Metropolitan colonisation and the reinvention of place: Class polarisation along the Cessnock-Pokolbin fault-line

This paper examines the emergence of a sharply delineated socioeconomic and sociocultural fault-line between Cessnock's former coal towns and the immediately adjacent Hunter Valley Wine Country, centred on Pokolbin. We provide evidence that divergent culturally-related class identities act as mutually reinforcing constraints on reciprocity between job-deficit former coal towns and the job-surplus wine country. We relate this to a consideration of time-space dimensions in the interdependencies between the class and place identities of Cessnock and Pokolbin. These identities have been influenced by metropolitan colonisation, with the markedly differentiated absorption of these two locales into the enlarged metropolitan population-work-welfare-housing-leisure agglomeration. Further, we propose that the former coal towns and the wine country can both be seen as place-specific representations of wider class-related changes within Australian society. Our interpretations are founded on three current research directions: first, the role of culture as a critical intervening variable in class identities and actions; second, the current flux in class formations, most notably the loss of self-identity and solidarity in the working class and the emergence of a new middle-class sector dedicated to self-realisation and self-fulfilment; and third, recognition of class formation as a geographical process.