-->'Hasn't the country had its fair share, and destroyed the country, and given us a desperado in a big hat in the process?'
This was Don Watson's characteristically provocative opening to an interview with Judith Brett, author of the most recent Quarterly Essay, Fair Share: Country and City in Australia, at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne.
Notwithstanding the current high profile of rural independents Bob Katter, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, and the prominence of issues such as the NBN rollout, live cattle exports, and the fate of the Murray-Darling Basin, flippancy and apathy are frequent features of any debate where Australia's pronounced country/city divide comes to the fore.
When Q&A's largest-ever studio audience filled the Albury Entertainment Centre in May, Liberal senator Eric Abetz's concerns about leftist bias received almost as much press publicity as the event itself.
In contrast with the studio audience, the TV audience for the Albury Q&A was down on the weekly average, and the Twitter stream filled with disparagement from bored Fitzroy and Surry Hills pundits switching off their TVs.
Metropolitan columnists from Catherine Deveny to Miranda Devine regularly fill column inches by hating on the bucolically backward.
On the other hand, agrarian socialist rants from the likes of Katter don't help the stereotyping, and it's easy to paint the book burners at last year's Murray-Darling Basin protests as no more than ignorant, self-interested environmental vandals.
Enter Brett with Fair Share, and finally there's a voice in the debate that resists resorting to the crude dichotomies and sweeping condescension that so often dominate perceptions on both sides, and conveys the importance of Australians in the cities taking an interest in the fate of the country.
30 per cent of the Australian population, 70 per cent of the Indigenous population, large numbers of the nation's long-term unemployed and increasing numbers of recent humanitarian refugees call rural areas home. An interest in rural Australia's future is therefore imperative for anyone interested in the future of the nation as a whole.
Some aspects of rural life at present are dire: 2010 Rural Woman of the Year and Albury Q&A panellist, Alana Johnson, went as far as to term the state of rural health a 'human rights issue'.
As an audience member noted, those in the country are 30 per cent more likely to die from a heart attack than those in urban areas.
It's also clear that in some areas, ways of life that have survived for several