The extension of the controversial 'creative class' theory from cities into rural areas posits this mobile and ‘innovative’ cohort as leading agents of economic change. In response, economic and cultural geography scholarship has challenged this approach by emphasising the diverse social and material relations that perform creative economies outside of the metropolis and mainstream markets. Yet, despite these debates, rural creative economies remain predominantly viewed through an urban economic lens. This paper contributes to understanding the role of actors and agents in processes of rural economic change through the concept of the rural creative economy. Drawing upon PhD research with community groups driving the cultural movements of Book Towns and Slow Food in Victoria, I argue that rural creative economies are relationally constituted and largely confound the normative capitalist framing of creative economies. Particular focus is placed on how relations between local actors and resources work to develop innovative new products and markets as part of a broader process of enacting community economies.
Key words: rural; cultural economies; creative economies; community economies

Proximity is associated with actor and institutional connectivity and clustering across time and space forming innovation or urban system. Regional differences between actor connectivity, industrial clustering, knowledge spillovers and social capital as well as the tendency for support and funding into success stories creates uneven development and opportunities for innovation. While insight into the dynamics of innovation in different regions and sectors of the economy is vital, the focus is on highly urbanised cities over sparsely populated, often resource-based and low-industrialised peripheral areas which have very different innovation barriers, capabilities and development trajectories. The latter need broader understandings of how proximity connects regions to global ‘pipelines’ of knowledge. Indeed, the limited scale and scope of the workforce mean the temporal proximities of long-distance commuting may also impact innovation.
This study explores innovation across regional Australia using a social network analysis of commuting and a regression of 2000-2013 OECD patent data against select socio-economic variables and commuting indices. It finds that innovative activity is positively linked to population, long distance commuting and professional employment. Labour appears to be an inter-regional conduit of tacit knowledge extending networks, suggesting different policy mechanisms and strategies are needed nationally for a more inclusive innovation system.

Indigenous land, sea and health enterprises are driving total system health outcomes via Indigenous-led environmental, health and biosecurity surveillance activities. These outcomes include building better knowledge systems to tackle contemporary landscape management issues, improving economic participation for Indigenous people, and enhancing positive health and wellbeing outcomes. Through innovative collaborations with industry, government and neighbours, Indigenous communities are engaging in diverse partnerships that include and integrate environmental and health services and schemes. In this paper we reflect on how distinctive Indigenous concepts of shared responsibility to country and each other underpin these partnerships and open up new ways innovation can be enacted through Indigenous-led sectors of the economy.

Australia’s innovation agenda is largely framed in terms of using new technologies to develop new products. But what if, rather than being about the new, innovation took a different turn? In this paper, we focus on innovation and sustainability but rather than exploring the ways that innovation might be used to create more sustainable forms of production and more sustainable products, we reframe innovation as the “radical unmaking of unsustainability” (in the words of Shove 2010). We explore this through the development of a Mattress Product Stewardship Program that aims to reuse and recycle as much as possible from the over 1 million mattresses that are thrown out each year in Australia. This program is novel for how it hinges on the role of a not-for-profit social enterprise, Soft Landing, and brings together industry partners from up and down the supply chain thereby crowding out the space for unsustainability.