Up where I belong: Doing cultural studies in the deep north of Australia

Recent editions of Australian Humanities Review (2008) and Cultural Studies Review (2010) mapped an emerging field of cultural studies devoted to rural Australia, uncovering the ways metropolitan biases tended to underpin studies of rural change. This paper builds upon that work by canvassing the mediation of meaning and interests that can occur when doing cultural studies in a wildly non-urban place. It draws on a new study of the lived experience of cyclone in Far North Queensland, where the people are allegedly bred tough - and where the researcher grew up. While producing an oral-historical account that centres upon the voices of survivors , the project also reinterprets cyclone as a cultural site, where stories of survival, both symbolic and literal, intersect. In that context, this paper examines the tensions involved in critiquing discursive and material histories and realities through embedded rural research practice, here depicted as a dialogic interchange with place.