Navigating rural ruin: Infrastructural dynamics in Australia's New England North West

Abstract

Whilst there has been an increase in attention to infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities over the last two decades, this focus has primarily explored urban landscapes, neglecting infrastructural dynamics in rural areas. This paper explores the synergistic relationship between rurality and infrastructure by focusing on examples and experiences of infrastructural ruin in Australia's New England North West. Drawing on 2 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that ruination is a common modality though which infrastructure is experienced in rural contexts, and that this ruination, which is tied to the histories and everyday experience of rural spaces, becomes a means by which rurality is (re)produced both materially and culturally. Exploring infrastructural ruination in rural regions allows for narratives to be told of rural spaces that move beyond revivalist and declinist paradigms of rural scholarship. Instead, attention to the experience of infrastructural ruin positions rural spaces as unique landscapes where engagements with infrastructure play an integral role in shaping the material and cultural composition of contemporary rurality.