The Once and Future Country: New England Style: And Australian Regional Fight-back

Abstract

In recent years - perhaps for a decade now - the Australian public has become more and more aware of the rise and various consequences of 'globalisation' and of its seemingly inevitable and disastrous and destructive impact on all aspects of culture and of (economic and social) life, in the rural and regional parts of this country, in particular. The public and critical focus on the concept of 'global' in recent decades had moved fairly quickly beyond the global linguistic (i.e. English language - use right across the planet): 'to the even greater media transmission of news instantly (remember McLuhan's use of 'the global village' as early as 1960); to climatic matters and 'global warming', a catch phrase of the later 1980s; and to the use of the word, culturally, to refer to an assumed threat to the survival and to the distinct identity of individual nations and of Australia in particular'