While most Australians now live in the major cities on the coast, much of the country's wealth is still derived from the interior, a vast area of scattered and often remote communities, mining towns and pastoral homesteads all linked by what historian J.W. McCarty called the Inland Corridor.

Culturally too the interior looms large: in Australians' imaginings, in tourism campaigns, and in the arts and media. But despite this, to most it remains an enigma, an emptiness whose distant rural communities and their populations are the subjects of stubborn misperceptions.

Outside Country makes an invaluable contribution to the rethinking of inland Australia. Through essays that mix the broad sweep of history with personal perspectives drawn from diaries, letters, oral histories and literature, it examines the rich and varied social, cultural and environmental histories of regions that continue to play a crucial role in the ongoing development of the Australian nation.