This image of a road through a pass in the Dolomites symbolises distance and remoteness perfectly, courtesy of freeimages.com / Enrico Corno
Click on the image for a larger version

I’m tagging this post as part of the Blog Carnival. The theme is sequels, and I think that being the third part in a series qualifies.

The first two parts of this small series (Part 1, Part 2) looked at the tremendous impact of a community being located close to the major social, political, and economic center of a nation, especially in D&D games. Well, being distant from the population / administration / social center of a nation is no less profound in its implications!

I come from a small town located a considerable distance from the main urban center of my State, and Australia is geographically remote from most of the rest of the world, and especially from our primary cultural influences, England and the USA. That places me in a unique position to be authoritative on the impact of remoteness and distance. In fact, this was originally going to be the entire article; it was only as it was being developed that I realized that the other side of the coin also needed attention.

In terms of the topics to be covered, I’m going to start with the same basic headings over these next two articles as I did in the first half of this series, suitably modified of course!

Distance From Power

When you’re located a long way from the power base of the ruling authority, you have a great deal more independence, especially if that central authority is reliant on messages from the remote community to know what is occurring there. British colonial history is full of stories of local viceroys pursuing their won agendas and ambitions, even in direct contravention of national policies.

It has long been a standard practice to exile troublemakers and agitators to remote communities – Siberias, if you will – because this limits their capacity to trouble the state. Australia was established as a penal colony, and while most of those transported were convicted of relatively petty crimes – stealing shoes, or a loaf of bread – there were a significant minority found guilty of more serious crimes. In theory, once a sentence had been served, the convicts were to be provided transport back to England, but in practice this rarely occurred. Although I don’t know of any specific examples, it is far from being a remote possibility that some were political prisoners.

One of the early governors of the Colony of New South Wales was former-Captain Bligh, notorious for the Mutiny aboard his ship, the Bounty. He had not softened in subsequent years, ruling with a heavy hand, and treating those under his authority as second-class citizens even if their sentences had been served. The Colony had been conceived as a social experiment, a moneyless community, but – as always happens in such cases – an unofficial medium of exchange had sprung up – illegally-brewed rum. Bligh, determined to keep the Colonials under his thumb, sent glowing reports back to England even as he ruthlessly suppressed and oppressed the residents. The straw that broke the Camel’s Back was his attempt to suppress the Rum Trade, leading to a full-blown revolt against his authority. He was captured, hiding under his bed, and sent back to England. Nevertheless, the Colony was still dependent on the home country, and one of the instigators also returned with Bligh to stand trial for Mutiny; he was found guilty, but pardoned due to the extenuating circumstances. More than anything else, this shows the difficulty of exerting power from a distance.

That difficulty also shows up as a key factor in the American Revolution; ‘taxation without representation’ held a particular resonance amongst many Australians on several occasions through the 20th century, as the nation of Australia sought to exert its independence. Even today, archaic English laws occasionally throw up a Constitutional Crisis here.

Distance From Authority

The more remote a community is to central authority, especially in a medieval/fantasy setting, the greater the independence of the local representatives of that central authority. Broad directives may be issued, but interpretation and implementation rests with the locals. Laws may be passed by the central command, but the reality is that some laws will be ignored (most of the time), some will receive no more than lip service (though they may be used as “the stick,” i.e. a threat to maintain order), and some laws that may have been modified or taken off the books entirely will still be in effect, however unofficially. The result is a strange melange between the contemporary and the way things used to be, as much as a generation or more earlier.

Popular myth suggest that this is true for remote communities in the US – sleepy little communities that are a generation or more removed from modern social attitudes are practically a trope in fiction and media – and there are ‘redneck elements’ in many remote Australian communities, even in modern times.

This tendency can only have been exaggerated in eras when communications were slower; it’s impossible to react sensibly to situations when all the reports are days out of date, even if those reports are accurate.

Distance From News

Back when I was growing up, people knew a lot about what was happening locally, were reasonably well-informed about regional events, and learned everything else about events at a state and national level from a daily half-hour of TV news, augmented by another half-hour of current affairs, and from 3-to-5-minute radio news bulletins. If you wanted depth, you were reliant on the daily newspapers, most of which were a blend of “the official line” and ideological perspectives. Most of what went on at the State and National Capitals was either perceived as irrelevant, or biased in favor of the cities over the needs of country citizens, and the rest was simply seen as “remote”.

Peculiarly, such when the city of Darwin was leveled by Cyclone Tracy (what North Americans would know as a Hurricane), this occasionally resulted in locals being better-informed about events than their urbanized brethren. The major news services were slow to pick up on events, but regional radio networks learned of the situation far more quickly. I can distinctly remember hearing about it on Christmas Morning in 1973, before we started opening Christmas Gifts, and the sense of guilt that accompanied having a good time while our fellow citizens were struggling to survive. Not that I, as a ten-year-old, could have done much about the situation! It was only in the evening TV news the following day that the national media seemed to catch on.

These factors are only amplified by the slowness of communications in bygone times. It was not unheard of for communities to learn of the death of their monarch after a successor was already crowned.

The effect is best thought of as ripples of emotion, spreading slowly. The outermost regions are not aware that anything has changed; life is proceeding as normal. Inward of that, you enter a zone where the news has only just arrived, and people are mourning (or celebrating, depending on the ruler, I suppose). As you proceed still closer to the center, you reach regions that have had more time to digest and react to the news and which are beginning to settle down again. Inward of that is a band in which people are waiting to see what will happen, and what it will mean for them. Then you reach regions where the identity of the new monarch has been confirmed, but in which it is not yet known when they will formally ascend the throne; then you have a band of celebrations following news of the coronation; and, in the center, the Capital, where the Coronation was last week’s news, and the consequences are beginning to dominate awareness. As the news radiates ever-outwards from the center, these bands expand outwards.

This process is illustrated in the form of a “time-lapse series” by the diagram. Each piece of news radiates out from the source like a wave, traveling a certain distance in a given time dictated by the speed of communications.

Bad and dramatic news (or rumors of the same) tends to travel faster than good news, while good news travels faster in the absence of other news or when it is in direct response to a prior bad news story. This has been simulated by widening some of the bands.

It’s important to note that “the speed of communications” is actually a two-to-three stage process. While some people will hear the news directly, a far greater number will need to hear it via word-of-mouth from someone who has heard it directly, and some will still ignore the story on the basis of disbelief or a failure to recognize the story as a matter of relevance to them.

It doesn’t really matter what the ultimate speed of direct communications is; the primary distribution medium remains human in nature. The bigger impacts on the process are (1) the telephone, and (2) social media.

The telephone changes the picture significantly because it means that someone in an inner zone can bypass the zones and inform someone in an outer zone of what is taking place (I include telegraph technology). Through central news distribution methods, they also change the model from a single source to multiple sources, with a small delay before the satellite “ripple sources” begin disseminating the message.

This of course distributes the dissemination of information, such that few places are more than a day or two removed from the latest news, even allowing for the human factor.

Social Media as a primary news source is a further game changer. For the first time, the human-to-human contact can be instantaneous, or close to it, but misinformation is equally rapidly shared; the usual filters of credibility are removed and replaced by those of the individual. However, it is easy for news of a less dramatic nature (but perhaps of greater importance) to be buried beneath the surface. The primary news networks are supplanted by smaller networks that preach to the converted, creating polarization and the well-known “echo chamber” effect.

I mention these changes purely because it is possible for some fantasy worlds to have fantasy-based equivalents of these technologies. In the absence of these equivalents – which will be the case in 99% of fantasy worlds – the primary model remains functional and accurate.

Limitations Of Communications

It’s extremely difficult to understate the relative importance of human networking in a remote community. “News” heard from someone that you trust often holds greater currency than more “official” sources, and everything is colored by local preconceptions.

Brevity is another issue, and one that I mentioned earlier. It is impossible to do more than communicate the most superficial of accounts; details and nuance take up too much room, and can only be achieved by cutting some other news.

Such communications systems struggle to cope with the pace of fast-moving events. While those closer to the source will experience the totality of a situation – initial reports, official response, outcome, and aftermath – as separate events, by the time the accumulated time losses resulting from human networking exceed the travel time plus event duration – which can happen within the first zone or two – later reports catch up with the initial events and become conflated into a single past-tense story,

When everything serious is reported as a solved problem, placed in the past tense, the sense of being insulated by distance inflates, and even the most critical emergencies lose their impact and urgency, and therefore, a significant part of their relevance to the local experience. Often, the stories seem to “pat” and superficial to be reality, as a result; manufactured propaganda, not real news. This nourishes and encourages the sense that local sources and their “interpretations” (mentioned in the first paragraph) are more reliable.

Communications problems are bilateral; just as it is harder for unbiased communications to reach the remote community, so it is hard for that community to communicate with the central authorities. Any sense of urgency is usually the first casualty, as discussed a moment ago; this is true of reports from the fringes going inward as it is for reports of government actions going outward.

Regional disasters assume a superficiality, and a sense that the difficulties being faced are being overblown and exaggerated, when the opposite is more often true. As a result, aid is often desultory, a token gesture in the face of need, further encouraging the perspective that the central authority and the local region live in two different worlds, and – by and large – prefer it that way, so long as one doesn’t interfere in the other. The problem is that almost every government intervention is colored by the insular attitudes and the perspective of distance, and is therefore most readily characterized as “interference”. There is a genuine sense in remote communities that the government cares only about the cities and their inhabitants, and would do away with the “bush” if they didn’t have to exploit it. “Us Vs. Them” is a very real internal struggle of perceptions.

Distance From Trade

The title of this section is a half-truth at best. While it is true that regional communities are far removed from the central markets and hence from the luxury and foreign goods that will usually be available there, the regional communities – for the most part – don’t miss those products, and are prone to look down on those who consume them. The mildest term for such are “fancy-pants” – Australian colloquial vernacular uses a lot of substantially stronger terminology for them, and my experiences during overseas visits is that the same is also true elsewhere. The vernacular changes, the attitudes do not.

Instead, regional communities have regional markets. The general attitude is that if the community can’t make it for itself, it can do without it if it has to; there is a far stronger sense of independence and self-reliance. This sense is often only partially true, ignoring the fact that regional goods and taxes still need to be conveyed inwards to the central markets and authority in order to keep the whole system ticking over. In particular, there is a sense that taxation is disproportionate relative to the benefits provided by authorities that often results from limited awareness of the economic realities.

For example, roads are usually maintained by some sort of regional authority commissioned to do so by the central government. This creates the impression that this work is principally funded by the regional government, and hence that the taxes paid to the central government are parasitic drains upon the local community. The reality is that the regional government provides and funds only administrative support, the actual work is funded by the central government – usually to make getting goods and taxes inwards more efficient.

Adjacent communities will often evolve to supplement each other’s manufacturing capabilities. If you think of each regional market as a piece in a jigsaw, each such piece evolves to become mutually semi-dependent on its neighbors.

Sidebar: A Regional Trade Simulator

When I started work on the image above, it was intended to do nothing more than illustrate the point made above. As it developed, it became something more.

The first panel (top left) shows an abstract representation of a number of trade regions. C represents the spaces that are completely devoted to the Central Markets. Radiating out from those markets are 5 roads in red. The rules used to generate the numbers shown are simple: 1 space along a road increases the count by 1; any other step increases the count by 2 (horizontal or vertical) or 3 (corner to corner) from the lowest value in an adjacent space. These show the relative influence of the central marketplace on the regional economy, as a reduction from a starting point of 10 out of 10.

The second panel (top right) shows the concurrent availability of produce for local markets (after tithes, taxes, etc). You get to the values shown by removing the “minus signs” from the first matrix and adding 1 to each value if the cell is adjacent to anything other than a central market space. Again, this is a score out of 10.

I selected a closeup of nine cells (surrounded by a dashed line in the second panel) to create the third panel (bottom left). This examines the actual trade at the central cell, which had a market strength of 6. To determine the relative strength of trade with each of the adjacent cells, simply multiply the strength of that cell with the strength of the central cell.

Now that’s nice and simple, but not all that meaningful at a glance. So, for the final panel (bottom right), I simply added up all the results from panel 3 and used the total to convert those values into a percentage. This shows that the dominant trading partners for this regional market are the cells to the left and upper left, though several others are almost as well represented.

If you wanted to incorporate additional realism (at the price of more work), you could extend the closeup out another set of regions. The market contributions of those cells gets reduced by 2 if connected to one of the cells in panel 4 by a road, and by 4 if not. For example, the row above the 3×3 closeup have base regional market strengths (from panel 2) of 8, 6, 7, 7, and 5, respectively. So far as trade with the regional 6 market is concerned, these are effective market strengths of 4, 3,(road), 3, 3, and 2. So they contribute 4×6=24, 3×6=18, 18, 18, and 2×6=12 to the local economy of 6, respectively.

Of course, this is a highly abstracted diagram; in real life, I would also show natural barriers and obstacles, giving them a rating out of 3, which would also subtract from the trade values.

Where things get interesting is if you designate a specialty craft to each region. Take the existing panel 4 and the more-greatly simplified depiction. In order, let’s assign the following specialties: Furniture & Timber (7), Blacksmithing (5), Fruit (6), Slate (7), Wine & Spirits (in our central ‘6’ region), Fine Apparel (4), Leathergoods (5), Horses (6), and Glass (5). Suddenly, a description of both the community and its inhabitants begins to emerge – wooden buildings and slate roofs dominate, the wealthiest dress well, but the economy is dominantly agricultural. A surprisingly high percentage of the population ride horses. Because none of the surrounding specialties (one exception) are food-oriented, it can be surmised that the land is fertile and self-sufficient. Because wine and spirit making tends to produce products for the upper classes, even the peasants effect a somewhat aristocratic or superior manner. From panel 1, we know that trade with the central market accounts for half the local trade, so the combined value of the regional trade represents the other half of the economy. Because of their respective products, it’s likely that the upper right 6 region (fruit) and lower right 5 region (glass) exert a disproportionate influence, providing additional raw materials used in the dominant local industry. Geographically, both slate and timber products are mountain industries, implying that this region is one of vineyards and orchards nestled in rolling foothills. The local cuisine would emphasize vegetables and be relatively low in meat products.

The great strength of this approach is that no region is an island unto itself; making sensible choices means that moving from this region to one of the adjacent ones also gives a sensible but unique description, and the entire nation emerges as a tapestry with internal consistency. Each region is different, but slots rationally into the whole.

Distance From Opportunity

While there will always be some local business opportunities, the real wealth is always somewhere else when you are talking about a remote region. No matter what the foundation of the local economy is, this remains true, because the definitions of what constitutes “real wealth” change. The grass is always greener.

Let’s say that a region is dominated economically by gold mines; that makes them dependent on outside suppliers for the products (Blacksmithing and timber) that supports that industry, and that in turn means that much of their food (beyond the basics) would have to be shipped in at relatively great expense. “True Wealth” means never having to ration meat, and not having to pay premium prices for better produce. You can’t eat Gold, no matter how pretty it might look on a platter! In such an area, it would be expected that only a small fraction of the wealth generated goes to enrich the locals; most goes into the pockets of the owners of the mines, who live lives of luxury in the city.

The distance from opportunity means that most people accept a socially-stable lifestyle built around traditional roles. The children of farmers are more likely to become farmers themselves, and the farthest that they stray from that path would be into farm equipment or farm supplies. A further generation removed, and you might get a generation providing services to farmers, and half would be laborers in the service of other farmers. Change to economic and social status is glacially slow, and this is generally perceived as a good thing, keeping one’s feet on the ground.

This also means that tradition, and traditional values, are highly valued in remote communities. They are far removed from the “corrupting influences” that expose people to “foreign ways” and “strange ideas”.

Even today, except at night or when you are out, it is normal in my home town to leave the front door unlocked, and people think nothing of ducking down to the shops for a carton of milk or loaf of bread without locking up. After all, they will only be gone five or ten minutes, and because everyone does it, you can never tell whether or not someone is home from the door being open or closed. An opportunist is likely to get caught, because 99% of the time, someone is home.

Distance From Fashion

The effects already described make it clear why fashions in remote settings are not only normally out-of-date, but why the locals (in general) don’t care. It’s the difference between old-school elegance and Bourgeois foppery – at least, that’s how the remote locals see the issue.

Nevertheless, there is often intense interest about the latest fashions, and some will make sincere but usually tragic attempts to imitate them.

In truth, the more you look into the subject, the more you discover that the reality is rather more complicated than popular myth would have it.

First, clothing in a remote setting tends to be divided into two categories – working clothes and dress clothes. In the case of the former, nothing is permitted to compromise practicality, and only practicality is permitted to compromise tradition. Only when these priorities are absolutely satisfied is there room to contemplate fashion, and at such times the goal is normally to compromise style for durability. Choosing a cut and style that aren’t quite cutting-edge, but which will remain close to socially-acceptable for several years, is viewed as only sensible. The combination means that working outfits are conservative in design and evolve only slowly.

Dress clothing is usually a little more reactive to the dictates of fashion. However, clothing designed for the fashion elite often has an extremely limited lifespan, whereas those in remote communities can rarely afford to be so profligate. Once again, somewhat conservative choices designed to wear well, with reasonable levels of durability, tend to be the primary objectives when choosing such clothing. When the old dress clothe wear out, or as a statement of personal prosperity, an individual’s fashions will abruptly ‘catch up’ with the conservative side of the in-style look of the last year or two, only to fall progressively further out-of-date thereafter – until the time once again comes to advance.

If you were to perform a statistical analysis of the degree to which fashions are out-of-date, you end up with a simple bell curve. Those at the extreme right are the most up-to-date, and each year their unchanged clothing drifts further and further away from the contemporary, until it is replaced. At any given time, there are some who are just a little out-of-date, more who are farther removed, still more who are still further removed, until you reach the median (where the majority always are). Thereafter, the numbers decrease, with increasingly old-fashioned clothing.

Again, these effects are not always all that obvious; the innate trend toward conservative dress means that change comes only slowly, and the differences between ‘this year’s look’ and that of yesterday are subtle and often minimal.

Distance From Style

Other forms of behavior follow a similar pattern. Matters of style are often reduced to a relatively simple common denominator. It might be the fashion at court this year for the men to wear elaborate mustaches of a particular style, held together with a scented grease; the more cutting-edge members of remote communities will grow mustaches and may even use hair oil, but will adopt a far simpler style. And no-one will pay particular note of an individual who foregoes the grease, or who chooses to remain clean-shaven.

This also means that affectations tend to vanish from the vocabularies of regional style long before they work their way to the remote communities. A good example lies in the propagation of slang terms and vocal styling when I was young.

Until the 1970s, it was routine for (most) Australian actors, presenters and politicians to affect upper-class British accents modeled on “BBC English”. Teachers and other professionals were also encouraged to speak in this way, which was considered a more succinct form of English. Outside of these ranks, better-educated people spoke a relatively slang-free language with an unobtrusive Australian accent. With each graduated decrease in education standard achieved, the accent broadened and slang terminology increased in prevalence, until one reached the point where “Oi! Strewth! The old bludger better pull his socks up or he’ll be for the high jump, and you’d better dinkie die believe it, Duckie!” would be a perfectly acceptable statement. None of those terms are especially obscure, and almost anyone in the country – then or now – would immediately understand the message. In particular, the further away from the central halls of power one went, the further down this range you tended to drift.

In the 1970s, the “better-educated” standard of Australian English became the norm, and the affectation of pseudo-British seemed to vanish overnight. It actually took a little longer than that, but the change, when it came, seemed to be an avalanche of change. It started with advertising, using Australian accents to imply down-to-earth trustworthiness, it followed onto the television screen, starting with dramas and spilling over into almost every area of the medium, and became overwhelming from that point. At much the same time, extreme characters began using a fairly sanitized form of Australian slang on television. Over the years since, the advent of American and British TV have slowly begun to kill off the most extreme Australian Slang, while some has become sufficiently acceptable that it is in routine use and no longer noteworthy; those who still employ such slang levels as the sample offered above are viewed as quaint, anachronisms and colorful characters – the Australian equivalent of Sheriff Culpepper in the Smokey & The Bandit movies. Overall, the standard of the common language has gone up.

It’s my understanding that a similar situation obtains in England, where there are multiple regional accents – far more than in the US, in far more concentrated clusters. So I’m reasonably confident that it will be a universal tendency for those in positions of power to employ the highest local standard of language, and a trend towards formality of expression, with local dialects becoming rapidly more common as you move away from those positions.

Distance From Expertise

Another harsh reality, rendered even more extreme by the extreme distances in Australia, is that for most forms of expertise, you had to travel great distances. As a child, for a long time, if you needed a hearing test or to get your eyes checked, you had to travel to the nearest city, more than 100 miles distant. When I was a teenager, these specialists began making tours of regional communities, calling once every month or two. And many communities were even more remote than mine.

It’s an interesting side-note that the popular perception of Mages has them choosing to exist in remote locations, visiting “civilization” only rarely, an interesting inversion of the usual pattern in D&D.

The consequence is that most times, if the locals need something in hurry, they will have to make it themselves; the results will usually be inelegant, crude, inefficient, but functional. It doesn’t take too much practical success of this sort to foster a sense of self-reliance that often becomes a source of pride, and can lead locals to spurn expertise even when it’s available to them, on the basis that it costs too much..

Distance From Comfort

This is a little bit of a misnomer. It would be more accurate to state that remote communities experience a distance from Luxury, but it’s also true that there is a subtle distinction between the remote-community definitions of comfort and those of a more urban setting. Durability and a “no-frills” approach are more strongly associated with the former, while the base standards of what constitutes “comfortable” tend to be a little higher, a little more decadent, in the case of the latter.

This manifests both in the form of minimum standards and of ubiquity of comforts; there is a far greater utilitarianism to “Comfort” in a remote community.

This stems from two factors: remote communities generally have a lower standard of living than urban centers, and luxury goods have further to travel, and hence are both more expensive and more restricted in availability.

I remember quite clearly visiting the electrical store in Dubbo, 103 miles away from the small town of Nyngan (where the family lived) and seeing a choice between exactly two models of refrigerator. One had a freezer compartment, the other did not. These days, the variety would be somewhat greater – perhaps half-a-dozen models, perhaps more – but, here in the city, there are hundreds to choose from, in all sorts of sizes and configurations.

In olden times, there used to be some exception made for those living on the trade route by which luxury goods traveled. That’s less true in modern times of mass-transit.

Exposure To The Outside (Aliens, “Monsters” in D&D terms)

When you’re a long way from the protection of the Central Authority, life becomes a lot more dangerous, and not just because you’re more used to taking matters into your own hands. Density of law-enforcement officers has a direct correlation to the number of criminals caught and captured and the number of crimes prevented. One sheriff, two towns over? Might as well not be there at all, for all the good he does you. The solution is generally the posse.

“Here There Be Monsters” used to be marked on the fringes of all the ‘best’ maps; in fantasy games, in remote communities, it’s likely to be true on a regular basis. The neighbors getting together to chase something nasty out of the region would be a weekly event, and the posse might even need to prioritize targets.

I’ve participated in any number of D&D adventures where the basic plot was “PC’s arrive and are hired to get rid of a locally-troubling monster”. If there’s one message you should take away from this article, it’s that nine times in ten, this makes no sense.

The self-reliance and independence that have been mentioned a number of times in this article means that the posse would either be out hunting the creature, or would have encountered it and failed to return. Without the active workers in the community, it is doomed to a slow death; the only solution would be for the remaining townspeople to beg for an escort back to more civilized lands; and if the posse is still on the job, the mistrust of expertise and usual poor state of the local economy means that the posse would be confident – possibly overconfident – of being able to do the job on their own. Only if the posse has encountered the target, been overwhelmed, and still managed to (mostly) survive might they be persuaded to let the PCs take a shot at the job.

Even then, there would be a significant minority who suspected the PCs of having deliberately driven the monster into the local region just to “create” work for themselves, and who would be ungrateful and even resentful of the presence of these professional monster-hunters – especially if still overconfident of success. There will also be those who dismiss the danger as anything unusual – “It’s just a brown bear and an active imagination, we don’t need no help from no [insulting label]”.

It follows that only if the monster – whatever it is – clearly overwhelms the local posse, and yet is for some strange reason not disposed to wipe them out – will this scenario normally make sense – and there is clearly more to the story, if that’s the case!

Paranoia aside, the GM still needs to think carefully about why the monster is here, now. It might be that the human activities have disturbed it; it might be that it has been drawn to the easy meal that the human activities offer; it might be for some other reason, but most creatures will avoid threats and dangers, no matter the likelihood of winning any confrontation.

In general, it’s a far more likely scenario that some very dangerous creature is being drawn to the inner kingdoms for some reason – again making this encounter part of a bigger story.

If you want something more plausible to take its’ place try: PCs arrive at farmhouse to find Wife of the owner distraught. The husband [or vice-versa] didn’t come home last night. She/he was about to start searching, what if he/she’s lying there hurt somewhere…

Because the remote parts of any political region are still the most likely to encounter something from outside that region. Which brings me to:

Exposure To Foreigners

The closer to the outer fringes of your homeland you are, the closer you are to being in someone else’s homeland. That has some profound effects on the population unless drastic action is taken to prevent it.

Some aspects of the native society are amplified and exaggerated, the better to distinguish the locals from those across the border. These will typically be those cultural attributes that are most dramatically contrasting. But in other areas, there will be a leakage of culture across the border, a blending of the two societies.

This leakage is also bilateral, it travels both ways; there will be some across the border who will become exaggerated caricatures of their native culture in some respects and more akin to their cross-border counterparts in others.

I spent a couple of hours throwing this map of a coastal Kingdom together to illustrate the effect. Dominating the map is our kingdom, a band of mountains forming its spine. The capital and a number of provinces and regional administrative centers are depicted. The bands of color surrounding it show a much larger ‘Kingdom B’ and the cultural seepage from both our kingdom and another, off-map neighbor, on that realm. At the border (green) you have heightened Kingdom B attributes and maximum leakage from our Kingdom. Outside that fringe, you have a yellow region in which the cultural ‘contamination’ is more contained and limited, but the exaggerated Kingdom B attributes remain; you could describe this region as “tolerant” of Kingdom A. Outside of that is a reddish orange band in which there is minimal cultural influence from Kingdom A, and the population are rural or central members of Kingdom B. Beyond that, you have cultural seepage from Kingdom C in increasing strength. At the extreme top right, and not shown on the Key (there wasn’t room), you find rural Kingdom B in which cultural assimilation by Kingdom C is almost complete; it’s entirely likely that until recently, the citizens of this area were subjects of Kingdom C.

Foreign ideas, foreign ways of doing things, foreign products and cuisines based on what grows naturally in the region, foreign music and architecture and decorative stylings – these are the things that ‘seep’ across borders from one nation into its neighbors.

There is often a sense that you are picking and choosing the ‘best’ of the remote culture for your own enhancement.

Although the map shows physical proximity, this isn’t necessarily required, as shown by the cultural history of Australia. Initially a British colony, many of the central tenets of the culture remained essentially British in derivation for many years, modified only by the unique cultural modifications that derived from the need to survive and prosper in the local environment. Even then, those modifications – a casualness of speech, for example – were regarded as culturally inferior to those of the mother country.

That started to change in World War II, when Australia became a staging and relief point for US troops fighting the Pacific War. To make these foreign visitors feel at home, Jazz was introduced into the Australian cultural scene, and the beginnings of a cultural seepage from the US into Australia began. Beatles-inspired Rock & Roll delayed that process for a while, but it continued making inexorable inroads despite the delays.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the cultural cringe began to wane; the success of The Seekers and The Easybeats in the 60s encouraged the success of later acts like AC/DC, Air Supply, and The Little River Band, which in turn inspired the success of INXS and Kylie Minogue and many others. The architectural triumph of the iconic Sydney Opera House, and sporting success in many fields, culminating in the Intellectual Victory in the America’s Cup of Australia II’s Winged Keel, all began to convince Australians that they had something to offer the rest of the world. We also became internationally recognized as having a good ear for the next big thing – Abba, Madonna, and Blondie all had success in Australia well in excess of that achieved by the same point elsewhere – and a role as a trend-setter, not recognized until the turn of the century, also began, with groups like Nirvana citing little-known Australian acts as key sources of inspiration.

Australian television remains a blend of 1/3 American, 1/3 domestic, 1/4 British, and a dash of ‘elsewhere in origin. Thirty years ago, the Domestic and British content share was higher; it was Dallas and Roots that began to change the proportions toward the modern picture.

To a very large extent, we view the US and Britain as setting the standard – but are happy to judge anyone and everyone against that standard. Nor are we afraid to condemn anything from either nation – or our own – as ‘rubbish’ if we feel it doesn’t live up to that standard. In effect, we have turned isolation into an advantage, an opportunity to filter out the cultural elements that we don’t want.

Of course, all that is changing due to the advent of iTunes and Social Media, but that isn’t relevant to the conversation.

What is relevant is the cultural influence of our nearest neighbor, New Zealand. Because Australia is larger, it’s economy is considerably greater in potential than that of New Zealand; for a great many years, successful Kiwi musicians, actors, performers, business-people and sportsmen and -women have been relocating to Australia to try and take ‘the next step’ in their careers. If and when we see potential in these imports, Australia is usually quick to claim them and welcome them as though they were our own. At the same time, with the exception of contests with the Mother Country, they are our fiercest sporting rivals, both respected and hated, and often seen as “keeping us honest” in the way they challenge us. Australian acts are often successful in New Zealand, too. There is bilateral cultural assimilation, a continued cross-fertilization that strengthens both.

In many ways, Australia is, in it’s entirety, a ‘remote rural region’ of England. Often slower to pick up on the latest trends and fashions, but independent enough to come up with the foundations of future trends before they become widespread phenomena.

Distance, it is often said, lends perspective. Distance is what remote communities have in abundance, and that can be an advantage as much as it is a handicap.

There’s one part more to come, continuing the exploration of what it means to be remote from the cultural and power centers of a nation. Sometime Soon…