swamp where Perth railway station now stands. Through fences and over them, Balbuk took the straight track to the end. When a house was built in the way, she broke its fence-palings with her digging stick and charged up the steps and through the rooms. (Bates, The Passing 70) One obstacle was Hooper’s Fence, which Balbuk broke repeatedly on her trips to areas between Kings Park and the railway station (Bates, “Hooper’s”). Her tenacious commitment to walking ancestral routes signifies the friction between settlement infrastructure and traditional Nyoongar livelihood during an era of rapid change. Figure 2. Determination of Fanny Balbuk’s Journey between Yoonderup (Heirisson Island) and Lake Kingsford, traversing what is now the central business district of Perth on the Swan River (2014). Image background prepared by Dimitri Fotev. Track interpolation by Jeff Murray. Project Background and Approach Inspired by Fanny Balbuk’s story, Re-imagining Perth’s Lost Wetlands began as an Australian response to the Mannahatta Project. Founded in 1999, that project used spatial analysis techniques and mapping software to visualise New York’s urbanised Manhattan Island—or Mannahatta as it was called by indigenous people—in the early 1600s (Sanderson). Based on research into the island’s original biogeography and the ecological practices of Native Americans, Mannahatta enabled the public to “peel back” the city’s strata, revealing the original composition of the New York site. The layers of visuals included rich details about the island’s landforms, water systems, and vegetation. Mannahatta compelled Rod Giblett, a cultural researcher at Edith Cowan University, to develop an analogous model for visualising Perth circa 1829. The idea attracted support from the City of Perth, Landgate, and the University. Using stories, artefacts, and maps, the team—comprising a cartographer, designer, three-dimensional modelling expert, and historical researchers—set out to generate visualisations of the landscape at the time of British colonisation. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup approved culturally sensitive material and contributed his perspective on Aboriginal content to include in the exhibition. The initiative’s context remains pressing. In many ways, Perth has become a template for development in the metropolitan area (Weller). While not unusual for a capital, the rate of transformation is perhaps unexpected in a city less than 200 years old (Forster). There also remains a persistent view of existing wetlands as obstructions to progress that, once removed, are soon forgotten (Urban Bushland Council). Digital visualisation can contribute to appreciating environments prior to colonisation but also to re-imagining possibilities for future human interactions with land, water, and space. Despite the rapid pace of change, many Perth area residents have memories of wetlands lost during their lifetimes (for example, Giblett, Forrestdale). However, as the clearing and drainage of the inner city occurred early in settlement, recollections of urban wetlands exist exclusively in historical records. In 1935, a local correspondent using the name “Sandgroper” reminisced about swamps, connecting them to Perth’s colonial heritage: But the Swamps were very real in fact, and in name in the [eighteen-] Nineties, and the Perth of my youth cannot be visualised without them. They were, of course, drying up apace, but they were swamps for all that, and they linked us directly with the earliest days of the Colony when our great-grandparents had founded this City of Perth on a sort of hog's-back, of which Hay-street was the ridge, and from which a succession of streamlets ran down its southern slope to the river, while land locked to the north of it lay a series of lakes which have long since been filled to and built over so that the only evidence that they have ever existed lies in the original street plans of Perth prepared by Roe and Hillman in the early eighteen-thirties. A salient consequence of the loss of ecological memory is the tendency to repeat the miscues of the past, especially the blatant disregard for natural and cultural heritage, as suburbanisation engulfs the area. While the swamps of inner Perth remain only in the names of streets, existing wetlands in the metropolitan area are still being threatened, as the Roe Highway (Roe 8) Campaign demonstrates. To re-imagine Perth’s lost landscape, we used several colonial survey maps to plot the location of the original lakes and swamps. At this time, a series of interconnecting waterbodies, known as the Perth Great Lakes, spread across the north of the city (Bekle and Gentilli). This phase required the earliest cartographic sources (Figure 3) because, by 1855, city maps no longer depicted wetlands. We synthesised contextual information, such as well depths, geological and botanical maps, settlers’ accounts, Nyoongar oral histories, and colonial-era artists’ impressions, to produce renderings of Perth. This diverse collection of primary and secondary materials served as the basis for creating new images of the city. Team member Jeff Murray interpolated Balbuk’s route using historical mappings and accounts, topographical data, court records, and cartographic common sense. He determined that Balbuk would have camped on the high ground of the southern part of Lake Kingsford rather than the more inundated northern part (Figure 2). Furthermore, she would have followed a reasonably direct course north of St Georges Terrace (contrary to David Whish-Wilson’s imaginings) because she was barred from Government House for protesting. This easier route would have also avoided the springs and gullies that appear on early maps of Perth. Figure 3. Townsite of Perth in Western Australia by Colonial Draftsman A. Hillman and John Septimus Roe (1838). This map of Perth depicts the wetlands that existed overlaid by the geomentric grid of the new city. Image Credit: State Library of Western Australia (Image Number: BA1961/14). Additionally, we produced an animated display based on aerial photographs to show the historical extent of change. Prompted by the build up to World War II, the earliest aerial photography of Perth dates from the late 1930s (Dixon 148–54). As “Sandgroper” noted, by this time, most of the urban wetlands had been drained or substantially modified. The animation revealed considerable alterations to the formerly swampy Swan River shoreline. Most prominent was the transformation of the Matagarup shallows across the Swan River, originally consisting of small islands. Now traversed by a causeway, this area was transformed into a single island, Heirisson—the general site of Balbuk’s birth. The animation and accompanying materials (maps, images, and writings) enabled viewers to apprehend the changes in real time and to imagine what the city was once like. Re-imagining Perth’s Urban Heart The physical environment of inner Perth includes virtually no trace of its wetland origins. Consequently, we considered whether a representation of Perth, as it existed previously, could enhance public understanding of natural heritage and thereby increase its value. For this reason, interpretive materials were exhibited centrally at Perth Town Hall. Built partly by convicts between 1867 and 1870, the venue is close to the site of the 1829 Foundation of Perth, depicted in George Pitt Morrison’s painting. Balbuk’s grandfather “camped somewhere in the city of Perth, not far from the Town Hall” (Bates, “Fanny”). The building lies one block from the site of the railway station on the site of Lake Kingsford, the subsistence grounds of Balbuk and her forebears: The old swamp which is now the Perth railway yards had been a favourite jilgi ground; a spring near the Town Hall had been a camping place of Maiago […] and others of her fathers' folk; and all around and about city and suburbs she had gathered roots and fished for crayfish in the days gone by. (Bates, “Derelicts” 55) Beginning in 1848, the draining of Lake Kingsford reached completion during the construction of the Town Hall. While the swamps of the city were not appreciated by many residents, some organisations, such as the Perth Town Trust, vigorously opposed the reclamation of the lake, alluding to its hydrological role: That, the soil being sand, it is not to be supposed that Lake Kingsford has in itself any material effect on the wells of Perth; but that, from this same reason of the sandy soil, it would be impossible to keep the lake dry without, by so doing, withdrawing the water from at least the adjacent parts of the townsite to the same depth. (Independent Journal of Politics and News 3) At the time of our exhibition, the Lake Kingsford site was again being reworked to sink the railway line and build Yagan Square, a public space named after a colonial-era Nyoongar leader. The project required specialised construction techniques due to the high water table—the remnants of the lake. People travelling to the exhibition by train in October 2014 could have seen the lake reasserting itself in partly-filled depressions, flush with winter rain (Figure 4).Figure 4. Rise of the Repressed (2014). Water Rising in the former site of Lake Kingsford/Irwin during construction, corner of Roe and Fitzgerald Streets, Northbridge, WA. Image Credit: Nandi Chinna (2014). The exhibition was situated in the Town Hall’s enclosed undercroft designed for markets and more recently for shops. While some visited after peering curiously through the glass walls of the undercroft, others hailed from local and state government organisations. Guest comments applauded the alternative view of Perth we presented. The content invited the public to re-imagine Perth as a city of wetlands that were both environmentally and culturally important. A display panel described how the city’s infrastructure presented a hindrance for Balbuk as she attempted to negotiate the once-familiar route between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford (Figure 2). Perth’s growth “restricted Balbuk’s wanderings; towns, trains, and farms came through her ‘line of march’; old landmarks were thus swept away, and year after year saw her less confident of the locality of one-time familiar spots” (Bates, “Fanny”). Conserving Wetlands: From Re-Claiming to Re-Valuing? Imagination, for philosopher Roger Scruton, involves “thinking of, and attending to, a present object (by thinking of it, or perceiving it, in terms of something absent)” (155). According to Scruton, the feelings aroused through imagination can prompt creative, transformative experiences. While environmental conservation tends to rely on data-driven empirical approaches, it appeals to imagination less commonly. We have found, however, that attending to the present object (the city) in terms of something absent (its wetlands) through evocative visual material can complement traditional conservation agendas focused on habitats and species. The actual extent of wetlands loss in the Swan Coastal Plain—the flat and sandy region extending from Jurien Bay south to Cape Naturaliste, including Perth—is contested. However, estimates suggest that 80 per cent of wetlands have been lost, with remaining habitats threatened by climate change, suburban development, agriculture, and industry (Department of Environment and Conservation). As with the swamps and lakes of the inner city, many regional wetlands were cleared, drained, or filled before they could be properly documented. Additionally, the seasonal fluctuations of swampy places have never been easily translatable to two-dimensional records. As Giblett notes, the creation of cartographic representations and the assignment of English names were attempts to fix the dynamic boundaries of wetlands, at least in the minds of settlers and administrators (Postmodern 72–73). Moreover, European colonists found the Western Australian landscape, including its wetlands, generally discomfiting. In a letter from 1833, metaphors failed George Fletcher Moore, the effusive colonial commentator, “I cannot compare these swamps to any marshes with which you are familiar” (220). The intermediate nature of wetlands—as neither land nor lake—is perhaps one reason for their cultural marginalisation (Giblett, Postmodern 39). The conviction that unsanitary, miasmic wetlands should be converted to more useful purposes largely prevailed (Giblett, Black 105–22). Felicity Morel-EdnieBrown’s research into land ownership records in colonial Perth demonstrated that town lots on swampland were often preferred. By layering records using geographic information systems (GIS), she revealed modifications to town plans to accommodate swampland frontages. The decline of wetlands in the region appears to have been driven initially by their exploitation for water and later for fertile soil. Northern market gardens supplied the needs of the early city. It is likely that the depletion of Nyoongar bush foods predated the flourishing of these gardens (Carter and Nutter). Engaging with the history of Perth’s swamps raises questions about the appreciation of wetlands today. In an era where numerous conservation strategies and alternatives have been developed (for example, Bobbink et al. 93–220), the exploitation of wetlands in service to population growth persists. On Perth’s north side, wetlands have long been subdued by controlling their water levels and landscaping their boundaries, as the suburban examples of Lake Monger and Hyde Park (formerly Third Swamp Reserve) reveal. Largely unmodified wetlands, such as Forrestdale Lake, exist south of Perth, but they too are in danger (Giblett, Black Swan). The Beeliar Wetlands near the suburb of Bibra Lake comprise an interconnected series of lakes and swamps that are vulnerable to a highway extension project first proposed in the 1950s. Just as the Perth Town Trust debated Lake Kingsford’s draining, local councils and the public are fiercely contesting the construction of the Roe Highway, which will bisect Beeliar Wetlands, destroying Roe Swamp (Chinna). The conservation value of wetlands still struggles to compete with traffic planning underpinned by a modernist ideology that associates cars and freeways with progress (Gregory). Outside of archives, the debate about Lake Kingsford is almost entirely forgotten and its physical presence has been erased. Despite the magnitude of loss, re-imagining the city’s swamplands, in the way that we have, calls attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities. We hope that the re-imagining of Perth’s wetlands stimulates public respect for ancestral tracks and songlines like Balbuk’s. Despite the accretions of settler history and colonial discourse, songlines endure as a fundamental cultural heritage. Nyoongar elder Noel Nannup states, “as people, if we can get out there on our songlines, even though there may be farms or roads overlaying them, fences, whatever it is that might impede us from travelling directly upon them, if we can get close proximity, we can still keep our culture alive. That is why it is so important for us to have our songlines.” Just as Fanny Balbuk plied her songlines between Yoonderup and Lake Kingsford, the traditional custodians of Beeliar and other wetlands around Perth walk the landscape as an act of resistance and solidarity, keeping the stories of place alive. Acknowledgments The authors wish to acknowledge Rod Giblett (ECU), Nandi Chinna (ECU), Susanna Iuliano (ECU), Jeff Murray (Kareff Consulting), Dimitri Fotev (City of Perth), and Brendan McAtee (Landgate) for their contributions to this project. The authors also acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands upon which this paper was researched and written. 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