A Multicultural and Multifunctional Countryside? International Labour Migration and Australia's Productivist Heartlands

Abstract

In 2007, Michael Woods posited the notion of 'the global countryside' as a hypothetical space within which globalising tendencies are fully realised in the transformation of rural place. Rather than viewing rural change as being 'determined' by global processes, Woods sought to encourage more nuanced accounts that could 'hold together' multiple scales in their narratives of rural restructuring. After three decades of neoliberal trade and agricultural policy reform in Australia, the country's inland regions are embedded in 'the global', yet their economic, demographic, and social fortunes are also being profoundly shaped by the processes operating at a range of other spatial scales. Within the context of the global countryside, this paper explores the interactions of rural demographic change and labour market processes. Specifically, we examine the ways in which long-standing patterns of out-migration from rural areas have seen new forms of engagement with the global in the form of international labour migration.