Introduction : twenty-first century rural Australia

Australia has become more complex and more diverse – perhaps increasingly divided as a nation from north-west to south-east – symbolised by the unwillingness of unemployed workers to cross the Nullarbor for jobs. But, even more obviously, by a divide beyond which only sponge cities and mining centres survive, whereas in the penumbra of the metropolitan capitals small towns have survived, buoyed by counterurbanisation and tourism, but wholly changed from agricultural pasts. When Phil McManus and Bill Pritchard concluded The Land of Discontent (2000), at the start of the century, Cairns was singled out as a place of rapid transformation primarily through tourism and some degree of industrialisation. Since then growth has continued but centred on its port – for commodity exports – and airport, as Queensland’s centre of FIFO. Typically growth has shifted inland, but the population has not. Indeed the image of mineworkers crowded into airports across the country, as they FIFO, is a potent symbol of the transience of success – how mineral booms can fade and mining towns fall off the map, as they have done for 200 years. The constants in rural and regional change are diversity, change and uncertainty.