ABSTRACT
Remote areas, the ‘outback’ or the ‘wild’, are important to Australians and Canadians. High levels of urbanisation and population concentration inevitably mean that for the majority of the people in these countries large parts of their region are in fact remote, far from where they live and from the hub of economic, social and political life. Geographical definitions of those remote areas have, in the case of Australia, encompassed the tropical lands (Courtenay, 198242–4), including the wetland and rainforest areas of the monsoonal ‘Top End’ and Cape York, the vast savanna regions of the semi-arid zone and Gulf country and the desert, stretching from the West Australian coast east to beyond the Queensland border and south into South Australia. Together these areas cover almost half the Australian continent. In Canada remote areas, defined as the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, including the whole of Yukon and Northwest Territories and extending to the southern edge of the boreal forest in the Prairie provinces, Ontario and Quebec have been estimated to account for almost 75 per cent of the country (Bone, 1992: 2–5). Geographical remoteness, characterised by difficult communications and resultant high costs of transport for both goods and people, is coupled with cultural distinctiveness, with Canadian and Australian ‘first peoples’ forming a very high proportion of the populations of these regions. It is on these remote areas, loosely defined according to the above criteria, that this study of aboriginal development focuses.
