ABSTRACT
Australia occupies an interesting position in the realm of scholarship in social and cultural geography. Australian research is simultaneously local and global. It is global in that as an Anglophone and affluent country, its researchers participate in, and orient their research towards, international publishing trends and outlets (witness, for example, a recent special edition (Vol. 4, No. 2) of this journal). Australians have been key contributors to many international debates, including those on nature-culture (Anderson 2003; Stratford and Davidson 2002), postcolonialism (Gooder and Jacobs 2000) and popular music (Connell and Gibson 2003), to name just a few. It is nonetheless also the case that Australian research is local, in two ways. First, Australian case studies are sometimes defined as ‘local’ in the sense of being unique empirical examples and hence incapable of producing theoretical generalizations. As Berg and Kearns (1998: 129) put it: ‘geographies of the United Kingdom and America are unmarked by limits—they constitute the field of geography … By contrast, geographies of other people and places become marked as Other—exotic, transgressive, extraordinary’. Second, there is a thriving, largely Australian-based, localized, publishing industry that encompasses social and cultural geography. Despite the publishing of ‘local’ journals by transnational publishing conglomerates, Australian geography journals maintain a focus on geographies of the nation. In addition, a small number of local book publishing outlets prioritize issues defined as ‘Australian’ and presume a primarily Australian audience. These publications do not have extensive international distribution agreements, and are generally much less likely to attract an international audience. For these reasons in this country report I focus on research appearing in these Australian-based publications. I canvass the main issues of concern to social and cultural geographers that have been covered in these publications since around 2000. My review of this research makes the argument that whilst this research is clearly embedded in, and responds to, domestic issues it also makes clear contributions to international debates.
