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Beyond the widely acknowledged importance of new business, the role of young exporting high-tech business in Israel and many other small economies is seen as vital for economic growth. Israel is small and geographically isolated from the main markets, suffers from security difficulties, but fosters a culture, which promotes knowledge rich new technologies. Thus, new ventures with leading edge technologies and prospects of high growth and profitability offer a means to achieve the national goal of economical independence. Internationally however, the high-technology sector has recently suffered badly from the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the crash of the Nasdaq.

On one level, motor vehicles might represent the possibility of unfettered freedom, escape (from government authority) and autonomy through providing work and leisure opportunities. On another level, in remote places, ‘hybridised’ and ‘Indigenised’ vehicles have been appropriated to speak to economic and cultural realities of everyday life. This chapter considers how night patrols may articulate expressions of decoloniality by enhancing Aboriginal social capital or what we refer to here as ‘collective efficacy’. It draws upon a subset of the findings from an evaluation of Indigenous Youth Programs in New South Wales to examine the effectiveness of night patrols operating in nine communities across the state. While the patrols were universally endorsed by the communities they served, some services were functioning at a high level while others had experienced periods of dysfunction and inactivity. The factors that impede effective service provision for night patrols in some communities were compared with other communities where services were functioning well. The chapter argues that night patrols can build and harness collective efficacy providing more than mere community policing functions.

‘Crossroads’ serves as a metaphor for networks and intersections, overlaps and trajectories, and is used throughout this book to denote how criminal transgressions and the representations of crime circulate in and out of rural spaces in the Australian countryside. This chapter provides an introduction and overview of key concepts and approaches to rural criminology informed by a ‘crossroads’ metaphor. It discusses the complexities of rurality and how these, in turn, point to significant turning points and strategic directions – not only for research and scholarship but also for understanding, communicating and responding to rural crime and deviance as it presently manifests in countries such as Australia. Along this journey, a number of issues are identified, and practical concerns signalled.

This paper documents the case of a young girl who went missing from a country track in 1972. It considers the function of roads in her disappearance, and the importance and terror of roads generally in Australia. For roads have a role in Australia that is vastly different to smaller, more populous nations. Roads in Australia are absolutely crucial to the maintenance and sustenance of society. So too are the cars and other vehicles we use upon them, but they are just as paradoxical in their effects. As Elizabeth Jacka and Susan Dermody (1988, p. 113) put it so plainly: ‘our cars kill us, and without them we would die’. The case of the girl who vanished from a road is not an unusual event in Australia. However, it has led to a conjunction of long-lasting effects, particularly on the community of Mackay, that are. The case has never been solved, not due to a desire to solve it, but ironically because of the very methods initially employed to do so.

Ambridge residents live with extended kin and non-family members much more often than the population of the United Kingdom as a whole. This chapter explores cultural norms, economic need, and family and health care to explain patterns of coresidence in the village of Ambridge. In landed families, filial obligation and inheritance norms bind multigenerational families to a common dwelling, while scarcity of affordable rural housing inhibits residential independence and forces reliance on access to social networks and chance to find a home among the landless. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, coresidence wards off loneliness among unpartnered adults. Finally, for Archers listeners, extended kin and non-kin coresidence creates a private space where dialogue gives added dimensionality and depth to characters who would otherwise be known only through their interactions in public spaces.

Across countless generations, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have had a vision for the health and well-being of all elements of Australia and its people. This includes directions for preventing inequity, crime, environmental degradation and illness. But the paths to take – and the knowledges that exist – have long been flooded by a negative discourse about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that blames, shames and discriminates, locating over-representation in prisons and poor health and well-being as a cultural deficit, apportioned to individuals rather than the complex systems and politics of knowledge construction that surround it. Rural criminology has an opportunity to change tracks to redress the lack of cultural competence training and cultural safety planning among its workforce – the 97 percent who have the power to create change for the small and young population of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This chapter identifies steps in the path to change and opportunities for rural criminology including identifying shared determinants of justice and health, decolonising evidence for decision-making and improving accountability including through partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders. This chapter asserts a freedom and confidence that emanates from decolonising methodologies, reflexivity in research and meeting aspirations of local community Elders and leaders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and strengths. ‘Next steps’ in constructing a more culturally responsive rural criminology are presented, with a summary of roles and spheres of influence to consider.

The colonial history of Australia has been a struggle between Indigenous peoples and the colonisers over Country. This is often represented as a struggle over land – it's control and use. Yet, for Indigenous people, land was never simply an economic commodity to be exploited. It was and is ‘Country’ in a deeper sense of the word, a fundamental part of Indigenous cosmology and a necessary foundation to a person's and group's ontology or being in the world. Country, then, can be conceptualised as both a physical and metaphysical domain. Indeed, both domains are inseparably intertwined. The struggle over Country remains core to understanding the social and political place of Indigenous people within Aboriginal law and within the criminal law and institutions of the coloniser. Further, this ongoing struggle goes to the heart of understanding why Indigenous people start their discussions on reform and change within the criminal justice system with a demand for recognition, negotiation and respect for Indigenous self-determination and a demand to see Indigenous people as colonised peoples.