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

Reviewed by: The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience by Catherine Driscoll Kate Hunter The Australian Country Girl: History, Image, Experience. By Catherine Driscoll. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 201pp. Cloth £60. In the very opening and the very closing pages of Australian Country Girl there are arresting descriptions of two women: one is Driscoll’s own grandmother, Ada, accompanied by a photograph taken outdoors of the twelve-year-old in her school uniform with her hair flowing down over her shoulders. The second is one sentence about an unnamed woman described only as “lonely” who recounted at length to Driscoll her experience of “taking the train, at 15 . . . to a faraway town to attend her first Girl Scouts Jamboree” (177). What makes these brief appearances of real women and their experiences of country (or rural, or small-town) girlhood is their rarity in a book that could have been about them, but is not. As Driscoll makes clear in her introduction, her interest is in idealized images, representations, and “what kind of object the Australian country girl is” (5). She argues that the “country girl” is both a set of experiences and a suite of ideas. In advancing this argument Driscoll employs a variety of approaches including memoirs, analysis of film and television depictions of country girls, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ shifting definitions of “non-metropolitan,” interviews and observations of girls in contemporary country towns, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, and Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling.” The book is divided into three parts: the first is a combination of “autoethnography” and an exploration of the idea of Miss Showgirl (one version of agricultural fair or harvest queens), the second makes extensive use of film and television soap operas set in the country, and the third is based on Driscoll’s field work in eight country towns carried out in the late 2000s. Driscoll argues towards the end of part 2 that “we cannot neatly distinguish between representations of the country and country girlhood, like these soap operas, and lived experience of them,” but, frankly, I felt that she wasn’t making much of [End Page 180] an effort to do so (106). Evidence of girls’ lived experience (and indeed, some discussion of who counts as a “girl” over time) is in very short supply in this book, making it a frustrating read for a historian. The third part of the book in which Driscoll’s field work features, has interesting sections about migration in and out of country areas (and the strange ways bureaucracies measure this), the policing and community monitoring of young women, and their use of public space in country towns, but even here the girls’ words and lives are jostling for space with cultural theory. A lack of engagement with the historiography of Australian rural women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the absence of archival research also leaves the book curiously devoid of substantive material before the 1960s. Richard Waterhouse’s excellent work on melodrama and popular theater in rural Australia in the first half of the twentieth century is also conspicuously absent in a discussion of representations of country girls in popular culture. My frustrations with this book will not be shared by all, especially those interested in rural geographies. But for me, Driscoll’s book runs the risk of re-inscribing what city people think the country is or should be. Of deeper concern, the book renders actual girls in the past—their work; their play; their aspirations; their own sense of who they are as expressed in a range of archival, printed, and photographic sources—silent and invisible. Kate Hunter Victoria University of Wellington Copyright © 2016 Johns Hopkins University Press

Topic: Gender, Feminism, and Media
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences