SUBJECTS OF DISTANCE

Abstract

The rural is widely associated with traditions that modernity is presumed to disrupt or displace. But rurality is an idea produced by modernity, and endlessly engaged in and by dialogues about modernization. This paper considers the figure of the country girl as an image of distance from modernity. Insofar as she is always coming from the outside of a presumed modern identity and experience that is fixed by its urbanity, the country girl in Australian popular culture clearly has parallels in other places and other cultures. My focus here is on the difference the country girl articulates in a broad Asian-Pacific context discussed as coming ‘late’ to modernity. The country girl is always arriving at an encounter with modernity that identifies what modernity costs and what it offers. Her difference is not only a dramatic foil that throws the subject of modernity into sharp relief but offers up stories about modernity as something that must be learned.