La Trobe University > Research > Research centres and institutes > Centre for the Study of the Inland (CSI) > Key research areas > Social transformation

Social transformation

Inland Australia is a space of movement and flows, not just settlement.

Inland Australia shapes and is shaped by social transformations over the course of its long history.

The movement of peoples and communities has impacted the land and environment just as much as the resources and land can dictate the lives of those living amongst it. Aboriginal people, migrants, grey nomads, itinerant workers, musicians, artists and even universities move into and out of and through this region, coming from near and far.

Reaching from the ancient past and speaking to pressing contemporary issues, this research area seeks to explore and understand ‘rurality’ and how rural communities can be supported to thrive and be resilient.

Current projects

Funded by the Australian Research Council, this project explores how people and communities have lived through and managed drought over time and in different regions of Victoria and their NSW borderlands: Mildura, Bendigo, Albury Wodonga and Shepparton. We look at the meanings and experiences of drought and aim to expand our knowledge of how we can better adapt to the environments on which we depend.

We explore the historic, artistic, cultural and scientific aspects of past and present droughts, as well as media coverage of these events. In particular, we will focus on four droughts: those of Federation (1895–1903), World War II (1937–1945), the Millennium (1997–2009), and the recent drought (2017–2020).

The project brings together a number of our centre researchers including:

What do local stakeholders think about the role of migration to the region and its interruption by the pandemic? This project between Assc Prof Anthony Moran and Dr Martina Boese investigates perspectives of regional stakeholders in the Sunraysia Mallee region (Mildura, Robinvale and Swan Hill) on migrant labour demands, experiences of migrants in the community and responses to labour shortages.

This interview-based project by Dr Martina Boese explores backpackers’ experiences in horticulture to assess how employment conditions in Australian farms have changed in the aftermath of interrupted migration through the pandemic and recent changes in employment and migration regulations.

This project investigated the socio-economic situation of Pacific people living in the Mildura/Robinvale area of Victoria. It explored how different immigration statuses impacted access to public services, interactions within and across ethnic groups and trans-local and translational practices. This project shed new light on Australian regional migration and brought marginalised regional population into discussions on migration and transnationalism.

This project was led by

  • Helen Lee
  • Makiko Nishitani
  • Partner Investigator Mr Dean Wickham and,
  • Executive Officer of Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council.

Australian Research Council Linkage Grant LP150100385 ($189,634) 2015-2019.

This report explored how people from disadvantaged communities experience the game of chance, bingo, and how harms can be minimised for individuals and communities. The report presents findings of a qualitative study examining the experience and impact of bingo on three Victorian communities where the game is relatively popular and economic and social disadvantage are common. These included: Aboriginal people in Gippsland and East Gippsland, Pacific migrants in Sunraysia and older people with fixed incomes in Melbourne. This project was led by Sarah MacLean and involved:

  • Helen Lee
  • Mary Whiteside
  • Kathleen Maltzahn and,
  • John Cox.

This project is linked to a Master’s thesis by Kathleen Maltzahn, supervised by Helen Lee, which has just been submitted.

Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation Grants for Gambling Research ($199,803) 2018-19. Lucky for some: bingo in Victoria.

In collaboration with the Pacific Islander Network and Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council, the project team built a website that contains collated narrative interviews with young Pacific professionals. The site documents show people have navigated various career paths in a range of industries (e.g. medicine, film and tv, publishing, carpentry, engineering and law). The result was a collection of online resources for community members.

This project was funded by the Scanlon Foundation and led by

This project will produce the first large-scale social, cultural, and environmental history of Australian rice. This history will examine how rice production and consumption created trade links and cultural connections between rural and urban Australia, and between Australia and the Asia-Pacific. It will outline underexplored longitudinal changes in consumer tastes and document rice producers’ successes and failures, providing historical context for Australia’s contemporary food security initiatives.

  • Emma Robertson (LTU)
  • Jennifer Jones (LTU)
  • Ruth Gamble (LTU)
  • with RMIT, Geneva Graduate Institute, Nichibunken (Kyoto), York University.

This SPARC-funded (Indian Government) project takes a multi-disciplinary approach to bordering practices in the Eastern Himalaya. Working across the disciplines of political ecology, political science, environmental and spatial history, socio-linguistics, geography, and anthropology, the research team is examining how bordering practices (both soft and hard infrastructure) are shaping the Eastern Himalaya.

A collaboration between La Trobe, UWA, Sikkim University and IIT (Madras), with LTU participants: Gerald Roche, James Leibold, Ruth Gamble

The politics, policies and practices surrounding cereal crop production for food security in Southeast Asia have long centred on optimizing cropping intensity and average yields in lowland agrarian environments. However, the progress in closing the “yield gap” between average farm yield and optimal yield potential has stagnated since the peak of the Green Revolution (1961-1985), contributing to and being threatened by biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and climate change. Previous understandings and applications of the yield gap concept among rice producers and managers have been narrow and technocratic, prioritizing the top-down imposition of ‘expert knowledge’ rather than an engagement with farmers’ knowledge, skills and livelihood priorities through participatory processes. This project aims to address this gap, by developing an integrated farmer-led understanding of crop yield from a social and agroecological perspective. Drawing on farmer field school and family farm approaches, the study aims to comprehensively examine how and why smallholder farmers and extensionists come to interpret, manage, and prioritize rice (and other crop) yields differently in the Philippines - a major innovator and producer of rice in Southeast Asia. By focusing on differences in understanding, valuing and using crop yield, the project will facilitate collaborative analysis, diagnosis, and learning to develop more inclusive and participatory modalities of engaging with rice farming systems, livelihoods and institutional support in the upland and lowlands of Palawan Island, the Philippines.
  • Associate Professor Brooke Wilmsen (LTU)
  • Professor Wolfram Dressler (University of Melbourne)
  • Dr Trent Brown (Tokyo University)
  • Professor Dominic Glover (International Development Studies Centre (IDS)/University of Sussex)

Responding to recent calls for critical commodity-type analyses and case studies to deepen understandings of the dynamics of the global pesticide complex, this research delves into the supply chain of a single herbicide – paraquat – as an active ingredient and in formulations. Acutely toxic paraquat is now produced primarily in China by a decreasing number of firms but is banned for use domestically in China. In contrast, it continues to be widely used in Australian broadacre farming. In this article we examine how the global pesticide complex materialises through the China-to-Australia paraquat supply chain. Through interviews with Australian pesticide manufacturers, retailers, peak bodies, and agronomists, we trace how the global pesticide complex materialises in the three nodes of production, distribution, and use, and their interconnections. The China-to-Australia paraquat supply chain illuminates the nature of global pesticide production, complicates presumed North-South flows of toxicity and environmental harm, and highlights the dynamics of agrarian change and regulatory politics in Australia.
  • Associate Professor Brooke Wilmsen (LTU)
  • Associate Professor Sarah Rogers (University of Melbourne)
  • Associate Professor Sonia Graham (University of Wollongong)
  • Dr Zoe Wang (James Cook University).

Mrunmayee Amshekar works with speakers of Tawang Monpa, spoken in Tawang district of Arunachal Pradesh, to document how the speech variety is used in different domains of day to day life, in the form of narrated stories, experiences and description of given prompts like pictures. Mrunmayee is also analysing the documented data to describe various aspects of the speech variety from a linguistic lens.

Adam Levy is working with the Porbami people of Nagaland, India, to better understand the grammar, sounds, and social landscape of their Chokri language. Adam has been recording traditional stories, elders' personal testimonials and natural conversation between speakers of the language to document the language in all its diversity. The people of Nagaland inhabit a rich linguistic ecosystem in which dozens of local languages, important regional languages, and global languages such as English and Hindi each play different roles in people's lives. In such an environment, a focus on the region's smaller languages is vitally important to the preservation of local identities.