ABSTRACT
This chapter overviews the distinctive patterns of men's and women's experiences of violence in rather different rural settings in Australia. It draws attention to the historic role that violence has played in the making and maintenance of rural community and identity. The chapter describes how a 'metropolitan' bias in the discipline of criminology led until recently to the relative neglect of research into rural crime and violence. The advance of industrial capitalism in the metropole in the nineteenth century worked hand in glove with the extension and intensification of what S. Beckert calls 'war capitalism' in the periphery. Understanding violence in rural Australia requires an appreciation of how it has been shaped by global transformations in the countryside that had distinct legacies for the contemporary social ordering of gender and race, which can be seen in contemporary patterns of crime, violence and criminalisation. The legacy of the history of discrimination persists in Indigenous communities, especially in rural and remote Australia.
