Rural Reading or Reading the Rural

Everyday Print Culture in Post-War Queensland

Abstract

This article derives from an ongoing project to map regional print culture in twentieth-century Queensland. An essentially qualitative methodology combined survey questionnaires with selected follow-up interviews. Conscious of the focus on metropolitan reading within existing Australia Council studies (1990, 1995), we were keen to explore issues of cultural consumption, distribution, exchange and community identity in a regional context. Subsequently, however, we interrogated the notion of regionality itself and identified a reading sub-group within the larger sample of fifty responses, living outside larger regional centres like Rockhampton and Townsville. The study documents and explores reading patterns of this rural group whose experiences can all too easily be subsumed within the broader ‘regional’ category. Lyons' and Taksa's valuable study of New South Wales, Australian Readers Remember, makes this assumption, admitting to ‘a definite bias in favour of Sydney at the expense of country districts’ while acknowledging that ‘cultural attitudes differ in rural environments’ (1992: 22–23).