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‘The modern idea is to bring the country into the city’: Australian Urban Reformers and the Ideal of Rurality, 1900–1918*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

KATE MURPHY
KATE MURPHY*
Affiliation:
School of Historical Studies, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3800, Australia
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Abstract

In the early twentieth century, Australians strove to create a rural civilisation through state legislation to encourage rural closer settlement. The fantasy that Australia might one day support a rural population of perhaps hundreds of millions endured despite the overwhelmingly urbanised character of the nation and the harsh realities of its environment. This rural dream was present not merely in the discourse surrounding the rural settlement imperative, but also inflected the language and modes of urban reform, as planners sought to ‘ruralise’ the urban environment to reflect something distinctive about Australian life. Previous scholarship addressing the rural ideal in Australian history, as well as urban history, has failed to interrogate these links. This article illuminates the power and ideological reach of rurality in the Australian nation-building project and pushes the boundaries of ‘rural history’ by considering the ways in which reformers sought to extend a projected Australian ‘rural civilisation’ into the cities.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 119 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

Notes

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50. The phrase ‘distinctly rural civilisation’ is from the Report of the Select Committee upon the Causes of the Drift of Population from Country Districts to the City, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council (Victoria, 1918), volume 1, p. 5.

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54. See Hoskins, ‘Marking Time’ and “It is inevitably a people's park’.

55. Hoskins, ‘The Core of the City’, pp. 10 and 17.

56. On the English movement and national identity, see Meacham, Regaining Paradise.

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76. Evidence taken by the Royal Commission on the Housing Conditions of the People in the Metropolis, p. 90.

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101. Hoskins, ‘Constructing Time’, pp. 6–8 and 4.

102. Bean, In Your Hands, pp. 22 and 62.