'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 generations are unlikely to be sustainable for much longer.
Take the wine industry in the Murray Valley. Brett argues that the policies of governments and business are at least as much at fault as the affected communities and individuals.
It's easy to contend that many of those who planted vines during the boom in the late '80s and '90s were naive opportunists, and that the free market has given them their just desserts for having commandeered precious water in order to flood it with the ocean of goon in which the nation's wine industry is now drowning.
But this argument ignores the role played by tax incentives and outside investment, and the huge encouragement larger companies — who should have known better — offered smaller growers in the form of lucrative, long-term supply contracts.
The wine industry is just one small part of the rural economy, but its current predicament illustrates the impact that decisions made in the cities have upon country people.
When 75 per cent of funding for agricultural science research and development is spent in capital cities, as Charles Sturt University Science Dean Nick Klomp noted on Q&A, it's hardly surprising that such decisions aren't always wise.
As Brett establishes, it's not all doom and gloom in the country. Many larger regional centres in the eastern states are thriving, the mining boom is fuelling exponential growth in parts of WA, the Northern Territory and Queensland, and almost half of the Australian tourist dollar — a bigger part of the nation's economy even than mining — is made outside capital cities.
But if we are to aim for the equitable distribution of resources and opportunities to citizens regardless of geographic location, policies must be developed through partnerships between city and country.
Brett's essay should be mandatory reading for every politician, public servant or business person whose conduct has a very real bearing on the everyday lives of rural Australians.
As she contends, it won't do to abandon 'all but the coastal fringe and a few regional towns' to blackberries, feral animals, and Bradley John Murdoch.
Rachel Baxendale is from a wine-producing family in North-East Victoria. She co-edited the Melbourne University student newspaper Farrago in 2010, is currently completing honours in English Literature, and tweets as @rachelbaxendale.