Sticky places: temporality, affect and gender in Australian country towns

This chapter draws on the ethnographic studies conducted in four diverse, dynamic, and 'out of the way' yet globalising places in Australia. The remit of the project was to examine possible effects of globalisation and deindustrialisation on the lives of boys growing up in isolated places that were transitioning from an agricultural or industrial economy to a tourism or service-industry economy. Under the imperatives of late modern global-trade economies, environmental pressures and cultural globalisation, places like Eden are being forced to rethink and reconfigure their economic base and dominant views of sustainable living, their sense of place identity, and what this means for locals. Global economic flows and territorial spaces coexist and interrelate in a complex fashion and can be experienced very differently, even in places of close proximity. Eden is regarded as a 'workingman's town'. This spatial identification has a long history in the fishing and logging industries.