Rob Garbutt,The Locals: Identity,Place and Belonging in Australia and Beyond

Originally a PhD dissertation, this book offers an insightful analysis of a hitherto relatively understudied concept: that of the ‘local’. Anchored in the author’s experience as a ‘local’ (i.e. a white descendant of Anglo-Celtic settlers), the book engages with the Australian context while it also offers valuable theoretical insights concerning the concept of the ‘local’ in the social sciences and humanities. The author comes from cultural studies and hence, while his analysis incorporates many elements of the sociological perspective, his writing and mode of argumentation is closer to the humanities. As he writes, ‘in this project, writing is the method’ (p. 3). Indeed, the author relies extensively on theoretical argumentation, including interrogating the origins of the word ‘local’ in the English language (p. 7). Other strategies include self-reflexive contemplation as well as autobiography (marked with italics in the text). Additionally, the author conducts an overview of the use of the concept of the ‘local’ in sociological discourse, as well as a critical language study of the usage of the same word in the Australian regional press. Overall, this book is based on a variety of research strategies and these are pursued in the context of a deep personal engagement with the topic.

On p. 4 the author sums up the book’s main argument succinctly: ‘the idea of being a local’ in contemporary Australia, he writes, is structured ‘around and stabilized, by a sense of autochthony, as if local culture and identity is born of the earth itself’. The settler ‘locals’ conceive their culture as if that culture ‘naturally emerged within the bounds of this place’ (emphasis in the original). Given that Australia (just like the US, Canada and other former British colonies) is a settler society, this is an intriguing thesis, one that the author attempts to establish. In order to articulate his thesis, the author has to tackle both theoretical and empirical facets of the topic. His efforts seem more productive on the empirical side (where the different research strategies are effective in yielding interesting results) and less so on the theoretical side.

On the theory front, the author has to overcome an important theoretical handicap in existing literature, namely the fact that, to this day, the ‘local’ remains a relatively underdeveloped concept in the human and social sciences. The author approaches this issue in a variety of ways. In Chapter 2, he conducts an analysis of geographic concepts (place, space and local) and contrasts different lines of interpretation; while in Chapter 3, he interrogates mostly social-scientific literature about the local. On both of these chapters the literature surveyed is somewhat dated. Moreover, the author’s attention is directed more towards descriptions of specific instances of the ‘local’ label in Hawaii, Scotland and England and less towards theoretical treatments of the issue. The intertwining of the ‘global’ and the ‘local’ mostly escapes the author’s attention. The reconstruction or remaking of the ‘local’ as the other facet of the ‘global’ – an argument made by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1995) and sociologist Roland Robertson (1992) – is left completely unexplored. In fact, the author ignores additional relevant contributions, for example, Paul Kennedy’s Local Lives and Global Transformations (2009). It might be that these chapters come from the author’s PhD dissertation and, in the course of turning it into a book, he simply did not did not extend the coverage of the literature into subsequent publications. While the author is writing at length about the historical construction of white localism – and about the colonial legacies that this construction entails – he nevertheless fails to develop a theoretical argument that would speak to the intertwining of global processes (inclusive of colonial power relations) with the construction and reproduction of local white Australian autochthony.

Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 6 are the book’s more Australian chapters. These chapters use the author’s research strategies to articulate the book’s main thesis. In the opening chapter, the author critically examines the process of land acquisition, the clearing through which white Anglo-Celtic settlers transformed their part of New South Wales into a locale. The author offers a candid picture of the local naturalization of this process through his autobiographical response to the challenge of Aboriginal presence in the area. This picture allows the reader an insight into the complex sentiments that are involved into the construction of ‘being a local’. The heart of the book’s main argument is located in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. In Chapter 4 the author examines the different uses of the word ‘local’ in the press, and the next two chapters focus more intensely on constructions of white local autochthony. The author’s critical language study of the word’s employment in the local or regional press reveals an interesting paradox. That is, ‘in Lismore the locals are non-indigenous and the Aborigines are not locals’ (p. 149). This paradoxical predicament (summed up in a table on p. 198) is further elaborated through a cursory examination of white response to Aboriginal presence, as well as of critical self-reflection vis-a-vis the author’s own whiteness. ‘White “autochthony” ’, the author argues, ‘enables settlers to install themselves quite un-problematically as local or original, despite the obvious evidence to the contrary’ (p. 202). The author’s own effort in the book’s final chapter is to conduct a search for an ethics of location as a response or alternative to white ‘autochthony’.

It is fair to say that, although the ability to generalize on the basis of the author’s evidence is somewhat limited, the author’s elaboration of the notion of the ‘local’ in a settler society is an honest attempt to come to terms with a notion that has, by and large, remained relatively unexplored in British postcolonial societies. Moreover, the author successfully avoids the predictable trap of reducing ‘localism’ to racism. That enables him to successfully explore the connections between the two. Still, his juxtaposition between Anglo-Celtic ‘locals’ and Australian Aborigines fails to take into account other European or Asian immigrants and their descendants. Are these ‘locals’ or not?

The author should be praised for the intellectual honesty and integrity that is clearly evident in the text. The book offers undeniable evidence of the author’s intellectual craftsmanship and scholarship. In terms of offering a general theoretical statement or conclusions and ideas that would be portable across cultural contexts, this book contains some insights but no coherent or overreaching theoretical perspective. Obviously, for the Australian context, its value is considerable; it brilliantly illuminates the micro-universe of the (typically viewed as unproblematic) Australian white autochthony. It moreover offers an insider’s view onto that world, illustrated through a masterful and authoritative narrative stemming from the author’s autobiographical journal entries. This is a highly recommended text for people interested in Australia’s notions of white autochthony, localism and the mundane and nuanced ways such notions are inscribed into people’s self-image. Moving beyond Australia, though, the book’s value rests mainly in its exploratory nature and the fact that it is one of the very few studies that have explicitly sought to problematize the local through empirical research. In many ways, it is an invitation for future scholars and researchers to explore new scholarly avenues as well as politically charged territories of meaning construction.