A ROUGH GUIDE 19reasons. In the artefacts they display, their orderings and codings, urban agricultural shows
speak to well-known themes in contemporary cultural geography: of power and performativ-
ity, bodies and objects, colonialism and nation-building, knowledge and discourse, cities and
citizenship. They also afford a lens through which to bring the ‘new vitalism’ signalled by the
study of non-human geographies into contact with cultural geography’s most referential cate-
gory, that of culture. In that sense, the focus in what follows on one such spectacle offers a
point of insertion into some defining narratives of the subject to which this Handbookis
devoted.
The Royal Easter Show held in Sydney (Australia) is a case in point of the genre of the metro-
politan agricultural show. Since the 1820s, agricultural displays have been made to stand as
testimony to ‘civilization’s’ arrival and development in the colony of New South Wales
(NSW). Shorthorns, stallions, shearing machines and other artefacts that sit in that borderland
space between the human and the non-human have been annually assembled. This proud per-
formance of the agricultural ideal through the props of cultivation – of livestock and produce,
farm implements and machines – reiterates the tropes of Australia’s colonial mapping. These
include pastoralism, agriculture, property and the spatiality of ‘settlement’ in a landscape
which, as terra nullius, had apparently been devoid of these ‘improvements’. By today, the
volatile mix of Aboriginal and environmental critiques of such land uses highlights the ten-
sions within the massive binary structures of culture/nature, city/country and settlement/
wilderness that have been the stock-in-trade framings of much of cultural geography’s
subject matter.
Conceived within these broad framings, the genre of the agricultural show speaks to prob-
lems at the heart of cultural geography’s disciplinary identity. Within the long tradition of
geographic learning and labour referred to as ‘human–environment’ or ‘man–land’, agricul-
tural activities and their associated patterns of human settlement have figured in regionally
based historical geographies. In the United Kingdom, a long tradition of historical geography
continues to map the changing configurations of agriculture, industry and settlement that
have been implicated in the ‘making of the English landscape’ (Hoskins, 1955). In the United
States, the study of regional landscape features has been framed by a model of culture that
continues to centre humans as key agents of landscape change (Rubenstein, 1999).
Armed with a mix of analytic tools, an alternative perspective on the agricultural show
is possible. The detail of such a perspective is of less interest here than the strategy of using
vignettes (of events, objects, anecdotes) to evoke new ways of thinking spatially– ways
that articulate links rather than fissures, that signal geographies of connection and circulation
rather than segregation and stratification. In this case, a focus on one city’s agricultural
show brings into view the complex entanglements of culture/nature categories that have
stood on opposed sides of the conventional faultline of much geographic endeavour. That
the chosen event occupies a site in the so-called ‘New World’ is also of no incidental
significance. Rather, the choice is central to the tactic of disrupting oppositional talk – of
deranging the conventional relation in colonial studies of a centred imperial subject
impacting a distant margin ‘out there’.
After all, and historically speaking, the technologies of agriculture and pastoralism were
not coincident with Europe’s Age of Discovery from the sixteenth century. They belong
within a heritage of European-derived stories that both predate and outlive Europe’s global
extension. These are stories of ‘civilization’ conceived in a quite specific way as humanity’s3029-intro.qxd 03-10-02 5:17 PM Page 19