Rural Revival?

Place Marketing, Tree Change and Regional Migration in Australia

John Connell, Phil McManus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317060727
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

How, if possible, to re-populate declining rural and regional areas? Examining this crucial and complex issue in relation to Australia, this book explores how a particular organization, 'Country Week', has emerged and developed as one means of stimulating the repopulation of declining or stagnating areas. While this is a problem shared by many other developed countries in Europe and North America, Australia's 'Country Week' programme puts forward an innovative range of place-marketing strategies that challenge rural decline and urban migration and can offer new approaches which could be adopted more widely.

Figure 1.1 New South Wales places

Figure 1.2 Queensland places

Chapter 1
Rural Revival?

Much rural policy is influenced by perceptions of rural disadvantage. Rural communities do face special problems and challenges … [but] it is important to note the positive aspects of life outside the metropolis. For most people, living in these areas is a positive rather than a residual choice.

(NSW Government 1995: 8-9; emphasis in original)

In recent decades most rural areas, unless blessed with valuable natural resources or tourism potential, have struggled. Agriculture has declined, providing fewer jobs, and rural infrastructure and services have often failed to keep pace with those in larger urban areas. Virtually throughout Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand similar trends have been apparent. As rural areas have moved closer to a post-agricultural future, and towards a so-called post-productivist countryside, once simply a place of ‘rural dilution’ (Smailes 2002), populations have tended to decline and age. The exceptions are towns within commuting range of large cities, or in particularly favoured regions, especially coastal areas of second homes and retirement. By contrast in more distant areas the viability and sustainability of rural and small town life has been questioned. This has raised concerns about the future of particular places, and even entire regions.

It has been rightly claimed that ‘Australia has become a land where regions matter’ (Beer et al. 2003: 1), but real variations exist within Australia over their importance. Queensland, for example, with several large cities, is more regionallyoriented than NSW, where NSW is sometimes seen as merely an acronym for the largest coastal cities of ‘Newcastle-Sydney-Wollongong’, separated by a ‘sandstone curtain’ from the bush. In Australia, regions have often become identified with the emerging concept of a somewhat disadvantaged ‘rural and regional Australia’ (Pritchard and McManus 2000, McManus 2005). The existence of significant, and growing, variations in regional prosperity has prompted calls for Federal Government involvement in regional development, on the basis that it has the financial capacity, due to its revenue generation, to overcome state and regional conflicts (Maude 2003, Beer 2006). The Federal Government, under the Liberal Party Prime Minister, John Howard, which governed for 11 years until 2007, shied away from involvement. State governments operated different forms of regional development, with South Australia (SA), Western Australia (WA) and NSW ‘essentially funding regional development boards outside the capital cities only’ (Beer 2006: 122). Different structures and practices influence regional development in various states, while the existence of development bodies does not necessarily equate with development, employment and rural revival. The role of local government is significant, but most councils perceive themselves as hamstrung by limited funding and technical capacity. In a survey of 302 local governments throughout Australia, two key areas that they saw as ‘least effective’ were ‘inward investment, promotion of region’ and ‘training, skills, and supply side labour market interventions’ (Maude 2003: 124). At both regional and local level structural development has been weak.

The latter decades of the twentieth century saw an increase in the number of narratives of rural decline in Australia (Country Shire Councils Association and Country Urban Councils Association Working Party 1990, Taskforce on Regional Development 1993, NSW Government 1995) and their parallel emergence in countries like Canada and the USA. In Australia these narratives were mobilised and sometimes contested, either politically, through the rise of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party in the 1990s (McManus and Pritchard 2000) or by academic analysis of changes in rural and regional Australia. In the twenty-first century, the diversity of what constitutes ‘rural and regional’ or ‘the country’ is recognised by many people, but is entwined with perceptions of rural decline and images of drought and accompanying concerns about climate change and water availability. This book explores and analyses one event, Country Week (CW), designed to address perceptions of both rural decline and regional promise in NSW and Queensland, and recent population mobility in regional Australia. In order to do that it is first necessary to examine rural history.

Why do discourses of rural disadvantage hold sway in countries such as Australia? How did the countryside or, in Australian lexicon, ‘the bush’, come to be constructed as problematic? This chapter examines the origins and development of discourses about the problematic countryside, the ‘rural’ and the ‘bush’, and their link to rural and regional development. It considers the relevance of these discourses, and points to the diversity within rural and regional areas and the contrasting fortunes of different locales. It further considers the notion of ‘countrymindedness’, which argues that only ‘real’ goods produce wealth, and that rural industries such as agriculture not only produce wealth but also produce ‘good people’, unlike the situation in large cities. Is this seemingly antiquated notion of countrymindedness dead, or does it appear in new guises in the early twenty-first century? This book suggests that something akin to countrymindedness does still exist, if without the widespread influence of previous eras. It is certainly a central element in discourses surrounding the three day CW Expo in Sydney and Brisbane that seeks to revive rural and regional Australia through place marketing of rural and regional locations with the intention of encouraging urban-rural migration.

In order to understand recent discourses of rural decline and of rural and regional development, it is necessary to situate ‘the rural’ in the history of developed countries. While the specific history of each country is unique, there are clear parallels with the USA, Canada and New Zealand in relation to technological change, agricultural employment and the socio-economic development of rural regions. Australia’s rural history is a necessary starting point in developing an understanding of the uniqueness and significance of CW.

A Brief History of Rural Australia

For clarity, the history of rural Australia is separated into three time periods. Though these periods are not arbitrary, they are neither a definitive division of time and nor do they necessarily reflect the most significant events in regional Australia, or in particular industries in rural Australia. They also relate to different phases of migration, with immigration booming until the depression of the 1890s, and post-World War Two migration increasing the population of state capital cities and some parts of rural and regional Australia.

Rural Australia pre-1891

Indigenous people have lived in Australia for at least 40,000 years. Prior to the arrival of European explorers and settlers after 1788, they lived in their specific ‘country’, where they hunted, gathered, used the land and managed the water in order to survive. This was unrecognised by the European settlers and, without signing any treaties, Aborigines were dispossessed of their land so that it could be ‘worked’, based on English notions of agriculture, rural villages and the division of land into fenced fields. The application of these notions to Australian conditions not only meant dispossession, it also meant that European settlers struggled to survive in the Australian environment.

Agriculture was vital for the success of Australian colonies, because the distance and dangers of importing food from England meant that self-reliance in food sources was paramount. By the end of the first century of colonisation (1888) agriculture was well-established in most colonies, and was prospering and expanding westward in NSW particularly with the extensions of the railway network. However prosperity was based on overstocking during periods of favourable weather patterns: a practice that was to have severe economic, social and environmental implications when subsequent drought conditions dominated. As Jeans (1972: 13) observed: ‘the 1890s proved to be particularly harsh years in which the optimism of previous decades was destroyed on both the pastoralist and farming frontiers’.

The colony of Queensland came into existence in 1859, and the 1860s and 1870s were crucial in establishing the settlement patterns of the colony as, during this time, infrastructure was built to support the pastoral, mining and agricultural industries. Despite the drought, economic depression and political upheavals associated with the Shearers’ Strike in 1891, railway expansion continued westward to support pastoral activity (Fitzgerald et al. 2009). This infrastructure contributed to the decentralisation of the population: a legacy being that Brisbane has always had a low level of primacy compared with the other mainland Australian state capitals.

While rural Australia became associated with agriculture (both pastoralism and farming) because of its prosperity in the late nineteenth century, other primary industries, and quasi-agricultural industries, were present in various parts of the country. In NSW, for example, there were several fishing ports, a whaling industry in Eden, coal mining in Lithgow, the Illawarra and Hunter regions south and north of Sydney and further north around Gunnedah, thoroughbred breeding near Scone in the Upper Hunter region, while viticulture had been introduced into much of the Hunter Valley (although this collapsed when cheap imports from SA flooded the market in 1901, at the time of Federation. In northern NSW and in Queensland, sugar cane was a major industry. The ability of wealthier agricultural interests to bind ‘the bush’ with ‘agriculture’, rather than other industries, was significant because it laid the foundations for discourses of rural decline that were to permeate rural policy deliberations in the late twentieth century.

Rural Australia 1891-1945

The east coast of Australia had been booming from the 1850s onwards, when gold was first discovered in NSW, and in the early 1860s in Victoria (Davison 2005). This boom came to a sudden end in 1891 when a combination of money market problems in London, severe and prolonged drought and falling wool prices resulted in a fall of about 30 percent in the GDP of Australia (despite a gold mining boom in WA) in the period 1891-1895. Sheep numbers in NSW, which had more than trebled in the 20 years between 1870 and 1890, plummeted as the availability of food declined and wool prices dropped. In 1892, at their peak, there were nearly 58 million sheep in the state; by 1900 this figure had fallen to approximately 40 million and did not reach the earlier figure again until 1942 (Jeans 1972).

Until the twentieth century the pastoral industry had ‘provided the bulk of the export trade of the colony and was the chief stimulus to regional development’ (Jeans 1972: 10). It is not surprising that the demography of NSW reflected the needs of the pastoral industry, and the constraints of available technology such as rail, chilling and communications: most country towns were small places and Sydney was 19 times larger than the second largest place (the inland mining town of Broken Hill, with 27,000 people) and only Newcastle (14,238) and Goulburn (10,612) had more than 10,000 residents at the 1901 Census. By contrast, in 1911, unlike all other state capitals, Brisbane held less than a quarter of Queensland’s population.

After the prosperity of the late nineteenth century, ‘by the early 20th century, however, young people were drifting from the countryside to the city, and the inland towns had begun their long decline’ (Davison 2005: 39). It was the first era of rural-urban migration in Australia. A period of rural re-population occurred after World War One with the initiation of Soldier Settlements, and the introduction of measures to improve the quality of life in rural areas. By 1920 a national Australian Country Party had been formed (after earlier state based prototypes beginning in WA in 1913) and by the 1930s improved roads and communication services as well as freight subsidies assisted people in rural areas (Davison 2005). This helped maintain population in rural areas, as did the Great Depression that resulted in much unemployment in cities and some people moving from the city to search for work. Yet, while populations were maintained, poverty and hardship existed in many places.

Rural Australia 1945-present

The conclusion to World War Two saw a marked increase in the productivity of Australian agriculture, largely following the replacement of human and animal labour by machines. Politicians from all parties had positive visions of rural development. In Queensland, the Australian Labor Party government, and a Premier ‘imbued with the agrarian ideals of former premiers … saw a decentralised Queensland based on farming, pastoralism and mining as a way of avoiding the social problems of overcrowded cities: there was also a barely articulated sense that work in the primary industries created virtuous, productive citizens’ (Fitzgerald et al. 2009: 120). In NSW the success of irrigation schemes on the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers offered a new vision splendid for agriculture. Increased productivity was accompanied by good wheat and wool prices, resulting in rural prosperity, but displacement of people by machines had a deleterious impact on rural areas, especially on small agriculturally-dependent communities. Small towns within commuting distance of a larger centre were often most severely affected as new transport technology enabled people to travel further for goods and services, and the rationale for many smaller service centres disappeared. Visions of rural growth were further undermined by the tendency of post-war migrants to settle in the state capitals, though mining towns continued to grow in inland Queensland. Over time population losses through migration, as younger people left the country to search for employment (Chapter 2), translated into an aging residual population and a gradual population decline as deaths exceeded births.

Where agriculture retained vitality production often changed. Sheep numbers in NSW have again declined to their lowest levels in a century, cattle production has fallen and many abattoirs closed in the last two decades, while the area of wheat cultivation has expanded. Salinity has affected some inland areas. However boutique wineries have increased in numbers and wine production has soared at least until the recent global financial crisis and gluts on overseas markets. There has been an increasing agricultural diversity, ranging from irrigated agriculture (including cotton and avocadoes in northern NSW and south-west Queensland, and rice growing in the Riverina), olives, gourmet food (including cheeses and organic products), and cool climate wines in Orange and Stanthorpe.

The 1960s and 1970s saw population decline in many parts of rural and regional Australia, notably in the inland agricultural areas, despite some local, state and national strategies to avert emerging economic and population imbalances (Country Shire Councils Association and Country Urban Councils Association Working Party 1990, Pritchard and McManus 2000). The most prominent of these strategies, initiated by the Labor Party Federal Government in the early 1970s, attempted to reduce population growth in the capital cities by encouraging relocation to selected inland sites, but the outcomes were limited and the initiative lapsed (Chapter 2). At least one inland city has grown quite rapidly: 50 years after it was established as the national capital, Canberra had become the largest of Australia’s inland cities, reaching a population of 70,000 in 1963, with more rapid growth to follow.

As the few growth centres demonstrated, rural and regional Australia was neither homogeneous nor uniformly in decline. In NSW between 1981 and 1993, 11 of the 12 statistical regions increased in population; the only decline was experienced in the Far West Statistical Division, which showed population losses at every census count in the century. Growth was slight and small population losses in one or more census periods occurred in the Central West and Murrumbidgee (NSW Government 1995). In Queensland a similar pattern emerged with most statistical divisions experiencing population growth, especially on the coast, and only the Central West losing population between 2001 and 2006 (Figure 1.3). Yet despite slow population growth, within both of these inland regions, some particular towns still prospered.

The existence of prospering and growing towns surrounded by smaller centres experiencing population decline suggested the idea of ‘sponge cities’: rather larger regional centres with superior infrastructure, where growth occurred, in distinct contrast to smaller nearby settlements. Services, especially government offices, and consequently regional populations, have become increasingly concentrated in the former – large towns such as Orange, Wagga Wagga and Tamworth in NSW and Toowoomba and Rockhampton in Queensland – at the expense of the latter. With greater access to cars, and thus long distance commuting and shopping, differential structures of growth and regional centralisation of services were at the expense of the continued decline of local services in small towns. Burnley and Murphy (2004) thus argued that population growth in inland regional Australia was a result of economic growth in larger centres, where towns such as Tamworth and Orange effectively sucked the life out of smaller towns and the surrounding countryside. Moreover that process had been going on since the rise of car ownership half a century earlier. The towns most at risk of losing population were those located in the catchment areas of the sponges (Maher and Stimson 1994) rather than more remote settlements. Thus Cooma, with 10,000 people, was big enough for ‘chain stores such as Coles and Woolworths and critical attractions such as McDonald’s and KFC’ drawing business from Nimmitabel, 40 kilometres away (Higgins 2009: 9; our italics). Towns like Nimmitabel, with just 240 people, are close to becoming ghost towns, with empty houses and few prospects of regeneration (Forth and Howell 2002). Cooma, and similar sponges, drew in shoppers from such dwindling towns, but were too distant for commuting from them.

Continuing the hydrological metaphor, the sponge city migration thesis may not however hold water. Migration trends over the period 1986-2001 in Dubbo and Tamworth, two NSW towns often cited as ‘sponge cities’, were more complex and the population ‘soaked up’ from surrounding settlements was a relatively minor part of their growth. Such larger towns, both with populations over 35,000, primarily drew new migrants from beyond their immediate hinterlands, mainly from Sydney and outside the state (Argent et al. 2008). The ‘sponge city’ phenomenon is at best only partially true, though it is incontrovertible that larger towns are playing some part in sucking the life out of smaller towns, and that smaller towns have continued to decline fastest as their residents moved on or simply died. It is useful therefore to explore in more detail population changes in regional areas, situating recent Australian trends in an international context.

Figure 1.3 Population change in New South Wales and Queensland 2001-6

Population Decline in Rural Areas

Population decline is consistently most pronounced in smaller inland towns and rural areas (Taskforce on Regional Development 1993, NSW Government 1995, Hugo 2005, Murphy 2006). For Australia as a whole the population in rural areas (defined as having less than 1,000 residents) fell from 17 percent of the population in 1966 to 14 percent of the population in 2001, though national and metropolitan populations grew steadily during that time. Population decline was most concentrated in the dry farming areas of most states, pastoral areas, and in remote mining communities, notably Broken Hill (Hugo 2005). By contrast coastal areas, especially in NSW and Queensland, grew rapidly, largely as a result of the ‘sea-change’ migration from the larger cities. Hugo (2005: 78) noted that ‘a significant amount of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Rural Revival?
• 2 Leaving the City
• 3 Country Week
• 4 Strategies: ‘In It to Win It’
• 5 A Place on the Map?
• 6 Going to the Show
• 7 Taking to the Country
• 8 The Good Resident
• 9 Living the Dream? A Retrospective
• Bibliography
• Index