An agenda for Australian rural sociology: Troubling the white middle-class farming woman

Positioning ourselves

As we commit to anti-racist and decolonial work, we have come to understand the shortcomings of much feminist reflexivity and positionality interventions in focusing too much on the ‘self’ without questioning the power structures that sustain colonialism and its geopolitical consequences (Mendia Azkue et al., 2017; Rodriguez Castro, 2021; Yuval-Davis, 2006). In moving away from ‘identity politics’ debates we turn our interventions to concrete actions that we can bring to understand how whiteness and the colonial project continue to operate in rural studies. We take a first step in rural sociology ‘to break the racial silence, which requires institutional dialogues around every day and structural racism’ (Bargallie, 2020: 18). We also take up Moreton-Robinson’s (2020a: xii) call to ‘consider how to theorise giving up power in order to effect a more just and equitable world’, and to advance an agenda for the relinquishing of white power within rural studies.

We do not present ourselves as neutral critics. We write as feminist rural sociologists, white Australians (Pini and Mayes) and migrant settlers (Rodriguez Castro) who live on stolen land, and benefit from the privileging of whiteness and settler logics in academia and beyond. Two of us have been part of the wave of white feminist scholarship described above, which, over recent decades, has challenged the masculine centrality of Australian rural studies (e.g. Mayes and Koshy, 2017; Mayes and McAreavey, 2017; Pini, 2002, 2005). We have done so through our presence at conferences and workshops, via feminist epistemological and methodological contributions and through our engagement with rural women beyond the academy.

From this privileged position, we have worked alongside other feminist rural scholars to address patriarchal oppressions in rural space. However, we understand our involvement in these contributions as deeply entangled in the reproduction of colonial power in that ‘the presuppositions that are contained within the imperatives of white western feminism are race blind and culturally biased and they underpin theorising as well as social and cultural political engagement’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2020a: xi). This makes us complicit in the structures that sustain white supremacy, and responsible for calling out racism, giving up power and politically committing to change within and beyond our discipline. Thus, while we draw upon the ‘Invisible Farmer’ case study in this article, we do not separate ourselves and our research from the types of narratives that are reproduced in this work.

Australian rural social science research from 2000 to 2020

In order to render visible how white supremacy operates and how racism is entrenched in our academic institutions and work with rural communities in Australia, we undertook an analysis of Australian scholarship published in the Journal of Sociology and in the two major international outlets for rural scholarship, the Journal of Rural Studies and Sociologia Ruralis, ¹ from 2000 to 2020. Seven of the 31 articles published across these decades in the Journal of Sociology, and which used ‘rural’, ‘regional’ or ‘remote’ in their titles or abstracts, examined farmers and farming. ² The remaining articles focused on previously under-researched populations in rural research, such as vulnerable parents with housing issues (Reupert et al., 2015), Myannmar refugees (Hughes, 2018) and older gay men living with HIV (Gardiner, 2018). Studies of rural Australia engaging with race were confined to an ethnography of black–white relations in Bourke by Cowlishaw (2006) and a media analysis of depictions of Aurukun by Carden (2017: 604).

From 2000 to 2020, 170 and 52 articles in the Journal of Rural Studies and Sociologia Ruralis respectively used ‘Australia’ and ‘Australian’ as search terms in titles, abstracts and/or affiliations. From this process we elicited a final sample of 162 papers from the Journal of Rural Studies and 43 papers from Sociologia Ruralis, removing book reviews, a retraction, a corrigendum, an editorial and papers written by rural scholars at Australian universities, but with a non-Australian focus. Given that the rural studies community in Australia is small, and that these are both high-quality publications with a wide global readership, this is a remarkable collective output. At the same time, a closer analysis reveals that, overall, this body of scholarship provides a very narrow picture of non-metropolitan Australia, largely reproducing unproblematically discursive repertoires of rural space ‘as a repository of White values, ideologies and lifestyles’ (Panelli et al., 2009: 357). The most striking finding in this regard is the predominance of research on farmers as the main subject of focus in 67 papers published in Journal of Rural Studies and 28 in Sociologia Ruralis. Across this writing ‘the farmer’ has typically been examined as an undifferentiated category. It is an exception to see any consideration of employees on farms (e.g. Hanson and Bell, 2007), migrant farmers (Klocker et al., 2018), or class relations amongst farmers (Bryant and Pini, 2009). Within the pages of both journals, Australian feminist rural researchers have had considerable success in extending the empirical focus of studies of ‘the family farm’ to include women (e.g. Alston, 2006; Bryant and Garnham, 2018; Liepins, 2007; Newsome, 2020; Pini, 2004), but they have been much less successful in investigating their own privileges and investments in maintaining racialised and classed hierarchies. Instead, as Moreton-Robinson (2020a: xviii) argued 20 years ago, ‘in Australia whiteness is not interrogated or named as “difference”, even though it is the standard by which certain “differences” are measured, centred and normalised’.

The predominance of Australian farming research which ignores race and class is connected to a persistent investment in agrarian imaginaries and constructions of the nation. The ‘white farming imaginary’ is a term coined by Alkon and McCullen (2010: 945) to denote the romanticising and universalising of ‘an agrarian narrative specific to whites, while masking the contribution and struggles of people of color in food production’. In furthering the concept, Cairns et al. (2015) note its patriarchal and heteronormative investments, as well as its morally infused affective and temporal orientations. The authors explain that the ‘white farming imaginary’ constructs farmers as moral subjects who, over generations and into the future, are stewards of the land, resilient against the many hardships and adversities of agricultural life, and skilled and resourceful in transforming the landscape to provide for the nation.

In the Australian context Mayes (2018: 116) argues that an ‘agrarian imaginary draws on and reinforces a white imaginary’ to establish moral and ontological claims of white belonging. Through a genealogy of the Australian alternative agriculture movement he demonstrates how the colonial logics of dispossession are perpetuated through the stories told about farmers and farming. Drawing on a case study of the ABC radio program Country Hour, Waller et al. (2019) exemplify this thesis, revealing how the show promotes an ‘agrarian imaginary’ through what Ritkin (2014) labels ‘settler common sense’.

The politics of the white farming imaginary and, in turn, the privileging of research on farmers and farming by Australian rural sociologists are intricately connected to the capital relations of research, and the fact that agriculturally focused scholarship (primarily bio-physical), has been well funded in Australia by government and industry. Research infrastructure buttressing Australian farmers spans departments of agriculture at state and federal levels, commodity-specific research agencies, as well as Agri-Futures Australia and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). In turn, this results in epistemic violence that has historically privileged and legitimised select narratives and projects about farming in Australia.

Compared to race, class in Australian rural space has been given some minimal attention in Sociologia Ruralis (e.g. Farrugia et al., 2016) and in the Journal of Rural Studies (e.g. Zufferey and Parkes, 2019). Importantly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are absent from work published by Australian authors in Sociologia Ruralis from 2000 to 2020. In contrast, over the 20-year period Indigenous lives are given rare, but important explicit attention in the Journal of Rural Studies on just seven occasions. In this writing, the ‘white possessive’ of core topics in rural scholarship such as ‘governance’, ‘land’ and ‘community’, are laid bare (e.g. Moreton-Robinson, 2015).

Rural Indigenous authorial voices have been heard on just two occasions in the 20-year period in the Journal of Rural Studies. In 2009 Bebe Ramzan, an Indigenous woman from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjaraut (APY) lands, shared her expertise about living in remote Australia in the journal. She challenged discourses of dysfunction in depictions of rural Indigenous people and emphasised the exclusion of Indigenous people from national drought narratives, revealing the farming undertaken on the Homelands (see Ramzan et al., 2009). Another article in the journal by Aboriginal authors (Marika et al., 2009) from the north-eastern Arnhem Land of the Yolngu people, utilised informal conversations, discussions and autoethnographic reflections. It also deployed an epistemologically distinct framework of Yolngu metaphors, including that of ngathu, the cycad nut, which identifies the need to use the right processes to ensure the cyanide is leached from the cycad nut so it can be prepared into sacred bread. Through this research the authors argued for the need to leach the poison from rural governance structures, which marginalise Indigenous decision-making processes, and provide knowledge which affords rural scholars and policy makers the ‘tools to read, see and act differently’ (Marika et al., 2009: 406).

Ramzan’s and Marika et al.’s articles are part of a rich body of scholarship by Indigenous authors which challenges colonial knowledge production processes (e.g. Moreton-Robinson, 2013 and 2020a on Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory and on life narratives; Miyarrka Media, 2019 on Yuta anthropology). For example, Dawn Bessarab, a Bard/Yjindjabandi woman from Broome in the West Kimberley, reveals that some methods may not be appropriate in Indigenous research, while others, such as her approach of yarning, that is, having an informal conversation with participants, are ‘conducive to an Indigenous way of doing things’ (Bessarab and Ng’andu, 2010: 47; see also Bargallie, 2020).

Feminism in rural studies continues to be marginalised, but of the total 102 papers focused on farmers published in the three journals, 17 explicitly brought a gender lens to the topic. In general, the dynamism and variability of the category ‘farm woman’, and the multiple identifications and differentiations between those who are categorised as such, are not afforded visibility. In short, while the patriarchal dimensions of the family farm are examined, its whiteness and relationship with colonial violence are ignored. At the same time, despite foundational studies bringing together work on class and gender (Dempsey, 1990; Poiner, 1990), there is an absence of analysis of the classed affiliations of farm women. As authors writing outside of these journals have demonstrated, class identities and the moral ascriptions tied to these identities will differ between rural people associated with agriculture according to variables including size, type, productivity and period of time of land holding (Bryant and Pini, 2010; Butler, 2018).

Australian rural social research is not produced in isolation. It is part of a much larger body of rural scholarship in which class has fallen off the agenda (Bryant and Pini, 2009; Phillips, 2016) and racial inequality is eschewed (Bray, 2020; Panelli et al., 2009). What is of concern to this article, however, is that the white settler woman, as the normative feminine subject position in Australian rural studies, is germane to Moreton-Robinson’s (2020a: viii) critique of the centrality of the ‘white middle-class woman’ constituted by and of colonialism, as enunciated in her authoritative work, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. We explore this further in the following case study of Museums Victoria’s ‘Invisible Farmer’ project.

Heather Mitchell’s Akubra

Museums Victoria’s ‘Invisible Farmer’ project is a contemporary and powerful illustration of the continuation of research that reproduces the primacy of the settler, along with settler values, assumptions and practice. As a leading Australian cultural institution, Museums Victoria is invested with significant authority to define and shape national identity and our understandings of the past (Morphy, 2006). Taking up this argument in a study of the Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Queensland, L. Smith (2012: 474) explains that heritage is a deeply political process, whereby ‘societies negotiate and legitimate particular narratives, and the cultural values that underpin them’. In Australian museums, O’Sullivan (2013) contends that these narratives are typically rendered via the unstated, normative colonial gaze of whiteness.

As a large-scale national study, the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project had a number of threads, including recording the history of women’s farm gatherings, ³ and collecting artefacts related to women and agriculture in Australia and the stories associated with these artefacts. Here, we focus on the first physical object acquired for the project: the Akubra hat owned by Heather Mitchell (1917–99), the first female President of the Victorian Farmer’s Federation, in order to illustrate how processes of possession, control and ownership of artefacts in museums are embedded in epistemic, cultural and material forms of colonial violence (see O’Sullivan, 2013). Mitchell’s Akubra is a significant item: it has been formally included in the project’s online collection; was afforded a prime position in the 2017 Women of the Land exhibition at Melbourne Museum; and is given ongoing attention on the project’s blog and Facebook page. The physical hat is rendered precious and special through the process of becoming an artefact, as foregrounded in photographs on the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project website. These images capture gloved curators carefully handling the Akubra, and showing the hat to a delegation of country women and to Mitchell’s extended family, as they stand around the glass case in which it is displayed.

A key narrative of the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project is that Australian rural women have been invisible, because farming has been imagined as a masculine enterprise. In this regard, the Akubra is positioned as a key symbol of the masculine definition of farmer. For example, in promoting the project, archivist Maggie Shaply (2019) states: ‘I’m sure when I said “farmer” you all pictured a male dressed in an Akubra, Driza-Bone and RM Williams boots, and yet women produce at least 49% of real farm income in Australia today.’ In echoes of this comment, a reporter in the Country News opines: ‘When thinking of a “typical” Aussie farmer city people think of someone wearing an Akubra hat with a tan from the harsh sun and a button-up shirt, often a flannel. But above all the image that pops into people’s minds is that of a man’ (Christensen, 2017).

In light of the thesis that rural women have been invisible, the project sought ‘to reveal the hidden stories of women on the land’ (Museums Victoria, 2017). The ‘hidden story’ the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project tells about Mitchell is that she was born in Sydney in 1917, trained as a nurse and, after marriage, moved to Hopetoun with her pharmacist husband, where they ran multiple businesses and farms. In 1986 she became the President of the Victorian Farmers Federation and later, the founding co-chair of Landcare Victoria, alongside former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner.

Curators explain that what they ‘found most interesting’ about working on the Akubra was ‘how little was known about Heather Mitchell in the public arena’ (Brinson and Matthews, 2017). Such a claim is undermined by the fact that her story has been narrated through recourse to multiple media reports, including the many obituaries which followed her death, and via the receipt of prestigious awards (e.g. Orders of the British Empire and Australia in 1970 and 1991 respectively). Curatorial notes further describe her as ‘one of the most celebrated and influential women in Australian agriculture’ (Museums Victoria Collections, 2020).

Despite its incongruity, the motif of invisibility is central to the story Museums Victoria creates about Mitchell. It is a motif that has had considerable currency in shaping the broader story of rural white, middle-class farming women in Australia over the past few decades. In 1992 Julie Williams used it as a title for a study she had undertaken on behalf of the Australian government, replicating Carolyn E. Sachs (1983) who had engaged it in United States research on farming women. In her project Williams (1992) mapped different dimensions of invisibility for Australian women in agriculture from the patrilineal line of inheritance to the gendered division of labour on family farms. Since then, the notion of invisibility has become a dominant trope in referencing farming women, despite evidence to the contrary, such as the plethora of research on the subject, policy change, including the establishment of rural women’s units in government departments, and more than 20 years of the high-profile national Rural Women’s Award.

The invisibility narrative of the project is embedded in a middle-class liberal feminist tradition whereby gender equality is equated with a series of social, economic and/or political exclusions. The primary emphasis of liberal feminism is the public sphere, as its agenda is about ensuring women’s equal treatment with (typically powerful) men. Absent is any class or race analysis. Thus, a key concern of the 'Invisible Farmer' project is women's leadership in agricultural organisations. There are also repeated references in project materials to the fact that farm women were not counted in the national census until 1967. Further to this, the project website lists other exclusions which have rendered farm women ‘invisible’ and have required legal redress, such as the prohibiting of women at some agricultural colleges up until the 1970s and the lack of voting rights in some farm organisations until the 1990s. In this light, the purchase and display of Heather Mitchell’s hat enters the narrative created by the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project, as a symbol of claiming feminine space in a masculine domain. As curators explain, she adopted the ‘Akubra as her public persona’, and it ‘became strongly associated with her agri-political career and public identity, with many images of her wearing the hat appearing in the media’ (Brinson and Matthews, 2017).

The narrative of Australian farm women’s invisibility, now beginning to be rectified by the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project, (as encapsulated by Mitchell’s hat), is tied to the deep socio-cultural resonance of the Akubra as a symbol of rural masculinity and, in turn, the nation, as mythologised in poems, films, novels, plays, advertisements, and the product’s association with national sporting teams and the military (Kennedy and Coulter, 2018; Maynard, 1994, 1999). Writing about the Sydney Olympics, Hogan (2003: 106) has observed that the spectacle of 120 men and women riding horses around the stadium carrying Australian flags and wearing Driza-Bone coats and Akubra hats, ‘made explicit’ the link between these items of clothing and national identity, and moreover, that the national identity communicated was not just rural, but primarily masculine and white. Craik (2009: 42) furthers this analysis of the meanings of the bush aesthetic by attending to class, explaining that the hat, trousers and boots associated with the bushmen were ‘the clothes of the bosses – the squatters and property owners’, not the clothing of workers, but such class differences and hierarchies were elided in the creation of a national dress. These items of clothing mark further class and racial differences between farmers and also have a geography. As an example, along the coast of Queensland and in northern New South Wales cane farmers, many of whom have family biographies tied to Italy or Malta, would typically wear a cap or straw hat in the paddock not an Akubra (Pini, 2003). Of course, the meanings attached to clothing such as hats are not static but can shift and be redefined, as Indigenous activists have demonstrated in appropriating the Akubra (Maynard, 1999). For example, Indigenous Labor Party Senator Patrick Dobson, is well known for wearing a distinctively black Akubra with added threads of the Indigenous colours of yellow, brown, red and white around the brim (Lewis, 2016). Nevertheless, the connection between the Akubra and whiteness and social class status remains deeply entrenched in the national psyche and settler colonial logics.

Notably the Akubra’s association with the squattocracy in Australia, that is, with elite settler cattle and sheep farmers, is completely ignored in Museum Victoria’s ‘Invisible Farmer’ project. Instead the artefact is presented as a generic, albeit gendered symbol of the farmer, so that, as is explained in the collection notes: ‘In adopting this Akubra as her public persona Heather Mitchell directly and successfully challenged the gendered nature of rural Australia and the role of women in it’ (Museums Victoria Collections, 2020). The refusal of curatorial staff to address the greater complexity of what is communicated by the Akubra obscures the fact that white, middle-class women, by virtue of insisting on their place alongside the white male farmers, indeed on their role in making such farming and ongoing possession possible, directly support and benefit from the ongoing denial of Indigenous sovereignty. As Moreton-Robinson (2020a: xx) argues, ‘middle-class women’s privilege is tied to colonisation and the dispossession of Indigenous people. Notions of race are closely linked to ideas about legitimate ownership and formation of the nation, with whiteness and nationality woven tightly together.’ Thus, the ‘assumption that the nation is a white possession is evident in the relationship between whiteness, property and law’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 30). This is manifest in the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project through the naturalisation of land-ownership, first as central to the identity of ‘farmer’ and second, for the nation as disconnected from Indigenous sovereignty and Australia’s violent colonial land theft. Thus, the Akubra, and what it represents, are clear examples of how white possessive logics about rurality in Australia are operationalised, circulating ‘sets of meanings about ownership of the nation, as part of common sense knowledge, decision making and socially produced conventions’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: xii).

Narratives of whiteness and class created and circulated via the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project focus not only on Mitchell’s Akubra, but also on the more than 40 badges affixed to it which, as the curatorial notes accompanying the hat contend, render her ‘an inspiration’ (Museum Victoria Collections, 2020). Collectively, the badges are taken as evidence of Mitchell’s community mindedness and, again, classed and racialised dimensions are ignored. She is positioned as an exemplary ‘rural woman’ and a role model for aspiring rural women, promoting middle-class and privileged public roles – sitting on boards of national institutions – in the (self-) service of advancing agri-politics, while maintaining a fundamentally gendered and ‘moral’ role in high-level community work. What is disregarded by the curators is that volunteering in rural communities is organised by class and race, with property-owning women typically involved in groups with an homogeneous white, middle-class membership, and using this membership to perform a distinctive rural middle-class femininity (Bryant and Pini, 2009, 2010). Also overlooked is that a prerequisite of membership of some of the organisations with which Mitchell was associated is property ownership. Further, while these organisations are presented as neutral entities, some are known for promulgating policies explicitly reiterating the founding assumption that the Australian nation is a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 1998, 2015). In short, the selective history recounted about Mitchell, which positions her as the archetypal rural woman, speaks to Moreton-Robinson’s (2020a: 174) observation that, in ‘white people’s history’, white women ‘are mythologised as the brave women who fought against the harsh climate’ and ‘no mention is made about how they lived and profited from the land stolen from Indigenous women’.

As we have shown, what the narratives surrounding the Akubra and Mitchell’s representations elide is that the landowning of settlers in Australia is premised on the violent dispossession of land through colonisation. At the same time, Indigenous women are brought into the storyline created by the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project as ‘the first farmers’, and depicted via another item in the collection, that is, an Indigenous grinding stone used in food production and for making medicines and pigments (Museums Victoria Collection, 2020). As illustrated in the curatorial notes cited below, a narrative of continuity is adopted, whereby the theft of Indigenous land is portrayed as a seamless and uncontentious transfer from one group of women to the next:

This grinding stone was uncovered by a farmer south of Donald. This stone is an interesting intersection between one farming technology and another, and an important opportunity to reflect on the connection to country, between Indigenous women farmers with those who now farm those lands.

We are not denying Indigenous people’s roles as agriculturalists (Pascoe, 2014), but rather emphasise that in the above ‘historical record’ no mention is made of the fact that the farming land on which the artefact was found is stolen land. Through an essentialist framing, Aboriginal women are positioned in the past, and a romanticised connection is forged between Indigenous women as the ‘original farming women’ in Australia, and white middle-class farming women, who are portrayed as having an equivalent ontological relationship with the land. At the same time, whiteness is left ‘uninterrogated, centred and invisible’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2020a: 184), as the significant contribution Aboriginal women made to establishing the pastoral industry is not mentioned in the curation of the Akubra or the grinding stone (Simone, 2016). ⁴

Through the white feminist imperatives that frame the ‘Invisible Farmer’ project, Heather Mitchell is a ‘rural woman’ deserving of having her story told. She is the reification of what is an idealised ‘rural woman’, an inspiring liberal feminist role model, and future focus. While we recognise that Mitchell’s wearing of the Akubra was no doubt an important signifier of her right to be a representative of an agri-political group and her undoing of gender norms, we emphasise that the hat did not just signify masculinity, but also elite class status and whiteness. In its ‘Invisible Farmer’ project Museums Victoria failed to interrogate whiteness ‘as a source of oppression and inequality’ (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 345), and instead represented it as unproblematically foundational to the construction of Australia as a white possession. Thus, the ‘new histories’ of rural Australia Museums Victoria (2017) sought to ‘uncover and create’ via the project, incorporated a narrow group of settler women into existing narratives, while reproducing racialised and classed exclusions.

An agenda for Australian rural sociology

Through the 20-year review of mainstream rural scholarship and the case study presented above, we have demonstrated how white possessive logics and racism dominate in rural studies. We have demonstrated what Chelsea Watego (see Bond 2021: 6) has identified as the ‘flimsiness of white women’s solidarity when it comes to attending to race as a structure of oppression’ (Bond, 2021: 6). As settlers and feminists who contribute to the discipline, we acknowledge our complicity and understand that our efforts through engaging with intersectionality and ‘difference’ have not been sufficient (see Yuval-Davis, 2006).

Twenty years ago, Moreton-Robinson (2020a: xxv) talked up to feminists in Australia encouraging an intersubjective dialogue and concrete action that we are yet to accomplish. She argued:

For Indigenous women all white feminists benefit from colonisation, they are overwhelmingly represented and disproportionately predominant, have the key roles, and constitute the norm, the ordinary and the standard of womanhood in Australia. White women are not represented themselves as variously classed, sexualised, aged and abled. The disjuncture between representation and self-representation of both Indigenous women and white feminisms means that the involvement of Indigenous women in Australian feminism is, and will remain, partial. This partiality in practice requires white feminists to relinquish some power, dominance and privilege in Australian feminisms to give Indigenous women’s interest some priority. To do any less means that the subject position middle-class white woman will remain centred as a site of dominance participating in maintaining the racial order in Australian society.

This article has argued that the racial order of white supremacy in rural and feminist studies continues and is implicated in epistemic, ontological, symbolic and material colonial violence. As Moreton-Robinson (2020a, 2020b) contends, this racial order is embedded in a politics of class but with some notable exceptions (e.g. Butler, 2018; Cuervo and Wyn, 2014), class has been omitted in rural Australian scholarship – with the middle-class typically presented as the normative rural standard.

Thus, we ask ourselves today how do we relinquish power as settlers working at the intersections of feminist and rural studies? As many Indigenous scholars have taught us, this is not about a checklist to complete and from which to absolve ourselves in claiming to be ‘good allies’ but it is rather a political commitment to dismantling the continued operationalisation of colonialism and white supremacy from which we benefit as settlers (see L.T. Smith, 2013). Given the lack of racial literacy and the prevalence of racism and hegemony of middle-class values that permeate all spaces of Australian society, including academia, we believe in the need for an explicit research agenda within our discipline, which centres Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s knowledge.

In a recent article, leading Indigenous scholars Bronwyn Fredericks, Debbie Bargallie and Bronwyn Carlson (2020: n.p.) ‘talked up’ to settler allies and researchers to position themselves in relation to whiteness, rightly claiming ‘nothing about us, without us’. Rural sociology’s lack of critical engagement with race and whiteness, and with the contributions of Indigenous scholarship is a ‘telling silence’ (Whittaker, 2019: n.p.), given the plethora of available literature. In her work Moreton-Robinson (2020a) has demonstrated how Indigenous life narratives are key sources for understanding and addressing sovereignty and self-determination. In terms of rural Australia, recent self-story telling includes The Cherry Picker’s Daughter in which Kerry Reed-Gilbert (2019) documents the trauma and disadvantage of growing up Indigenous in rural Australia, but also communicates strong family ties, as well as tenacity, industry, and the extraordinary labour of ongoing resistance to colonialism. In Blakwork, by Gomeroi poet Alison Whittaker (2018), the author addresses numerous themes, among which is her experience of growing up Aboriginal in country New South Wales. Further to her poetic memoir, Whittaker (2020) has recently edited an anthology of Indigenous poetry and essays, which, together with other Indigenous scholarship (see O’Sullivan, 2020), further challenges the hegemony of white ontologies of rural Australia. Equally overlooked in publications by rural researchers is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholarship from a range of subdisciplines which are highly relevant to rural sociology’s need to recognise and decentre whiteness and address racism. This includes research on health (e.g. Bond, 2007; see also her Inala Manifesto in McInerney, 2019), social work (e.g. Walter et al., 2011), creative arts (O’Sullivan, 2013), education, sociology and cultural studies (e.g. Bodkin-Andrews and Carlson, 2014) and environmental studies (e.g. Yunkaporta, 2019).

Further to the above, the breadth of research on critical race theory (see for example, Bargallie, 2020, and the work of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association) that spans over 40 years is yet to be fully utilised in mainstream rural studies in Australia. Arguably, engaging with this work is paramount to de-centre, disaggregate and de-structure the ‘white farming imaginary’, including the privileging of the subject position of the nation’s white and settler women. This involves an epistemic and political engagement with the violence of colonial land theft, the dispossession of colonialism, and the social construction of gender as tied to colonialism. As Moreton-Robinson (2020b: n.p.) has stated: ‘This is our land, and you are on it, and you are here illegally. And you have to deal with that, as part of the history of this country. So, in the formation of the middle-class white woman that is very much tied to colonialism.’ Indeed, Moreton-Robinson’s work speaks to Global South knowledge within feminist and gender studies, calling out white supremacy in feminism through the ‘colonial imposition of gender’ (e.g. Lugones, 2010: 742). Again, there is little evidence of this scholarship informing Australian feminist studies and rural sociology.

Thus, a commitment to a politics of citation, that deeply engages with the rich and heterogeneous critical race and Indigenous-led scholarship, is imperative. Also necessary is to recognise the knowledge produced by Indigenous research participants (Bennett, 2020). Oxley (2020: n.p.) notes that ‘the result of failing to cite the works of Aboriginal scholars is a lack of recognition of the research that Aboriginal people have undertaken in our own right, and the denial of self-determination and sovereignty over our knowledges’. It is then colonial ontological violence to continue to ignore this work. This argument also relates to the importance of stepping down from research and partnerships in which white and settler presence claims space that is not ours, particularly in leadership roles doing ‘Indigenous research’ in rural contexts. As Oxley (2020: n.p.) cogently argues in relation to the importance of ‘retaining custodianship of Indigenous knowledge’ in Australia:

There is often no accountability, no one to answer to, when the research on Indigenous people is conducted in a manner that is not decolonised, and that underpins the very existence of Aboriginal Knowledge. In fact, it is the opposite. Career progression is expected, awards, recognition through the Aboriginal knowledge, the use of Aboriginal intellect and use of Aboriginal labour.

O’Sullivan (2019: n.p.) recently drew necessary attention to this issue, pointing out that out of the 100 successful applications for ARC’s Future Fellowships there were ‘five Indigenous-focused projects, no fellows are Indigenous’. These, among other current examples of non-Indigenous leadership, demonstrate the importance of giving up power in academic spaces including in the field of rural sociology.

The actions narrated above are only the beginning of what we hope is an ongoing dialogue and commitment to action by Australian rural studies academics for an anti-racist agenda. Such an agenda comes with structural and personal consequences. We are in no way claiming to have all the answers. What we have argued in this article is that the minimum work of giving up power as settlers is long overdue. However, as a discipline we must aspire to go beyond doing the minimum. This means interrogating epistemic and personal engagements with whiteness, race and racism, relinquishing power as settlers, calling out racism in the spaces we inhabit, respecting Indigenous custodianship of knowledge, and standing in solidarity with the hundreds of years of the resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to the ongoing colonial violence and land dispossession of rural Australia.