How can cultural analysis be brought to bear on the rural? This central question for rural cultural studies prompts our exploration of how the rural has been delineated and interpreted in the developed West, as a departure for thinking about new intellectual approaches to rurality that span spaces, times and academic disciplines. In this paper we adopt a broad schema, discussing insights from rural studies, cultural geography and history. As Michael Woods (Rural Geography) has handily pointed out, 'rural' is

This essay surveys the fields of oral history and memory studies in Australia since the publication of the landmark volume Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia in 1994. It argues that the practice of oral history has been central to memory studies in Australia, and explores key texts relating to the memory and commemoration of war, colonialism, Indigenous histories, trauma and witnessing in Australian society.

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This themed section of Australian Humanities Review seeks to establish the emerging field of 'rural cultural studies' firmly on the agenda of the contemporary humanities and social sciences. This is a timely intervention as rural Australia has featured increasingly over the last decade and especially over the last few years as a topic of national policy attention, public commentary and social analysis. If the notion of a crisis in rural Australia has become something of a one-sided cliché, the changes being faced in non-urban-rural, remote and regional-Australia are nonetheless significant, complex and widespread. For example, one of the topics for the federal 2020 Summit, 'Rural Australia', addressed future policy directions for rural industries and populations. In this wider context, the purpose of the present collection of papers is to argue for the significance of the cultural dimension-and the multiple dimensions of the cultural-in understanding the key issues of demographic change, economic productivity, environmental and climatic crisis, Indigenous/non-indigenous relations and land ownership, and the role of 'cultural' factors in the renewal, or potential renewal, of country towns and communities.The essays in this collection offer a range of perspectives representing the 'cultural turn' in rural studies and, indeed, the 'rural turn' in cultural studies. Rural cultural studies has been formed from the intersection of cultural history and cultural geography and from new developments within adjacent interdisciplinary fields including cultural and media studies, Australian studies and environmental studies. While cultural history and cultural geography may be interdisciplinary in themselves, they are still often separated from each other by disciplinary or institutional boundaries, perhaps most notably in the distinction that persists between the Social Sciences and the Arts or Humanities. Rural cultural studies offers one way, or rather several ways, of crossing these boundaries and thinking through how research questions, fieldwork and analysis may be enriched through multiple disciplinary perspectives.

In 1975, Fairfax News commemorated International Women’s Year by appointing Lorrie Graham as its first female cadet photographer. Women only joined the photographic staff of newspapers in significant numbers from the 1980s and were more likely to be employed on regional newspapers than the metropolitan dailies. This article draws on interviews with male and female press photographers collected for the National Library of Australia’s oral history programme. It provides an overview of the history of women press photographers in Australia, situating their working lives within an overtly masculine newspaper culture where gender inequity was entrenched. It also examines the gendered and evolving photographic representations of women in the Australian press, including those of women in positions of social and political leadership. Although women press photographers have achieved greater recognition in the 2000s, the transformation of the media industry has impacted the working practices and employment of press photographers.