Outside Country makes an invaluable contribution to the rethinking of inland Australia. Through essays that mix the broad sweep of history with personal perspectives drawn from diaries, letters, oral histories and literature, it examines the rich and varied social, cultural and environmental histories of regions that continue to play a crucial role in the ongoing development of the Australian nation.

While most Australians, now live in the major cities on the coast, much of the country's wealth is still derived from the interior, a vast area of scattered and often remote communities, mining towns and pastoral homesteads all linked by what historians J.W. McCarthy called the Inland Corridor.

Contents include: Outside country / Alan Mayne p1. Social landscapes / Alan Mayne p11. South Australian historical novels of pioneering and development along the Murray-Darling river system / Rick Hosking p17. Dr Jean White and the Prickly Pear Experimental Station, Dulacca, 1912-1916 / Jodi Frawley p43. Settler women in the Victorian Mallee, 1920s-30s / Ruth Ford p63. Reclaiming cultural flows: aboriginal people, settlers and the Darling River / Heather Goodall p95. Flows and frictions / Alan Mayne p127. Richard Pope: a miner's life in the inland corridor / Charles Fahey p135. The railway corridors / Lionel Frost p159. Mobile lives / Jenny Gregory p177. Traversing the margins, connecting worlds / Raelene Frances p199. Making a life / Alan Mayne p225. A long history of the Australian family farm 1830-2000 / Charles Fahey p231. Culturally mapping the Cradle Valley: Tasmanian outback landscapes and sustainable communities in the present day / Keir Reeves and Christopher MacDonald p267. Living on the margins at Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve / Fiona Davis and Patricia Grimshaw p287. Memory and identity in Broken Hill and Mount Isa / Erik Eklund p311. Afterword / Stephen Atkinson p331. Contributors p345. Index p349.