Emerging Perspectives on Automobilities in Non-Urban Australia: A context for Cruising Country

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, motor vehicles of all descriptions have been central characters in the settlement, governance and representation of Australia. They have been, and remain, objects of desire and exchange, characters in subsistence, ceremonial and market economies, sites of projective identification and spaces of distinctive social experience. Local and national spaces, time, histories and identities are reshaped in and through our car cultures. Represented in paintings, sculpture, films, literature, music, ceremony and other media, vehicles and the roads they travel communicate closely with the aesthetic spirits of modernity and its postmodern discontents. This issue of Humanities Research sets out to explore some of the key conjunctures of Australian nonurban automobility - intercultural exchange and communication, power and social transformation - from the vantage points of history, cultural studies, art history, anthropology, and visual art. The authors in this volume examine the ways in which car cultures in non-urban Australia produce social relationships between car owners, drivers, passengers, their families, and their observers through the mediating forms and forces of moving vehicles, petrol, bitumen, and the inevitable debris of car wreckages and ruins. In this respect, the analyses collected here provide fresh insights into what anthropologist Daniel Miller has called 'the humanity of the car'.1 The idea for this volume emerged as a coda to a symposium, a photography exhibition and a screening program - Cruising Country: Automobilities in nonurban Australia - held at the ANU Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2005 (26-28 May).2 The symposium canvassed car-focused histories, artworks, documentary film, ethnography, cultural analysis and personal storytelling offered by researchers, artists, filmmakers, and Aboriginal elders. As the producers of that event, we conceived the term 'cruising country' to conjure and capture the affective experiences of being automobile on a national map where 'country' is a multivalent post-colonial concept of enduring Aboriginal space and place; country is overwritten by tracks, roads, highways and the myriad 'cruising' journeys they have enabled, from the 'first contact' encounters of desert patrol officers to family trips, from rallies to 'grey nomad' adventures, artists' research routes and cinematic narratives (to name only a few that were featured at the 2005 event). Where once the analysis of car culture began in the driveways and petrol stations of cities and suburbs, the Cruising Country project has turned over the engine to confront another set of stories - those we call the 'non-urban'. Here, motor vehicles are seen making tracks across 'the frontier' of the post-colonial nation and carrying research across other romantic tropes of exploration that require ongoing critical attention in the analysis of post-colonial settler societies. The non-urban focus of our theme reframes notions of distance and 'remoteness', and repositions the desert, the bush and suburban fringes at the centre of narratives of Australian automobility. The exponential growth of Australian road construction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is intertwined with structural transformations of an economy balancing land-based primary industries (and the regional expansion that followed these developments) with domestic manufacturing and commodity importation and circulation of ever more goods beyond major metropolitan zones. Domestic and regional industrialisation of automotive manufacturing, the normalisation of car ownership, the fading of rail travel as mass experience and the development of a diversified market of road-based tourist travel have solidified automobility as contemporary Australian habitus. Given the ubiquity and normalisation of car travel as the primary everyday habit of mobility in postwar First-World countries, it is actually surprising that there has not been more humanities and social science research into the varieties of automobile experience in Australia, or elsewhere. …