On being rural: identity claims, higher education and the global citizen

Unlike other western countries, Australian young people do not have the tradition of moving away from home to go to university; the most common living arrangement for Australians in their twenties is to be living in the parental home (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2005). For rural young people accessing tertiary studies, however, staying at home is rarely an option, especially if a rural young person accesses an elite higher education institution. Thus within Australian higher education, mobility is an ontological absolute for a rural young person. Simply put, all of the elite 'sandstone' universities in Australia are located in the cities; in fact, half of these, the self-identified 'Group of Eight' are in the two largest cities of Melbourne and Sydney. Alston and Kent (2003) argue that moving to the city or a larger regional area for further education is a move that requires an 'emotional hurdle' not everyone can achieve, and thus the gap between opportunities for rural and urban young people continue to deepen. This paper will examine this gap as a clash of two types of conflicting narratives that were evident in a recent four-year study that followed eight young women from small Victorian towns accessing an elite education in a large city. Jane Kenway's (2006) insightful reading of Australian higher education policy as 'traveller's tales' argues that university policies are written for the 'winners...emancipated from space' as they become 'citizens of the world'. What happens, however, when those 'emancipated from space' want to also hold onto a rural narrative that, in many ways, is in contradiction to the urban university's narrative? In order to unpack this conflict, I have developed two terms that I will seek to explain in the body of the paper: the rural cultural narrative and the urban public narrative. I will demonstrate the ways they are evident in the young women's own renditions of their mobility.

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