The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience by Catherine Driscoll

Abstract

Book Reviews 167 William Crain is a professor of psychology at The City College of New York. In 2008, he and his wife, Ellen, founded Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Poughquag, New York. The sanctuary provides a permanent home to farmed animals rescued from slaughter and abuse. Dr. Crain’s most recent book is The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children: Insights from as Farm Sanctuary. The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience Catherine Driscoll (2014). Surrey: Ashgate, 201 pages. $104 (hardcover); ISSN 978-1-4094-4688-0. Catherine Driscoll, a professor in the department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney and a country girl herself, provides an important insight into what it means to be a country girl in Australia. One of her most prominent insights into children’s experiences in their environment is the sense of having nowhere to go and nothing to do. Driscoll portrays the country at a distance from modernity, the city, and the present. The country town is described as a bounded space that encloses a geographical location and a sociocultural community. Its boundedness and perceived distance from somewhere else produces “identity flows relative to an array of sharp boundaries between Us and Them” (177). Driscoll argues that the country is a “great place for young children but not for young women.” In country towns, she explains, girls are limited in their use of time and space through institutional, parental, and community controls. Youth in general have few leisure activities that offer anonymity and subsequent freedoms, with teenage girls being even more heavily monitored than teenage boys. The lack of public and recreational spaces in country towns, such as shopping malls, cinemas, and public transport centers, means that children and youth become highly visible. Driscoll reveals that children living in the country strive to create mini-urban centers. She describes a country town park that was renovated for the benefit of families, seniors, and recognized community groups. The renovation of this park also provided visual shelter and privacy to local youth who were able to start exercising some urban behaviors such as hanging out, observing others, and showing off to peers. These activities were not originally envisioned by designers and were looked upon unfavorably by local residents. Driscoll uses this town park to illuminate issues of contested space, yet this example also serves as an important reminder to designers about the importance of social and behavioral characteristics in a given place and their influence on the way local spaces are experienced and used. In this way, Driscoll makes an important contribution to the sociological field of gender research, and also offers valuable insights to the study of localized experiences by children and youth. Book Reviews 168 Much of the rest of this interdisciplinary book is located outside the scope of child, youth and environment research and of relevance to more humanistic studies. But, for those working across disciplines and for those focusing on girlhood, Driscoll makes many original interpretations and observations that are worth exploring. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which is a reflexive place-based ethnography that delves into Driscoll’s personal and family history. Part 2 locates the Australian country girl at the intersection of history, image, and experience, and here Driscoll focuses more on the sociocultural rather than physical aspects of the environment. Part 3 captures Driscoll’s ethnographic work with contemporary country girls living in Australia. She applies a mixed-method approach in this interdisciplinary study, including, but not limited to, fiction, film, histories, exhibition materials, media archives, photography, reflexive place-based ethnography, and ethnographic fieldwork in country towns. Driscoll places Australian country girlhood in the historical context of the modern period. Driscoll describes the ambivalent image of the Australian country town that is culturally alienating, while simultaneously capable of facilitating a supportive community. The way the majority urban population in Australia thinks about country girls is based on their image and representation. Australian city and country life combine to form the broader Australian national identity, which influences Australian policy, popular culture, research trajectories, and everyday life. Driscoll explains that the representation of one’s self through film, television, illustrations...