Mapping regional cultures : discourses in social contexts

"The Mapping Regional Cultures project at Central Queensland University, of which this book is an outcome, had its origins in a recognition some years ago by a number of CQU academics, that regional culture and society was a neglected area of study. In Australia, culture, or the way of life of people, their self-understandings, and the symbolic forms in which these understandings become public, is usually regarded as the domain of the metropolis. Rural and regional culture becomes a pale reflection of that found in the city; a second hand, impoverished form brought about by the pioneering, frontier realities which still inhabit the daily lives of those living in the regions. Or so the story goes."--p. x