Fault Lines Exposed: Advantage and Disadvantage across Australia's Settlement System

Fault Lines Exposed intends to understand inequality across Australian cities and towns. Social and economic change in Australia has resulted in the emergence of disparities in advantage and disadvantage between metropolitan communities and regional localities, towns and cities. In 1999 the book Community Opportunity and Vulnerability (Baum et al.) considered the disparities that existed between communities using 1996 census data. This new book, available both online and in print, uses up-to-date data to reanalyse the patterns and consider the important policy issues that arise from the patterns identified. Fault Lines Exposed provides insight into advantage and disadvantage at an aggregate community or locality level. Such insight is necessary if we are to better understand what is happening in society. It helps us plan effective solutions to problems that impact not only on individuals and families but also on communities. Each of the chapters outlines the main findings from the typology of advantage and disadvantage. The book concludes with a strong policy orientation, addressing possible options and raising more policy questions. Fault Lines Exposed will be essential reading for academics, researchers, students, policy makers and other professionals working in the areas of geography, sociology, economics and social work. “We had escaped our societies. Nobody was watching us. We could be free, we could behave as we liked. We had found the meaning of our existence. The real meaning of existence was there all the time of course, in the simple pattern of the island which we had annexed as our own primitive milieu, but after a time we could not see it for the mired footprints of our own excesses.” George Johnston, Clean Straw for Nothing “They had a larger-than-life, a mythical quality. They drank more than other people, they wrote more, they got sick more, they got well more, they cursed more and they blessed more, and they helped a great deal more. They were an inspiration. They had guts. They were real, tough, honest. They were the kind of people you meet less and less.” Leonard Cohen, on George Johnston and Charmian Clift