Thinking through country : new literacy practices for a sustainable world

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams (1973) complains that the images of English rural life he is exposed to in his Cambridge University education are not the images of the specific rural places where he grew up in Wales. His is a specific country(side). He develops the thesis that the country and the city are relational categories that can be understood only together. In the vastly greater movement of transposing the English rural to the Australian landscape, processes of colonization produced both material and discursive effects. The country and the city were inscribed onto an old and fragile continent with deep prior symbols and representational practices in which cities did not exist and the country was not rural.