News Release

'Beyond the North-South Culture Wars'

Reconciling Northern Australia's recent past with its future

Book Announcement

Springer

A new book, Beyond the North–South Culture Wars – Reconciling Northern Australia's Recent Past With Its Future by Allan Dale, explores the conflicts which exist between northern and southern Australia. Increasingly, Australia's agriculturalists are looking to the nation's north to escape the decline in southern Australia's water and soil resources. Booming mineral and gas development is also helping to drive the nation's economic success. At the same time, the south's conservation sector would like to see much of the north preserved as iconic wilderness.

Both conservation and resource development interests alike are often at odds with the interests of the north's traditional owners, many of whom remain trapped in welfare dependency and poverty. Indeed, to the ire of north Australians, the past four decades of north Australian history have indeed been characterized by these national-scale conflicts being played out in regional and local communities.

Beyond the North–South Culture Wars explores these conflicts as well as the many emerging opportunities facing the development of the north, suggesting that a strong cultural divide between northern and southern Australia exists; one that needs to be reconciled if the nation as a whole is to benefit from northern development. The author first explores where these historical conflicts could take us without a clear forward agenda. A story-based personal narrative from the author's long and diverse experience in the north gives life to these themes. Finally, the book draws on these stories to help shape a cohesive agenda for the north's future.

Associate Professor Allan Dale is the Research Leader in Tropical Regional Development with James Cook University's Cairns Institute and an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow with Charles Darwin University's Northern Institute. He has research, management and policy experience in regional development and natural resource governance, including in northern Australia's pastoral, fishing, forestry, tourism, and mining sectors. Before joining the Cairns Institute, Allan was the CEO of one of the nation's leading community-based regional natural resource management bodies, Terrain NRM. Allan is also Chair of Regional Development Australia (Far North Queensland and Torres Strait).

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Allan Dale
Beyond the North–South Culture Wars
Reconciling Northern Australia's Recent Past With Its Future
Springer 2014, 148 p., 12 illus., 6 in colour
Hardcover € 49,99 | £ 44.99 | $ 54.99
ISBN 978-3-319-05596-1
Also available as an eBook


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