Space and Culture

Outback Metropolis by Penelope Dean and Peter Trummer

“Australia’s largest polis is not Sydney but a geographical network of settlements scattered across the central continent – connected not by shared streets but the aircraft and telecommunications system of the Royal Flying Doctors Service…The territory covered by the RFDS is not a city. It is also not a region. To many it remains a wilderness, an untouched landscape – Nature par excellence. Yet the outback has another reality. It is an urban field. It is a constellation of inhabitants that includes people of long residence (pastoral workers, miners and Aboriginal communities who live in small and dispersed settlements); people engaged in mobile living (sheep farmers, truckers and seasonal workers); and people of temporary residence (tourists, archaeologists and adventurers who are bound to a site for only a short period of time). The outback, part of the country’s economic hinterland for raw exports – wool, minerals and crops – once sustained the coastal cities where 70 percent of Australia’s 18 million people now live. The RFDS affords a free service to the outback population. It is financed by federal and state governments along with donations from corporations and the public. However, its existence, coupled with its territory, creates an urban paradox: the socio-medical services usually equated with urban life are brought to a territory that does not have an identifiable urban form in terms of built fabric and population density. The configuration eludes definition in conventional terms. Question: how might it be defined?”