Almost by definition it represented rural life, although not without doubts and insecurities or an inability to admit that the land was blameless. and Beef Week, Casino, both in NSW) are also popular in Australia (see also Bessiere, 1998). In stories about the American frontier (Whiteoak, 2003) had clear parallels and several local adaptations rasi: performers like Tex Morton, Australian Yodelling. rural areas. , 2002), but there are attempts to reinvent places outside metropolitan centers by combining music production and performance. However, music festivals have become by far the most common, from the annual East CoastBlues and Sweden Festival of Byron Bay to the Elvis Revival Festival in Parkes, NSW; From the Port Fairy Folk Festival (Victoria) to many country music festivals in Gympie (Queensland), Mildura (New South Wales), Port Pirie (South Australia) and Tamworth (see Aldskogius, 1993; Derrett et al. metropolitan and international media (Peterson, 1997; Jensen, 1998). Such estimates of music venues reflect, to some extent, the accumulation of production infrastructures, the raw number of active musicians, and the continuous recording of a relatively dense cast; in other cases, such associations are created as part of media campaigns and local marketing strategies, "invented traditions" (Hobsbawm, 1983) that have become central to the tourism industry and the music economy (Atkinson, 1997; Cohen, 1997; Gibson and Connell 200
) . In some cases, the connections between music and place coalesce into a definable "sound", such as the output of the music industry at different times in New Orleans, Seattle, Liverpool, Detroit and San Francisco. Country music came to Australia mainly through radio broadcasts, music distribution.