Abstract

We suggest that in order to begin to understand the impact of the drought crisis of the 1990s, the modern day legacy of a rural mythology which continues to underpin what could be called the 'collective consciousness' of present Rural Australia needs to be explicated.. The mythological concept of pioneering the rural is a crucial one - as here the struggles against the elements play a vital role in the heroic - Man v. Nature. Nature - and by extension the Natural Man - can live together in harmony, but occasionally clash. The manifestations of these clashes are in the experiences of 'natural disasters' - floods, bushfires and droughts. In the past 100 years, drought in particular has become a defining characteristic of rural Australia - from Lawson's stories, where the countryside is always portrayed as 'unyielding, desolate, drought-ridden' (Hirst, 1992:213) - to the current media interest in the impact of the drought in the early part of the current decade.

It would appear that the drought crisis, together with the ongoing process of rural restructuring and devaluation of commodity prices, is precipitating a move away from rural areas as these 'spaces' lose their production value. Underlying the so-called 'rural crisis' is a concept of 'rural Australia' that is both historical and nationalistic. Its mythology involves notions of masculinity, individualism, and patriotism. This paper begins to draw together, through a concept of discourse(s), the way in which the lingering mythological notion of 'the rural' needs to be challenged. We argue that in order to allow the emergence of a genuine understanding of the lives of those families who live beyond the eastern seaboard those of us who live in urban Australia should begin to understand the way in which dominant discourses frame the 'rural' and deny the reality of lived experience(s).

What is the experience like for those who have been/are living through it? How does the relentlessness of it become absorbed into daily lives and managed ? Elsewhere (see Bulis et al 1996b) we describe the way in which the drought of the 1990s has been redefined and reconstructed by policy makers and politicians from a natural disaster to a farm management issue. We also describe how the experience has impacted on women (see Bulis et al 1996a) communities (see Gray et al 1996; Stehlik et al 1996b) and farm management practice (see Lawrence et al 1996). We argue that the process of change within rural communities can be viewed as a lived experience, both communally, familially and individually.

The Rural Social and Economic Research Centre, located at Central Queensland University (Rockhampton campus), and the Rural Social Research Centre at Charles Sturt University (Wagga Wagga campus) received funding from the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation in December 1995 to undertake a two year study of the effect of the drought of the 1990s on farm families. The study, being undertaken in the Riverina district of New South Wales with sheep/wheat producers and in the Central Queensland area around Rockhampton with cattle producers, is the first of its kind in Australia. To date, a number of papers have been written detailing our reflections on information gathered during the first year of research. Our interviews at both sites are now completed and we are currently re-interviewing a small number of these families to develop our case study profiles. In 1997, the analysis of our data commences in more detail.

This paper begins to draw together, through a concept of discourse(s), the way in which the lingering mythological notion of 'the rural' needs to be challenged in order to allow the emergence of a genuine understanding of the lives of those families who live beyond the eastern seaboard. It begins by establishing the historical legacy of such mythology, and the way in which it is impacting on current political decision making. The intensity of the experience of the drought on rural families is, we would argue, much more than just economic or emotional. The experience of the drought has highlighted for many rural families their belief in an essential difference between them and other, urban, Australians. Their wish is not to have that difference mythologised and thereby elided, but to have it recognised and, in a sense, celebrated. Such recognition would, we argue, involved a strong challenge and a final farewell to bush mythology and instead foreground a recognition of the importance of rural Australia to urban Australia.

In addition, many rural people are coming to believe that the consequences of this drought and the concurrent decline in commodity prices for some sectors of the agricultural community, will have long term repercussions - particularly, in the context of this Conference, that the kind of community in which rural families have lived will not be the rural community of the 21st century. This paper focuses on the current discourses which define drought and the way in which rural mythology frames such discourses and the resultant consequences for families. Here we will primarily be using material gained from the Central Queensland component of the study.

Charles Lemert (1995) describes discourse as being within an 'uncomfortable social space in which knowledge is no longer the foundation of that which is, where instead language both is the universal problematic and, insofar as 'knowledge; is concerned, is all that is' (p. 269). As such, a discursive approach would demand the 'uprooting of deeply ingrained convictions' including dualities such as subject/object and acceptance of the scientific model of knowledge (p. 269). Toby Miller describes discourse as an 'area in which knowledge is produced and operates, both overtly and in a less than overt way. It fixes norms, elaborates criteria and hence makes it possible to speak of and treat a given problem at a particular time' (Miller, 1993: xiv). What are the 'rules' of such discourse? Miller suggests they are '... what it is to be human; what it is to be social; and the procedures and institutions that circulate such information'(1993: xiv). Such discourses are formed socially, culturally, historically, politically and economically. In other words, we can have conflicting discourses about the same issue but some discourses predominate and become the ones within which others are framed. As Chris Weedon describes, some discourses will support and promote the essential status quo, while others will offer a resistance to it. In the process of the resistance, the dominant discourse(s) will 'marginalize and dismiss the alternative voices' (1987: 35). The way in which discourses are structured also determines who is able to participate in them, and who is marginalised from them. Such discourse becomes framed by other discourses and consequently 'discursive events - whether written or spoken - are guided, constrained, and organised by rules 'never formulated in their own right' '(Foucault cited in Alcoff and Gray, 1993: 265).

Elsewhere (see Lawrence et al 1996) we discuss the way in which conventional assessments of drought have tended to 'frame' the dominant discourses. Mostly, as we argue, these are scientific/technological discourses which involve rainfall deficiency, the period of deficiency, and rainfall variability. We also discuss the way in which this discourse has come to frame government policies. We suggest that farm management under drought conditions is now viewed as a 'challenge' one which producers should be planning for ahead of time. As a so-called 'normal feature of the Australian climate, and hence, of agriculture' (Land Management Task Force, 1995: 31) drought is something the individual producers now needs to anticipate as a normal event, and plan for it. This is despite strong arguments from producers that the length of the drought is something no-one can plan for.

We would argue that underpinning such overt policy discourses are hidden cultural, historical and ideological ones which need to be explicated in order to begin to understand the impact of the drought of the 1990s on Australian farm families. This debate includes issues of what 'rural' means, nationalism and patriotism, masculinities and 'the bush'; the ideology of individualism as well as that of 'community'. Before I discuss some of these in more detail, I want to first place that current mythology discourse historically.

Nationalism, the Bush and rural mythology

At the end of Australia's 'long boom' of the 1950s and 1960s, and looking back over the previous fifty years, Emeritus Professor Fred Alexander (1967) wrote that 'Australian civilization is no longer predominantly rural but mainly urban in character; what is more, it is largely metropolitan'. Despite what he termed the 'obviousness' of this, Alexander argued that too many still consider the quintessential Australian to be 'essentially a bushman and a lover of the great outback .... He [sic] is an individualist - a little crude, perhaps and uncultivated - but self-reliant, with a strong sense of mateship and a healthy community spirit. Any deviation from this artificially constructed image' suggests Alexander 'tends to be written off as un-Australian ... [while it] is recognised that Australians have been 'forced' to live in cities ... it is implied that they have carried with them there not only their love of sport, sunshine and the outdoor life but also the individualism, the courage and the self-reliance of their original, rural, pioneering ancestors' (1967: 310). Alexander was writing at a time when Australia was very consciously attempting to become a more sophisticated member of the international community - by leaving behind its previously essentially agrarian persona and with complacency and confidence, reaching for a cosmopolitan, more technological future.

The mythic persona of the Australian as the tamer of 'wide open spaces' and of 'bronzed Aussies' colonising the inland with a pioneering spirit and a determined individualism tied up with 'mateship' and giving everyone a 'fair go', was well established by the 1920s. With the expansion of rural Australia by returned service men - the so-called 'soldier settlers' - the 'bush myth' also became tied up with that of 'the Anzac legend' as it emerged by the end of World War I. As Stephen Alomes suggests this legend

... influenced a new celebration of bush Australia. Not the bush of the shearer or drover, but of the pioneer and settler, the squatter and small farmer, the bourgeois proprietor not the egalitarian worker. Its mythic rural Australianness expressed the ruling conception of countries like Australia, New Zealand and Canada as part of an imperial farm. ... The pioneer image, like that later used by multinational mining companies, stressed enterprise and individualism, and rewards for hard work and endeavour rather than bush mateship and solidarity ... The 'bush Australia' myth encouraged acceptance of the idea of a simple, provincial society looking to the imperial metropolis for guidance and expertise while providing it with fruits of the land (1988: 68-71).

In her groundbreaking text Damned Whores and God's Police, Anne Summers points out the 'enduring and often ... determining effect [literature has] on the image a country has of itself' (1975: 36), and in the case of Australia, this image was dominated by that of the 'Australian Man of the Bush, ... [a] 'brash, rugged, sardonic individual' (p. 36) - and this was a Bush where there was no central place for women or families. Of course there were women (and children) in the Australian rural hinterland at this time and as Summers and later, other feminist historians point out, there were also women writing about women's lives - authors such as Barbara Baynton, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Mary Gilmore and Henrietta Drake-Brockman - however in literature as in life 'they were not allowed 'to rival their husband's monopolization of the national characteristics ... Nor was it easy for a woman writer who wanted to try and depict with some honesty and understanding what life in the bush looked like from the furnace-like kitchen or the unattended child-bed' (1975:37-38). Contemporary feminist historian Marilyn Lake argues that the mythology of the Bushman on the late 19th and early 20th centuries has left its legacy on modern day Australia. She writes that 'men's cultural practices ... have profound implications for women and children and there were particularly injurious consequences of the style of masculinity propagated by the champions of the Bushman (1992: 161). In this sense, the feminist challenges to 'histories of the nation' as Gail Reekie suggests 'lies in its fracturing of a false unity and in its revelation of the hidden masculine assumptions around which the nation is invented' (192:155).

At the end of the 20th century, at a time when Australians are re-considering their nationality and the possibility of a republican future, and their place in a world framed by our position within an Asia/Pacific region, it could be argued that we are still essentially ambivalent about our cultural consciousness. We still respond to the notion that we are essentially rural creatures transplanted against our will in urban metropolises around the eastern seaboard of the continent. To many of us 'the bush' evokes a natural, pristine essentially good place which may be less than the city we live in, but somehow it is still morally our national conscience. We respond emotionally to the ideology of the pioneering spirit, the challenge against the unknown, the concept of 'the rural' - all essentially framed within a masculinist discourse. When asked, for example, to describe a 'typical Australian' most of us still respond with stereotypes that revert to such mythology. Yet most of us continue to live on the eastern seaboard and most of us know little or nothing about the lives of those people whom we mythologise. The reality of family life in rural Australia, the notion of the lives of women and children (as well as men) in that environment, is less understood. Thus the concept of the resourceful, independent, beholden to no-one 'Bushman' - is still one which draws us and one with which we as Australians, continue to identify - although perhaps now more subtly than overtly .

Alternative discourses?

Drought as a defining experience is seen as something that is shared across communities and regions and even the States of the Commonwealth. Elsewhere (see Gray et al 1996) we discuss how drought has been presented as a problem common to all Australians due to their economic dependence on agriculture, but how in fact, it is most directly a problem for those people who are dependent on agriculture, that is farm families and the rural communities which depend on local agricultural production. In an analysis of a sample of a variety of documents (including media, parliamentary debates and reports) about drought discourses in Australia over the past 100 years, West and Smith (1996) suggest that 'droughts are consistently defined as unexpectedly severe in their intensity or duration' and that this in turn acts to define drought as an 'alien force against which society must unite' (pp. 94-95) and how this resonates with important Australian myths about people's struggle with the elements. Putting to one side issues associated with West and Smith's methodology and analysis (see Lawrence et al 1996 and Gray et al 1996 for more detailed critique), the concept of drought appealing to the mythology of the rural and allowing for a redefinition of the alien force is a useful one to begin to explore the way in which the drought has impacted on what people in rural Australia perceive as their 'quality of life' (see Stehlik et al 1996b).

In a cliched way, the drought of the 1990s has become 'part of the landscape' - by this we mean that it has, in the public mind, moved from 'crisis' to just 'being there'. In the early months, particularly after about the fourth season (1993/4) there was a great deal of attention from the media, politicians and others not usually involved in the rural community, on the effect of the drought on families - this has now essentially dissipated. As one woman producer during our interview put it:

' ... it is like flogging a dead horse, I think. People get sick of it ... the TV tendency these days ... is cyclone and forget about it whereas the drought is just a constant, ongoing, boring thing ... there is only so much you can say and it is really only giving their impression of the drought but it is the nature of drought it is different, it is really difficult to explain to people that it is ongoing. It is not one-off you are going to lose something and then you can start afresh. You just have to wait until it is over'

In the discussion between urban and rural the ideology of community within the rural context is just as powerful as it is within the urban (see for example, Martinez-Brawley, 1990). There is a 'particular force' such ideology has in rural society - as it appears to be seeking a 'lost golden age of communal solidarity' (Crow and Allan, 1993: 81). Martinez-Brawley suggests that part of the 'nostalgia' for community is based on a sense that the 'family is perceived to be weakening and becoming more remote from each person' (1990: 25). As we know in Australia, many city dwellers are leaving the urban sprawl for acreages, farmlets, or blocks in the nearby countryside. British sociologists, Crow and Allan (1993) outline some of these trends in England - where an urban middle class population of commuters and retired people make their way to what they perceive as unspoiled countryside to live. These people are then perceived as 'immigrants' by the locals who, as a survival mechanism, retreat into an ideology of localism (p. 82). In other words a sense of them v. us becomes stronger as the locals identify who they are not and so the very 'community' that the urban immigrants seek is essentially denied to them.

Additional to this, and evident in the Central Queensland region, is the in-migration of people into the rural environment who have no connection with rural Australia, but are there to undertake activities within other industries, specifically, mining and tourism. It is a paradox that while some parts of rural Australia are experiencing decline, others, - specifically mining communities and coastal regions are experiencing growth. Here, there is a transition of power within communities - where once the power resided within the agrarian based communities, now it has shifted to those centres focussed on mining (see Stehlik et al 1996b). As we discuss in an earlier paper, cultural differentiation and structural relationships within groups in rural Australia is changing (Gray et al 1996), as the traditional hierarchy of graziers, farmers and townspeople is being redefined through impact of out-migration of particularly itinerant employees, diminution of properties in the selling off of farms, and the changing roles of women. In addition, those rural families who are specifically undertaking agricultural pursuits, view such in-migration with ambivalence, particularly (and understandably) the transition of power to those with the economic resources. What is viewed with increasing alarm is the movement of 'urban' families into rural environments - particularly small communities - as an alternative to public housing shortages in regional or urban centres. Such families are offered all kinds of financial incentives to encourage them to settle in rural environments. They are not there by choice, and as a result, are resented by the 'locals'. Decisions being undertaken within a policy context which may be rational and logical, become issues of contention within the rural environment in which they are played out. The assumption of the policy is that 'community' still exists whereas one male cattle producer, reflecting on the changes in his community said:

The population [has] dropped dramatically. There have been not only people that have gone off properties, employees I'm talking about, but some of the houses have moved because they can see because they won't employ a man again. Complete houses have been moved and moved into town. So people won't come back to this area ... we won't get the services out here because there will be less children and less everything you see. New people have come into the area and we haven't really got the social contact with them that we had with the previous people [they are] different sort of people, they don't socialise, I suppose'

... there is a big division between the town people and the country people ... [Small town name] people are the town people. Everyone has been flat out with their own interests at home, with feeding cattle, helping their husbands, schooling their children, summer school, distance ed[ucation]. I don't think anyone has had time to worry. They are all trying to keep themselves floating without worrying about anyone down the road.

As recently as this month, at a rural seminar held in Rockhampton, there was a great deal of discussion about the need for policy makers and politicians particularly to divest themselves of a persistent mythology associated with the rural in order to better understand the reality of the plight of the bush. What the drought highlighted for rural families is some essential differences between them and their urban counterparts. A question was asked from the participants - does urban Australia in fact want a rural Australia? The President of the Qld. Graingrowers Association, Ian Macfarlane, alluded to one aspect of this when he stated in August of this year that :

'... many country residents had lost faith in their ability to make a decent living from farming, pointing to a serious morale problem in the bush. We are looking for a sign from Canberra that the pressures and the struggles of farming are worth it, and that politicians understand the true value of agriculture to the economy' (cited in The Morning Bulletin 19 August 1996, p.2).

At the seminar, some speakers argued that such mythology tends to get in the way of the reality, that in effect the dominant discourse continues the frame the political and policy agenda to such a degree that it is actively working against the best interests of rural families (see Proceedings, DFSYCC, 1996 forthcoming). As we note in an earlier paper, just when communities are being asked to support themselves and rely on their own resources, policy making which is urban and centralised is impacting negatively on such resources (Gray et al 1996: 11). Social commentators connected with rural families have a responsibility to contest the dominant discourse(s) underpinned by rural mythology that deny the difference(s) between those families who live on the eastern seaboard and those who live in rural and regional Australia. What is needed is to begin to understand their realities, and not revert back to myths of nationalism, masculinities and constructions of 'community'. How we do this is by accepting local knowledges as legitimate, by challenging the dominant discourse(s) wherever they appear - either the media, policies, or practice - and by celebrating the differences between families.

Acknowledgments

We express gratitude to the funding bodies which have sponsored this research - the Rural Industries R & D Corporation and the Land and Water Resources R & D Corporation; and most importantly, to those families and other stakeholders who have participated in our study.

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