Place, time and stigmatised youthful identities: bad boys in paradise

This paper focuses on rural young people in time and space, examining the implications of changes in their location for their youthful identities and reputations—particularly those of young males. It explores how, in a fishing, logging and reluctant tourist town on the coast of New South Wales, Australia, such young people form and perform their identities and gain their status through a ‘geometry of multiple differences’. This geometry includes collisions and collusions between history and the present, nature and culture, and between generations. The paper begins with a consideration of how boys in particular use public space as a theatre for certain of their masculine performances. It also shows how such performances contribute to their ‘bad’ reputations among other members of the community. The paper then contextualises this discussion by explaining how globalising circumstances such as rural restructuring, the movement away from traditional industries and the consequent reshaping of the local world of work contribute to contemporary constructions of rural youth in this town. Indeed it shows how in uncertain times and places ‘badness’ is a construct steeped in changes in place. More generally, the paper implicitly critiques the notion of the rural idyll and offers instead a cultural analysis of dynamic intersecting localities and identities in changing times under the concept ‘geometries of multiple differences’.