inspiring achievement

2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future

presented by

Professor John Halsey

Sidney Myer Chair of Rural Education and Communities

Acknowledgements Thank you for the opportunity to deliver the 2009 Elford lecture to honour the contributions the late Dr Ken Elford made through his distinguished career as an academic. The Elford Lecture was established as a memorial to Dr Ken Elford, a staff member originally from the SA College of Advanced Education, Sturt Campus. The late Ken Elford had a strong social conscience and believed that it was critically important for Australians to examine their own society deeply and honestly. Ken was instrumental in introducing Australian studies into all South Australian schools In preparing this paper, I have drawn upon many sources which I have acknowledged, and my own publications, conference papers, professional and personal experiences, and resources. Professor John Halsey Sidney Myer Chair of

Rural Education and Communities School of Education, Flinders University P +61 8 8201 5638 F +61 8 8201 3184

E [email protected]

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror – the wide brown land for me.

Introduction and framing On the cover of Peter Goldsworthy’s book True Blue? On Being Australian (2008) is a picture of a galah perched somewhat awkwardly on the cap of a lifesaver who is looking out to sea from his beach patrol post. There are many photographs and works of art one can refer to that capture and convey something of the essence of being an Australian and being in Australia: the ancient Aboriginal art in the Arnhem Land Escarpment or Chambers Gorge here in South Australia; Tom Roberts’ iconic Shearing the Rams (1890); the ground breaking work of the ‘dot and circle painters’ of the Papunya Tula group (Goldsworthy, 2008); the capturing of landscapes in the photography of Stavros Pippos (2001); or the just released work of Mischkulnig and Winton (2009) described on the dust jacket as a “view of Australia we politely ignore …the peculiar collision of beauty and ugliness that characterises our farflung towns”. The galah on the hat of the lifesaver for me, however, captures not only something of the essence of ‘Australianness’ but also something of the tension, indeed near crisis we have today in Australia, when it comes to thinking about and recognising the significance of rural in the life of our nation. The galah, quintessentially a bird of eucalypt woodlands, large agricultural clearings and grasslands, seems to me to be out of place, a curiosity of sorts, a distraction

from the main game of maintaining vigilance over one’s domain – the beach, the sea and those who come to enjoy them – and even perhaps dependent on the generosity of those prepared to provide subsidised sustenance-seed from the local supermarket! My first awareness of country – of rural – came through my grade 2 teacher reading, as I recall, a verse from Dorothea MacKellar’s famous poem, My Country. The verse, printed in the Adelaide Primer, has stayed with me since I was a child of 7:

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains. I love her far horizons, I love her jewelsea, Her beauty and her terror – the wide brown land for me. Curiously, perhaps, the formal national salute – or was it national oath? – we recited each week at primary school, together with hand signals which I still remember to this day, tended to reinforce a sense of ‘country’, of something ‘out there’, something ‘bigger than me’, ‘somewhat unknowable and mysterious’, certainly beyond my immediate world: I am an Australian I love my country I salute her flag I honour her queen I promise to obey her laws

The recital was followed by standing to attention in rows for the playing of the national anthem, God Save the Queen, as the flag was slowly raised to full height. We then marched off to our classroom to military parade-type music on a 78 rpm vinyl record and the beat of the base drum – what a high privilege it was to be the drum monitor and drummer! Then there were the weekly films while at primary school – black and white 16mm that ran in the library room on a projector which made a sound something like a frog on steroids. One of the joys for me – and I suspect many others during an otherwise much regulated week of lessons – was to discover through various means that there was an Australian Diary film in the allocation. These ran for about 8 or 10 minutes – the only downside – and often depicted people at work, mostly men, developing Australia, with scenes of ‘useless mallee and other trees’ being knocked down so that land could be cleared and ‘opened up’ and made productive for farming. The narrator’s voice had a certain rallying and call-toarms cadence about it that tended to reinforce the relevance and importance of what we were seeing. My induction into the world of rural Australia, of the bush, of life outside a city and even the emerging suburb where I lived, the wonderful and wild sand-hills and beach of Outer Harbor – now fashionably, North Haven – and

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future Miss Hutton’s goat farm perched precariously amongst the box thorn bushes and the dunes, was buoyed along by countless stories around my maternal grandparents’ kitchen table about ‘trying to make a go of it’ (i.e. farming) in the days before superphosphate became widely used and horse power was literally all you had, if you were lucky! When I went to high school in the early 60’s, short stories and poems by Henry Lawson, the poetry of Judith Wright and Kenneth Slessor, and Alan Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles (1959) worked their magic on me, in me. Later in life – too late if I am to be honest with myself and you – I started to read the works of Patrick White. The death of Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for literature was the event that sent me looking for his legacy. A colleague of mine at the time recommended I start with The Tree of Man (1955). I did – I drank it really – and four other novels by White, including Voss (1960), in relatively quick succession. A cart drove between the two big stringybarks and stopped. These were the dominant trees in that part of the bush, rising above the involved scrub with the simplicity of true grandeur. So the cart stopped, grazing the hairy side of a tree, and the horse, shaggy and stolid as the tree, sighed and took root...the man took an axe and struck at the side of a hairy tree, more to hear the sound than for any other reason. And the sound was cold and loud. The man struck at the tree, and struck, till several white chips had fallen. He looked at the scar in the side of the tree. The silence was immense. It was the first time anything like this had happened in that part of the bush. … The man made a lean-to with bags and a few saplings.

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He built a fire. He sighed at last, because the lighting of his small fire had kindled in him the first warmth of content. Of being somewhere. The particular part of the bush had been made his by the entwining fire. It licked at and swallowed the loneliness. (White, 1955, p.9) My formative apprenticeship with rural Australia came to a sharp focus when I was appointed to the Kimba Area School in 1967, where I taught mathematics, physics, science and physical education in the secondary section for six years. The school magazine of that year, I am pleased to report, had one of my forty year 8 students record in it, “[u]nder the supervision of our class teacher, Mr Halsey, and our subject teachers, we had an enjoyable year”. She is now the principal of the school. What else would you expect? Rural landscapes, rural places and communities, rural events, rural myths and stories and more, have played a seminal role in defining who we are as individuals, as communities, as a nation. So too, in more recent times in our explorations of who we are, have the aeons of history of the First Nations’ peoples. Writing in 1965, Russell Ward asserted that A D Hope’s poem, Australia, “reminds us …of the extent to which the vast interior of the continent…has tended to dominate the imagination of Australians” (p.7). Geoffrey Blainey (1966) wrote in the preface to his book, The Tyranny of Distance, a set of words that have been embraced by many to capture and convey something of the defining quality of Australia: “[t]hat distance is characteristic of Australia as mountains are of Switzerland”. He went on to say that “Australians have always recognized

that distance or isolation was one of the moulds which shaped their history…”. Sean Glynn (1970), a historian writing around the same time as Ward, Blainey and also Manning Clark, argued that while “Australia [by the late nineteenth century] had forged a national legend based in the bush, the acceptance of the legend must be related to the ideological needs of a highly urbanised population” (p.52). Aboriginal leaders such as Pat Dodson have helped bring into the foreground the power of land, one of the things we always associate with rural, to define and shape who we are as Australians: Land isn’t just bound up with geographical limitations that are placed on it by a surveyor…Land is the generative point of existence; it’s the maintenance of existence; it’s the spirit from which Aboriginal [and our] existence comes (Goldsworthy, 2008, p.140). The profoundness of what Dodson is telling us can also be heard in the words of Aldo Leopold’s idea of a “land ethic… which implies thinking of land and community as a connected network of parts, in which each element possesses intrinsic rights [and plays a unique role] ” (Pretty, 2002, p.172). In 2001 Geoffrey Blainey wrote, somewhat provocatively: In Australia the big city and the countryside are sharply divided. Many areas of what are now called rural and regional Australia fear for their lives… the rift between the country and the city is wider than at anytime in the last 150 years. The rift is so wide that the return of rural and outback prosperity – if by chance it does return – will not quickly narrow the gap.

For country grievances are not simply economic: the grievances are also social and cultural...country and city... They each see the world differently and this gap is growing (Goldsworthy, 2008, p.143). In a somewhat similar vein, Graeme Davison wrote in 2005: For more than two centuries, Australians have wrestled with a deep dilemma. Almost from the beginnings of European settlement, the coastal cities claimed a large and apparently abnormal proportion of the population of the colonies…The ‘Bush’, long a national ideal, has become in our times an object of pity. Sustainability, with its assumptions of maintenance rather than growth, and of an environmental, rather than economic or political, frame of reference, represents a belated climb down from the more sanguine expectations of earlier generations...What generates the current sense of crisis is that country people are experiencing loss when the rest of the country is prospering, when their community institutions are already debilitated by several decades of change, when nobody seriously proposes the situation can be changed…[Previously] rural communities could hang on in the belief that the rest of the country needed and wanted them, and that theirs was a national cause. Now, for the first time in more than two centuries, that sustaining belief has been discarded, effectively if not explicitly (Cocklin and Dibden (Eds.), 2005, p.38).

Key questions and belief Against the backdrop of what I have sketched out, for me a key question emerges for Australia today and looking to the future, namely, what role will rural landscapes, rural places, spaces, people and communities play as we map and move our way forward as a nation? I believe that vibrant, productive rural communities are integral to the longterm sustainability of Australia. However, I do not believe that sustainability is the consolation prize you get when you don’t win the development and growth race. I align myself with Tim Flannery (2008), an internationally renowned scientist, who argues that “[o]ur search for sustainability…[is] the greatest challenge we have ever faced” (p.8). Davison (2005) argues that “sustainability is not only an economic, demographic and environmental concept; it is also a historical concept” (p.39). He also asserts that sustainability “is the newest addition to the lexicon of rural decline” (p.38). Davison’s thinking about rural communities in Australia since white settlement in terms of five phases underpins his emphasis on knowing and valuing the historical dimensions of sustainability – “rural communities themselves …often have long memories, kept alive by the alltoo-tangible reminders of better times evident in disused or decaying buildings and faltering local institutions” (p.39).

The phases of rural communities in Australia according to Davison commenced when they were planted in the early colonial years. This was followed by the water[ing] phase when governments worked to support the growth and expansion of rural communities, then the protect[ing] phase characterized by special treatment to prop up their survival. The fourth phase (post World War 2) focused on plan[ning] with an emphasis on decentralization. The fifth (and current) phase, sustain[ing], is characterized by rural communities, as already signaled, having to deal with the impacts of globalisation and do more than just survive and be more than just survivors (2005, pp.39 & 40). So, how to move forward; how do we reconnect with and realise the potential of rural for nation building in a context where sustainability must be ‘front and centre’ of our thinking and actions?

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future

Rural – where, what and who An important aspect of exploring the questions involves considering the where, what and who of rural in a little more detail. It is widely recognised there are many definitions and understandings of what is rural, where is rural and who is rural. It is also widely recognised that definitions and understandings vary according to many factors, not the least of which are the physical parameters of the context being considered and its prevailing cultural dimensions. What seems to be less widely recognised, however, is the complexity of rural contexts – as a person who had lived for over forty years in rural and remote Australia said to me a few years ago, “When you have visited one rural town, you have visited one rural town!” Essentially there are instrumental/ quantitative definitions of rural, and definitions of a more nuanced and qualitative kind. Quantitative definitions of ‘rural’ emphasise population size, density and distance from large centres where there is an extensive range of human services available. Qualitative definitions, on the other hand, while recognising that population size and distances are contributing elements to what constitutes ‘rural’, focus on the cultural and relational dimensions of places and people. In terms of making decisions about the provision and availability of human services in non-urban contexts, Griffith (1996) argues that “the descriptors, rural and remote, have been shown to be so generic and so imprecisely defined that they are relatively useless terms” (p.5).

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This led him to develop a services (such as education) access score, which is derived from “the population of the urban centre or locality containing the school, the distance from the school locality to the most likely accessed service centre, and the economic resources of the school population” (Jones, 2000, p.8). Hugo (2000), in a somewhat similar vein to Griffith, has also argued there is much confusion about the classification of the population of Australia living outside of cities with populations greater than 100,000 persons. He states that a significant amount of this “confusion regarding rural, remote and regional stems from an attempt to combine into a single classification two distinctly different conceptual elements: urban/ rural and, accessibility/remoteness” (Hugo, 2000, p.1). As these are very different concepts, Hugo (2000) believes that “[a]ny attempt to classify nonmetropolitan into rural and remote areas is misplaced. We need to classify areas in terms of their urbanness/ruralness and we also need to classify them by their degree of remoteness” (p.2). While a geographical approach to delineating and defining ‘rural’ essentially focuses on size, distance from a city or large regional centre, and access to services, a sociological or qualitative approach on the other hand pays attention to essences of places and spaces in order to gain an understanding of rural and rurality. Put another way, the notions of movement, flow from place to place, the ways in which places are connected by histories rather than geographies, and the idea put forward by Deleuze that place is an issue of becoming and identification, all constitute interesting problematics for [an] analysis [and understanding] of rural… (McConaghy, 2002, p.14)

Emphasising place presents options for incorporating what Mulley (1999) calls the vernacular – “people’s experience of the rural” (p.3) – for shaping conceptions of rurality. This Mulley argues, may be “the key” to enhancing understanding of rurality, because “while academics struggle to precisely define the rural, most people have a general conception of what constitutes ‘rural’ in their mind’s eye” (p.3). Stereotypes and myths about the Australian bush and bush characters, as an instance of the vernacular, have a long history as I have already alluded to and continue to have some hold on understandings about rurality. For example, The Advertiser newspaper (Devlin, 2006), in a feature article to commemorate the Black Tuesday bushfires on Eyre Peninsula in 2005, used the banner headline “Bush spirit shines amid tears, pain”. Kapferer (1990) cited in Hooper (2001) lists “egalitarianism, independence, physical endurance, doggedness, taciturnity, loyalty, resistance to oppression, fortitude and perhaps a naïve faith in humanity” (p.2) amongst the commonly held stereotypical images of rural people. Cruickshank, Lysgard, Magnussen & Myland (n.d.) suggest that ideas and assumptions like these “have social consequences” (p.4). As well, “ideas about rurality are just that and not objective truths [which] … opens up the possibility of doing things differently”. Further, Cruickshank et al (n.d.) argue that “‘rurality’ is … not something given, but a social construction: its existence and the meaning that is put to it is dependent on its producers” (p.4).

Rural – why Having shed some light on the where, what and who of rural, in thinking about Australia and its future, I now want to focus on the why of rural. Put another way, what is happening, what is likely to happen and what may happen looking forward that requires a radical rethinking of how we value and embrace rural spaces and places in terms of our individual, community, national and international futures? By far the most significant answer is that by the year 2050 it is estimated there will be an extra 3 billion people on planet Earth. Everything is in place, not withstanding some cataclysmic event, for this to occur (Homer-Dixon, 2006). For Australia, this means a population of at least 35 million and, as we know, there is much debate about how robust this figure is and whether or not it is ‘a good thing or a bad thing’. From my knowledge and vantage point, everything points to population growth and, to borrow from some bus ticket-type slogan, ‘if we keep on thinking and acting as we have always done about rural spaces and places, we will continue to get what we have always got’. Today, with declining proportions of state and national populations, many rural and regional areas of western countries are struggling to remain viable in relation to essential human services like education and health, in the face of rising costs per unit of services required (as defined by certain views of economic costings and benefits), and the pervasive impacts of globalisation on rural economies, amongst the most visible of which is a steep decline in the demand for traditional labour (McSwan, 2003; Lawrence, 2005).

Globalisation and the power differentials it creates have had a significant social and economic impact on rural and remote areas…[while m]ajor cities have benefited from the focus on the knowledge-based production that global capitalism demands, drawing in capital, people and resources (Alston & Kent, 2003, p.5).

(Pretty, 2002, p.5). As well, “[i]n the West, the food industry is based on a [complex] system of imports and distribution networks that is reliant on [fossil fuel] transport…‘relocalizing’ food by reducing the distance it travels” before it is consumed needs to become a priority within our overall food security strategy (Arthus-Bertrand, 2009, p.44).

The continuous emptying of rural places, with the consequent running down of services, linked to the apparently endless processes of consolidation to generate economies of scale and efficiencies – whose efficiencies is an important question to ask – directly impacts on a country’s capacity to survive. As Diamond (2005) states, “even the richest, technologically most advanced societies today face growing environmental and economic problems that should not be underestimated” (p.2). And, “either we solve the problems [within the next few decades], or the problems will undermine not just [countries like] Somalia but also First World societies” (p.7).

Recently I attended a Future of the Farm Forum run by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia (CEDA). The forum involved presentations by researchers, agronomists, farmers, economists, regional development personnel and politicians, all with varied interests in rural Australia and the future. It re-affirmed for me that the food security of Australia, and the world more widely, is a critical issue and one that we cannot take for granted in ‘our land of plenty’.

Flowing from the continuing population growth of the world and the way this will differentially impact on individuals, communities and countries, there are least four major reasons why radically rethinking and reframing rural is a preeminent priority for our nation. Firstly, and probably the most pressing reason, is that the majority of the food consumed daily in the world, and particularly in the developed world, is produced in rural areas. Accessing food is already a major problem for nearly a billion people in developing countries. Even in the United States, “the largest producer and exporter of food in the world, 11 million people are food insecure and hungry, and a further 23 million are hovering close to the edge of hunger …”

Producing food, even if in many instances it has ‘gone the way of high tech’, requires enormous numbers of highly skilled and semi-skilled workers. Unlike mining, agriculture and horticulture – even with the advent of agri-business – it is not as conducive to a fly-in/fly-out model of labour supply. Without food, we are clearly nothing. It is not a lifestyle or add-on fashion statement. The choices we make about food affect both us, intrinsically, and nature, extrinsically. In effect, we eat the view and consume the landscape. Nature is amended and reshaped through our connections – both for good and bad (Pretty, 2002, p.11). Secondly, much of the world’s energy is sourced from rural and remote regions and many of the world’s fresh water supplies have their headwaters in rural locations and traverse substantial rural landscapes, which entails varying degrees

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future of investment, human intervention and management. In the driest state of the driest continent in the world, we need to be acutely aware that, in Western countries, between two and five thousand litres of water are used to produce the daily food for a single person (Arthus-Bertrand, 2009, p.134). Thirdly, there is the profoundly important matter of arresting the decline of the natural environment, which includes climate change, and developing new paradigms of valuing it so that it, in turn, can do what it has always done – sustain life in all its complexity and diversity. … an intimate connection to nature is both a basic right and a basic necessity…we have shaped nature, and it has shaped us, and we are an emergent property of this relationship. We cannot simply act as if we are separate. If we do so, we simply recreate the wasteland inside of ourselves (Pretty, 2002, pp.10-11). Or in the words of Ernest Callenbach in Barlow (2007, p.1), “All things are interconnected. Everything goes somewhere. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Nature bats last”. Fourthly, there is the issue of maintaining territorial security. It is worth reflecting upon how, moving into a future with rising pressure on space for human habitation and all the requirements for progressing and sustaining it, the land mass of a nation will remain secured. At various times in Australia’s history since white settlement, there has been a focus on ‘populate or perish’. Recently, a report was released by Desert Knowledge Australia (The Australian, September 13, 2008), raising the possibility of Australia’s sparsely populated interior – less than 15% of Australians live in settings statistically defined as rural – being seen as attractive ‘vacant’ land for others in need. Maintaining a purposeful presence in our rural spaces and places is a ‘soft’ but significant contribution towards national security. Page 8

Rural – how How then can the rural spaces and places, people and communities of Australia be revitalised and renewed – be supported and encouraged to move out of the rain-shadow? Education is central to answering the question. It is absolutely critical that people who live and work in rural and remote Australia have access to high quality, relevant and affordable education, training and care at all ages and stages of life. As well, it is essential that people who live and work in urban contexts and provide policy advice to governments, and design and manage a myriad of programs intended to benefit country people and communities, deeply understand rural. In the Background Paper for the International Conference on Issues Affecting Rural Communities, held in Townsville in 1994, Sher and Sher argue that “[f]rom a rural development perspective, education is both the necessary precondition and the primary enabling strategy for [driving the 3 other arenas of action identified by them – empowerment, environment and entrepreneurship]” (p.27). The validity of the argument remains and if anything, has strengthened in the ensuing period. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1999-2000 Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education (2000a, 2000b) was a seminal event in education in Australia because, for a brief time, it shed a spotlight on the urgent and frequently dire situation confronting many who live in rural and remote Australia. The National Framework for Rural and Remote Education, derived from the Inquiry and approved by the Australian Ministerial Council for Education, Employment and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA, 2001), identifies 6 “Essential Enablers” – basics if you like – for improving rural and remote education. They are Personnel, Relevant Curriculum, ICT, Multimode Delivery, Environment

and Resourcing (PRIMER). Before outlining some ways in which these basics might come together to make a difference, I want to say something about what I call the deficit framing that I think all too often colours thinking and action about rural contexts in relation to human services like education. Deficit framing focuses on what is absent in a context, what is unavailable, rather than what is present, what is available. Put in vernacular terms, it is glass half empty rather than glass half full thinking. The opposite, nondeficit framing is not, however, a sugar coated pill, a set of words to gift wrap a problem or an exhortation to avoid confronting difficult issues. Rather it is a preparedness to think and function recognising the value of ‘what you have rather than what you wished you had’. In educational leadership terms for example, do rural leaders construct their roles around a view that rural schools and rural communities essentially lack what is available in larger cities and contexts, or do they construct their leadership essentially with a pro-active framing? As argued by Danaher, Danaher and Moriarty (2003, p.135), it is important “to challenge the orthodoxy that conceives of educational experience in non-metropolitan areas in deficit terms”. It is also critically important for rural educational leaders to challenge the view that the continuing decline of rural contexts is ‘an inevitable fact’. A non-deficit stance about rural spaces and places and rural education can be illuminated by considering education set against a worrying trend – the exodus of youth from rural areas. As Hillman and Rothman (2007) state at the commencement of their research report on Movement of Non-metropolitan Youth Towards the Cities, “[r]ural communities have long felt concern about the rate at which young people leave for urban areas, many never to return” (p.v).

Alston and Kent (2003) argue that “[t]he lack of meaningful full-time work in rural areas is one of the main reasons for young people leaving rural communities” (p.6). Limited postsecondary education and training is another significant reason for the exodus of youth from rural areas. Often added to this is a gender imbalance, where young females leave rural areas at a higher rate than young males. There are also particular challenges associated with the education of Indigenous youth so they have choices about their cultural identity, employment opportunities and personal fulfilment. While this exodus of youth has been happening for centuries and has often been spurred along by fundamental changes in the way societies organise themselves, such as occurred during the Industrial Revolution, it is now one of the most challenging issues confronting rural communities. This is because “youth are fundamentally future-oriented and, as such, are a critical human resource for re-building and re-energising rural contexts” (Halsey 2008, p.2). As Salt (2004) asserts, “[i]t is the loss of youth and the partial replacement of that demographic by older people that is of most concern…[because the] structural shift has an impact on the economic wellbeing of a community and also on the sense of [its] vitality…” (p.68). Put another way, the future of a rural town or community is linked to the choices youth make – to stay, to leave, or to return after moving out to experience life elsewhere or to complete education and training not available in the local area. A primary role of education has been, and continues to be, equipping young people with knowledge, skills and dispositions to become autonomous, responsible and productive citizens. In other words, education is critical in developing and nurturing human agency.

From the perspective of sustaining and sustainable rural contexts and the future of Australia, a major question flowing from the role of education as stated is: so what might it translate into for youth, their learning and their mobility? Answering the question first requires some discussion of choice. A real choice for rural young people and their education and pathways beyond schooling has often been defined and actualised as the choice to move out or leave home. As Corbett (2007b) remarks about youth living in the coastal fishing community in Canada that was the subject of his research: “community is not a place that can sustain youth throughout their working life” and “[t]he privilege of being able to choose to stay is fraught with uncertainty” (pp.775, 776). This in large measure echoes Alston’s and Kent’s (2003) finding about rural contexts as quoted earlier. In the Australian context, choice in education came to prominence through the work of the Commonwealth Schools Commission Choice and Diversity in Government Schooling Project. It was established “to explore the concept of choice as an approach to educational improvement” (1980, p.7). It was through working with the Choice and Diversity Project that I became involved in thinking about how different framings of choice might result in improvements for students. While I use the ideas of weak choice and strong choice here, drawn from my experiences with the Choice and Diversity Project, the full discussion paper of the Commission on choice also refers to “passive” and “active” choice respectively (1980, p.16).

Choice when linked with education frequently means being able to select between options such as which school to attend, which subjects to study, and which career pathway to follow. This concept of choice – of essentially selecting from a menu designed by others – for the purposes of this paper is weak choice. The consequences of weak choice nevertheless may be beneficial to an individual, such as achieving a high tertiary education rank by selecting subjects taught by teachers who have a track record of ‘getting students through Year 12’. The relevant point in relation to reframing how we think about education in rural contexts – for this read small enrolment/populations – is that in a weak choice context, the chooser has little or no say about determining the options available to them.

Strong choice on the other hand is where those who need to make choices about their learning participate in constructing the options available to them. A strong choice context might well have fewer options than a weak choice context, but the match between learning needs and aspirations and study program is a better fit. Strong choice is characterised more as a partnership – of “common effort toward common goals” (Seeley, 1981, p.65) – than an obligatory set of arrangements set in train as a consequence of choosing from a predetermined range of options. It may be argued that moving to a strong choice approach to learning at a system or even school level would create resource and administrative demands that could not be met. Imagine allowing every student to decide what it is they want to learn, with whom, when and how – a sure recipe for chaos? Two points in response – strong choice is not about educators or systems opting out and ‘letting things run’ with no regard for the consequences.

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future Secondly, strong choice is about creating contexts where learning is negotiated expansively and with the intention of being pro-active in addressing issues that impact on learning in-situ. In other words, as a ‘local’ might say, you roll up your sleeves and work out how to address the issues, to minimise students leaving their home and community perhaps for good. What then are some of the enabling pieces of education architecture needed to underpin strong choice and learning for choice, and how might these play out in a rural community to reduce the drift of youth, and thereby potentially enhance community and wider sustainability? Firstly, Bernstein (1971) in his seminal paper entitled “On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge” argues that the knowledge functions of education – read ‘schools’ for ‘education’ – are “realized through three message systems – curriculum, pedagogy and evaluation” (p.47). Bernstein (1971) stipulates that “[c]urriculum defines what counts as valid knowledge, pedagogy defines what counts as a valid transmission of knowledge, and evaluation defines what counts as a valid realization of this knowledge on the part of the taught” (p.47). These definitions are value-laden, powerful and pervasive in prescribing what schools do and for what purpose(s). While I agree with Bernstein’s framing, two other message systems are part of the educational architecture required for creating and nurturing a strong choice context for learning for choice. They are organisational structures and processes, and location-mobility.

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The organisational structures and processes message system plays a very important role in highlighting the need for flexibility of learning arrangements. The location-mobility message system focuses on explicitness about post-school career and living options. I have named it separately because it is central to addressing a key problem facing many rural communities as already stated – the loss of youth. Put another way, the location-mobility message system is intended to ‘ensure’ that discussions and decisions with rural young people about their education and post-education trajectories, always include meaningful considerations of the possible impacts of their decisions in relation to the local community. As Bandura (1989) writes, “people [youth] can generate novel ideas and innovative actions about their past experiences [by]….bring[ing] influence to bear on their motivation and action in efforts to realize valued futures” (p.1182). Secondly, Corbett’s (2007a) seminal research into schooling in a fishing community in Nova Scotia, Canada, provides some other powerful tools for looking more deeply and consequentially into learning for choice. Essentially, Corbett’s research is based around a question I believe resonates with all rural communities and, rural teachers and leaders – “how do some rural youth ‘learn to leave’, while others ‘learn to stay’?” (p.9). The theoretical framing for Corbett’s research is rich, extensive and especially pertinent for rural educators and others interested in engaging with a fundamental rethinking of rural education and what it means for individuals and communities. The heart of it is a fresh engagement with resistance theory from the sociology of education, which draws very

substantially on Willis’ (1977) pioneering work, Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs, and Bourdieu’s “logic of practice and what he calls ‘habitus’ ” (Corbett, 2007a, p.45). While acknowledging limitations and criticisms of Willis’ (1977) resistance theory, including that of Roman and Christian-Smith (Eds.) (1988), Rikowski (1997), and Kelly (1997), who together argue that the claims for it are over stated, Corbett (2007a) believes, and I concur, that “resistance has value…[especially] in the context of particular locations” (p.44). This value is strengthened as a theoretical tool for investigating what is going on in the lives of young people when they wrestle with their post-school options and how they might be assisted, by enjoining with Bourdieu’s idea of ‘habitus’, that is, thinking about how different kinds of contexts might influence choices individuals and communities make. Corbett, while greatly valuing Bordieus’s work on habitus, argues that the idea may not be as rigid in practice as that delineated by the author “because of overlapping discourses” (2007a, p.47). Corbett asserts, for instance, that the habitus of families may have a range of valued capitals and the “spatial turn in social theory has introduced what is now understood as multiple geographies of youth, each containing differential developmental trajectories and patterns of habitus” (2007a, p.47). In other words, youth are highly differentiated in their perspectives about such things as place, purpose, future, and understandings of what constitutes ‘worthwhileness’. Soja (1966) argues that thinking differently about space and spatiality may result in insights about phenomena such as rural, from the very personal to

the global levels that might otherwise remain masked, blurred, hidden, suppressed or oppressed. The ‘thinking differently’ referred to here Soja (1996, p.2) calls Thirdspace, “a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, appearances, and meanings”. The central challenge of Thirdspace is to “begin to think about the spatiality of human life in much the same way that we have persistently approached life’s intrinsic and richly revealing historical and social qualities: its historicality and sociality” (p.2, emphasis in original). This is because, from Soja’s perspective, while it can be assumed that ‘rightfully’ there will always be historical and social dimensions brought to bear on issues or problems, there is more. Integral to Thirdspace then is an invitation, an imploring perhaps, to “set aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplate instead the possibility of a both/and also logic…” (p.5) Many, perhaps most, rural schools are well situated to engage in a strong choice approach to education because of their size and proximity with community. In claiming this, two of Corbett’s (2007a) research conclusions are pertinent for progressing learning for choice, that is, learning that values and acknowledges the richness of ‘the local’ as well as ‘the universal/global’. The first conclusion is that individuals involved in his study “detest[ed] and resist[ed] being drawn into abstract systems preferring to remain multi-skilled, hands-on, and community-based” (p.259).

Secondly, he concludes that most individuals: resist the mobility imperative built in to the idealized education trajectory and remain “around here.” In the process they build alternative visions of success that involve persistence, survival and resistance to the forces [of modernity] that seek to displace them. (p.259) There are critical implications arising from changing how we think about choice and education in and for rural communities, their students and their futures, as well as Australia more generally, particularly because of the steady decline in enrolments occurring in many places which in turn threatens school viability, and therefore community viability. Relating back to the National Framework for Rural and Remote Education, they include focussing on the preparation of teachers and leaders for rural schools and communities, curriculum, resourcing models, varied approaches to schooling and accessing education. Each of these is a topic for in-depth discussion but suffice here to make a few comments to indicate directions for change. The challenge of attracting and retaining teachers and leaders for rural schools is part of the wider issue of attracting and retaining professionals of all kinds for non-metropolitan postings (Miles, Marshall, Rolfe, & Noonan, 2004). However, there are several factors that drive the need to more deeply understand what might be done to enhance the attraction and retention of staff in rural schools. They include: the size and composition of the national teacher workforce, its age profile, the growing urgency to ‘guarantee’ replacement of staff for

schools due to the retirement rates of Baby Boomers, and the propensity for young professionals to opt for greater mobility and flexibility of employment over stability. While staffing rural schools has been problematic for over a century in Australia, the last 20 years has seen an intensification of interest in this (Boylan, 2004; Green & Reid 2004; Herschell, 1998). In 1987, the then Commonwealth Schools Commission (report published in 1988) advised the Minister for Employment, Education and Training of the day that: Attracting staff and maintaining reasonable staffing continuity can be difficult in schools in remote areas. Staff in these schools can find that their preparation for teaching in remote schools and the extent of professional support available are insufficient. (p.1) Submissions to the Schools Commission by education authorities and teachers consistently emphasised that “teachers feel, or are, ill-equipped to face the realities of living and working in rural and remote areas” (p.141). And, “adjustment to rural teaching can be facilitated through improved pre-service teacher preparation” (p.142). As well, “there is considerably more that teacher training institutions could do to encourage their students to consider teaching in rural areas, especially those students who show a predisposition towards an appointment to remote schools” (p.145). In advocating changes to the way teachers were being prepared for rural and remote schools, the Commission argued that “teachers in rural schools face special challenges and conditions not necessarily experienced by other teachers” (p.139).

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future It also asserted that “a successful adjustment to a rural appointment… include[s] the preparation for teaching prior to appointment” (p.140, my emphasis). Fast forwarding to 2000, HREOC, as quoted above, virtually repeated the calls made two decades earlier by the Schools Commission of the urgent need to address problems in the way teachers were being prepared for teaching and living in rural communities. Notwithstanding the diversity and depth of enquiries and reports, the research and the initiatives, the issue of attracting and retaining teachers and leaders to rural schools continues to be problematic. Given what is occurring in many rural areas through the impacts of drought, climate change and globalisation (Cocklin & Dibden (Eds.) 2005; Alston and Kent, 2006) and demographic shifts, especially in relation to youth (Salt, 2004), challenges associated with attracting and retaining professionals to rural areas will persist and are likely to intensify, and therefore require fresh and bolder solutions like far greater work place professional preparation involving universities and other tertiary providers, rural school mentors, rural communities, future employers and, of course, funding and delivery flexibility. A greater emphasis on “contextual intelligences (CQ) [is also needed which] involves the capacity to read, understand and interpret at least four dimensions of the environment in which a school [and other human services and organizations] functions – internal, local, national and global” (MacGilchrist, Myers & Reed 2004, p.122) is also required.

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Put another way, creating and progressing futures for rural which are other than those focused on defending the past or shoring up a shrinking survival base, requires professionals and champions who understand the pervasive forces and superstructures of change, and can also shape and deliver at a local level. In 2006, while working for the Rural Education Forum Australia, I conducted research based on the HREOC recommendation that: All teacher training institutions should require undergraduates to study a module on teaching in rural and remote communities, offer all students an option to undertake a fullyfunded practical placement (teaching experience) in a rural or remote school and assist rural communities in the direct recruitment of new graduates for their schools. (HREOC, 2000b, p.44). The research found that in excess of 10,000 pre-service rural teaching placements – practicums – were organised annually in Australia, averaging 26 days and at a personal/ out of pocket cost to the participants of $2,553. This rose to nearly $3,000 if the participant also had to pay for care services for children and partners while away from home. Clearly there are costs associated with locating more of the preparation of teachers and leaders in rural schools and rural communities. The potential benefits however, are likely to be very significant for individuals, the mentors and schools, the rural communities and, I would argue, universities.

What else might be done to drive the renewal of rural? In times of national crises, ideas which confront, challenge and change entrenched ways of thinking and doing are needed. Paraphrasing Lear (2008), who has written a profound philosophical anthropology of the demise of the Crow Native American Nation and its transition to another way of life, a new poetry is needed that builds on the past – rather than remains captured by it – and projects into the future. Change which deeply disrupts, disturbs and shifts to other ways of perceiving and functioning, requires “[in] the broadest sense…creative makers of meaningful space” (p.51). Or to quote Soja (1996) again, novel challenges require “set[ting] aside the demands to make an either/or choice and contemplat[ing] instead the possibility of a both/also logic …there is always an-Other…” (pp. 5 & 7, my emphasis). Given that the exodus of youth from rural areas as mentioned earlier is draining the regenerative capacities of many of Australia’s rural areas, is it time to provide every secondary student in Australia who attends an urban school an opportunity to live and learn in a country school and community for an extended period, say a term or a semester? This would likely achieve two outcomes at least – improve the viability and in some instances the vitality of rural education, by increasing enrolments from sources outside of usual catchment areas albeit for limited periods of time; and, over time, increase the pool of youth who have had firsthand experience of rural Australia and therefore may become positively disposed to a career/employment in rural

areas and to advocate for rural. Research to explore the potential of a city to country nation-wide movement of youth into rural communities is needed to investigate and test the idea more fully.

pedagogy and learning. In most rural and remote communities there is a very strong desire for community survival and with this a real openness to working in new ways with new ideas and partners.

I believe there are sound reasons for being optimistic about a city to country national youth initiative using education as the means. Many rural schools have developed specialized vocational curriculum pathways such as aquaculture, agriculture, tourism and hospitality, and environmental management, as well as the traditional academic ones, which are highly valued by students, community and employers. They are making a very significant contribution towards the knowledge and skills required for Australia’s sustainability and international competitiveness.

Another thing that urgently needs to be done is develop new approaches to how educational leaders are prepared and supported for the vast array of opportunities and challenges in rural Australia. Put another way, corporate, city-centric models of leadership are not sufficient to create, drive, energise and harness the potential of rural in shaping and building Australia now and into the future.

It is often the case that new specializations as outlined have capacity to take extra enrolments at very little extra cost. An enterprise-team-based approach to aquaculture can be enriched by having a significant number of students to debate and trial alternative ways of growing high-quality marketready produce. The same can be said for courses that have an extensive field experience component like agriculture or construction industries – sufficient students to simulate work place conditions is a major factor in the delivery of the intended learning experiences and outcomes. For other areas of the curriculum like history, English, mathematics and the sciences, an increase from a few students to 10 or 12 can also benefit teaching and learning. As well, rural education and rural communities have embraced ICT and Australia is a world leader in distance education. There is a rich and long experience to draw upon here to propel further advances in using ICT to enhance

Rural contexts have evolved and changed over time and will continue to do so. Rural educational leaders need to be able to conceptualise and actualise their roles and their associated networks expansively and from a ‘why not’ rather than a ‘why’ standpoint. They need to be prepared to take risks and actively explore ideas that may become, given work and resources, a vehicle for changing the ways learning and communities come together to progress new futures. Looking forward, there will need to be “an openness to ruralities that are quite different from those we are familiar with” (Cocklin & Dibden, 2005, p.252). The capacity to accelerate the speed at which the evolution and change of rural contexts occurs has been dramatically increased through globalisation (Eriksen, 2007) and through the continued growth of the world’s population. The pressures these place upon the ways communities function, on the environment and finite resources, as well as relationships at a multitude of levels, from one-on-one through to nation-to-nation through to trading/ security-block to trading/security-block, are profoundly significant. The changes

require – demand – a radical reframing of the role of rural, of rural communities in nation building and nation sustaining. Education is a powerful and pervasive resource for perpetuating and for changing ways of thinking and perceiving, ways of being, ways of doing and responding. It is well known that in rural communities rural schools are frequently the largest and most wellendowed public institution and connect into and with communities in multiple ways and levels. Rural schools function as they do because of a complex mix of legislative requirements, policies, established practices, and expectations about ‘what schools should be and do’. The ‘given-ness of schooling’, however, is constructed and therefore is ‘open’ and ‘available’ for change. Put another way, rural schools are as they are because of a long history of decisions and they would have been different had different decisions been taken. For example, what if rural schools had been (and were today) resourced on the basis of sustaining communities as well as educating children? The fundamental challenge – fundamental duty? – of rural educational leaders is to embrace the pursuit of Other. Doing this requires rural educational leaders to spend time creating and seeking out opportunities that have the potential to disturb and shift the status quo towards some other state which they, and desirably others, believe is likely to be more beneficial for students, staff and the community. They need to do this in many different ways including by questioning, by influencing agendas, by developing links and alliances within and beyond the school, by moving around and through the school and community picking up clues and making suggestions as to

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2009 Elford Lecture Moving out of the Rain-Shadow: Rural Australia and Australia’s Future ‘what might be done instead’. They need to read widely to nurture their imagining of Other. They need to create and seek out opportunities that have the potential to shift the status quo by sharing images they have about the purpose and essence of education and by projecting a sense of control blended with a preparedness to form innovative, purposeful collaborations. In a book of contributions on the future of leadership by various authors, written to celebrate the life and work of Warren Bennis, Bennis had the privilege of authoring the final chapter. His last words in the chapter are essentially prophetic for rural educators and leaders and the challenges before them because, while acknowledging how history had influenced his career, he particularly emphasised the power of “the spirit of place” (Bennis, Spreitzer and Cummings, 2001, p.280). This is a fundamental challenge for rural leaders, rural schools and rural communities in pursuit of new and sustainable futures – to discern and harness the “spirit of place”.

Concluding remarks

Jared Diamond argues that the “past offers us a rich database from which we can learn, in that we may keep on succeeding” (2005, p.3). Out of this rich database comes a myriad of things. Some are more important and more potent than others, and we ignore them at our peril, literally. The database of our past tells us that in order to continue to prosper as a society we must focus upon the fundamentals that sustain life and that imbue it with purpose and meaning. Globally, 3.5 billion people currently live in the urban and city scapes of our planet and the trend is for more and bigger cities.

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As well, there are “nearly two hundred metropolitan areas with more than two million people” (Brugmann, 2009, p.4). In our ‘home’, Australia, we have 3 metropolitan areas of more than 2 million and we have already exceeded the trend that will see an estimated two thirds of the world’s people living in cities by 2040 (Brugmann, 2009, p.15). The enormous reach and power of cities with their “four basic elements – ‘raw stuff’ – of urban advantage … density, scale, association and extension” could, as we go forward, distract us as a nation from paying sufficient attention to the role that rural places and spaces, rural communities, will need to play if Australia, projecting forward to 2050 and a population of 35 million, is to be a vibrant, sustainable, productive, secure, civil and inclusive society.

Rural Australia has to move out of the rain-shadow and become centred in our national debates, national policy making, national valuing, and national psyche. Rural Australia has to move out of the rain shadow because all Australians will be beneficiaries when this happens. Given the challenges Australia and Australians face looking to the future, some features of which I have sketched out, in ‘bottom line terms’, it makes little – actually no – sense to not harness the full capacities of our rural contexts and communities. To make the point another way, consider what would happen to Australia if rural Australia shut down overnight and all who lived there moved into the cities. We know this will not happen but allowing yourself to play with the thought for a few minutes is a sobering thing to do. High quality education, at all ages and stages of life, that is accessible, affordable, available, adaptable, acceptable and accountable, and that is led imaginatively, is a key to moving rural Australia out of the rain-shadow.

From the Bradley Review of Higher Education in Australia (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2008) target of 40% of 25–34 year olds having a first degree by 2020, to high quality locally available training that is internationally recognised, to every young child having access to quality child care and pre-school, education is the core capital of and for the future. Actualising this reality in rural and reducing the complex web of problematics frequently associated with this requires what Veronica Brady calls “a renewal of the imagination, a transformation of the way we see the world” (Tacey, 1995, p.1). Or, extrapolating from Lear’s (2006) treatise on the pain and the possibilities of the transition of the Crow Native American Nation, we need to rediscover – restore – a fertile middle ground context for change and progress, a place where “…diverse peoples [and thoughts, aspirations and ‘day to day pragmatics’] adjust their differences through what amounts to a process of creative, and often expedient misunderstandings…[and] from these misunderstandings arise new meanings and through them, new practices…” (p.30) Meadows, Meadows & Randers (1992, p.209) in Black (2005, p.24) “define a sustainable society as ‘one that can persist over generations, one that is far-seeing enough, flexible enough and wise enough not to undermine its physical or its social systems of support’ ”. A sustainable society is also one that embraces all of its places and spaces; all of its human resources. A sustainable Australia will be one that fully embraces rural and moves it out of the rain shadow and into the mainstream of national policy, national practice, national life!

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www.flinders.edu.au CRICOS No: 00114A