Being an academic far from the action I'm currently halfway through a PhD in computer science at a good school in the US. After I graduate, I want to stay in academia. I also want to return home to Australia to be closer to my family.

However, I worry that I will struggle to do good research when I am thousands of miles from where the action is happening. It's hard to collaborate when you can't meet in person and are in a vastly different time zone. It's also hard to keep up with recent developments from afar. I find that collaboration and keeping up with developments are essential to doing good research. Computer science is a rapidly-moving field, so being behind can make your results much less interesting.

How do academics in Australia, New Zealand, and other "remote" places deal with this?
I have several Australian colleagues, and the challenges are, in fact, real.  The key challenges I have heard them speak of are:


Time zones isolate Australia/New Zealand from the United States and Europe, though not from India and Asia.   
Travel is very long and costly.  Most particularly, it is often difficult to get people from elsewhere to attend conferences in Australia/New Zealand.


The strategies that I have seen employed are:


Some universities in Australia and New Zealand apparently provide significant amounts of travel funds to make it easier for their scholars to travel and to bring others for sabbaticals to Australia.
Increased emphasis on collaboration with Asian colleagues.  My anecdotal information seems to point particularly toward India, where there are fewer language, cultural, and legal barriers, particularly for computer science.