What is the future for Australia’s declining country towns?

In second semester 1999, as a Visiting Faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Community Planning at Kansas State University, I had the privilege of studying small-town decline and revitalisation in America’s Midwest. As a regional historian with a long-term interest in Australia’s regional communities, I was seeking to discover just what Australian country towns experiencing decline could learn of practical value from their Midwestern counterparts.

My time at KSU and fieldwork undertaken in the United States provided useful insights into the complex factors underlying the ongoing decline of both American and Australian small towns and how certain rural towns have successfully reinvented themselves. Yet the main, unanticipated consequence of my recent journey along the Yellow Brick Road that commenced in Manhattan, Kansas was to reach certain conclusions regarding the inevitable long-term decline and eventual demise of certain small towns in non-coastal Australia. Some of the views presented in this paper may verge on the heretical. I will argue that the decline and ultimate demise of many smaller country towns is part of an inevitable historical process and should be accepted as such.

The decline of Australian country towns and the regional communities of which they are part needs to be considered in the context of Australia’s recent economic history. It is in an understanding of this historical process, rather than singling out recent government policies or pointing the collective finger at multinational companies or the globalised economy that we gain critical insights into the underlying causes of small-town decline. I would suggest that even if government policies that have impacted negatively on regional Australia were reversed and agricultural commodity prices return to the higher levels of the long boom (1950-74), this would do little to prevent the ongoing decline of many Australian country towns.

My understanding of what constitutes regional decline was broadened as a result of visiting a number of smaller incorporated towns within commuting distance of Manhattan, a prosperous university town of 38,000 in north-central Kansas. One such township was St George, once a thriving agricultural-transport centre that now provides "affordable housing" for low-income families employed mainly in nearby Manhattan. In the case of St George statistical evidence confirms the obvious visible indicators of small-town decline, yet due to the availability of affordable housing, including the development of a basic mobile home park on the outskirts of the town, the town’s population is actually growing. The point that needs to be emphasised, is that while population loss remains the key indicator of rural decline in rural Australia, in the United States this is not necessarily the case.

Though less apparent than in north-central Kansas, the lower cost of rental accommodation in Australia’s country towns is providing an attraction to welfare-dependent families rather than the working poor due to the general lack of employment opportunities in these towns. If the gap between urban rich and rural poor continues to widen, a possible, albeit unattractive, future for country towns would be to provide alternative affordable accommodation but minimal services for a new inter-generational underclass.

Before describing the historical events that resulted in the establishment, development and inevitable decline of hundreds of rural towns in the American Midwest and Australia, let me define country towns. The Australian country towns with which this paper is primarily concerned are those with populations between 200 and 4000, which are experiencing ongoing decline.

At this point, those concerned with the future of Australia’s small towns in decline might well ask why one should look to the American Midwest for new insights or possible solutions. In both Australia and the United States the great majority of small towns experiencing ongoing decline are located in rural regions and remain dependent on resource industries – agriculture, forestry and mining and related manufacturing – for wealth and employment generation. In terms of understanding the underlying causes and developing policies to assist Australia's country towns in decline, the history and recent experience of the American Midwest is highly relevant.

While there are important differences in the political, cultural and physical environment of the two regions, the basic, yet often overlooked, reason why small towns in both these wider regions have, are and will almost certainly continue to decline has to do with the nature of European settlement in the Midwest and non-coastal Australia. In both regions European exploration and subsequent occupation involved several decades of rough pioneering during which time enterprising settlers sought a better life through agriculture, speculative livestock farming and mining. In both places the arrival of Europeans with their diseases, firearms and land-hunger heralded the dispossession of the indigenous population and wholesale destruction of native wildlife.

Recently arrived European migrants and families from the previously settled areas sought to establish themselves as small-scale agriculturalists, often on land that was basically unsuitable for the purpose. Restricted by the obvious limitations of horse transport and encouraged by the construction of private and public rail transport systems, these settlers were responsible for the establishment of hundreds of small towns in Australia and the United States that provided basic services to local farming communities. Though increasingly mechanised, agriculture in the late nineteenth century was still labour-intensive and provided regular or seasonal employment for farm labourers as well as family members.

In post-goldrush Victoria and New South Wales, newly constituted democratic governments promoted closer settlement schemes that involved the forced-resumption selection and sale before survey of vast areas of Crown land. The so-called "Free Selection Acts" of the 1860s largely failed to achieve their stated purpose of establishing a class of self-sufficient Yeoman farmers in place of large-scale pastoral leaseholders. However, in south-west Victoria, Free Selection together with an increased demand for labour in the pastoral industry resulted in the rapid growth of small towns such as Merino, Casterton and Branxholm.

Following both World Wars, the Australian government developed Soldier Settlement schemes to provide thousands of veterans with an opportunity to become farmers. As with the Free Selection Acts, the productive capacity of land allotted to many soldier settlers was insufficient for viable farming enterprise. The subsequent restructuring of Australian agriculture has involved the ongoing consolidation of many of these farms into larger holdings.

The initial optimism of farming communities in the American Midwest and rural Australia west of the Great Dividing Range was soon tempered by the discovery that these regions were subject to prolonged periods of drought, destructive floods, bush-prairie fires and insect and mice plagues. In both regions, overstocking of grazing land and wholesale clearing of native vegetation reduced the productive capacity of what was in many cases marginal farming land. In Australia, environmental degradation of marginal farming land has impacted on the viability of many small towns that basically depend on local agriculture for their survival.

During the twentieth century the application of advanced technology to farming and regionally based manufacturing has significantly reduced the demand for labour in rural Australia and the United States. As with other resource industries, in order to compete on world markets Australian and American agricultural producers and processors have invested heavily in labour-saving capital infrastructure. The reduced demand for labour in rural industries together with improved transportation has been a major cause of the ongoing decline of small towns, which remain largely dependent on primary industries and related manufacturing.

Not only is the population of much of non-coastal rural Australia decreasing, but as one rural business writer stated, "If you live in the bush, you are more likely than other Australians to be sick, unemployed and poorly educated". The same article, published in The Weekend Australian in September 1998, claimed that of the forty poorest Australian electorates, thirty-six were rural or provincial. Available research together with a general understanding of the historical process outlined in this paper clearly indicates that for many Australian-American traditional small towns’ decline will be ongoing.

In regional Australia the critical question is not whether isolated rural towns that rely on primary production and processing for employment will decline. They inevitably will. Rather, the central issue is whether or not whole rural regions such as Wimmera or Darling Downs will continue to lose population and hence services that must impact adversely on the costs and quality of life of those who remain. In both the United States and Australia it is simply unrealistic to hope that the cavalry in the form of some substantial federally funded rescue package will eventually arrive.

This brings us to the potentially divisive issue of just what, if anything, should governments at all levels be doing to address what I refer to as Dying Town Syndrome. Until recently, significant state intervention to assist the economic development of rural Australia was accepted as an essential part of government policy. However, one of the outcomes of recent economic reform of Australian state and federal governments has been reduced funding for interventionist regional development policies. Given the ongoing commitment to improving Australia’s international competitiveness it seems likely that this will result in the decline and eventual disappearance of hundreds of Australian small towns.

The main arguments raised in favour of significant government intervention to assist rural communities to remain viable rarely address the longer-term issues underlying small-town decline. Within certain Australian rural communities it has been assumed that significantly higher average commodity prices for agricultural exports such as wool and wheat would somehow assist small country towns to remain viable. In reality, in order to access even quite basic services, in health, banking, finance and retailing, residents and local farming families are increasingly bypassing their local small towns to travel to major regional centres. While this is partly due to a loss of services in smaller towns involving the closure of banks, shops and schools, it also reflects individuals’ desire to access better quality, more sophisticated services. It is generally only larger centres, with a minimum population of about 10,000 that can provide the range of services required by regional communities. In both Australia and the United States the main movement of population from small towns has been and will continue to be to larger, "sponge" regional centres.

Underlying these more pragmatic considerations as to why Australian and American towns in decline ought to be preserved is the widely held view that they are an essential part of both societies’ national heritage. This is strongly evident in American and Australian literature, film and television culture. Central to both mainstream Australia’s and America’s sense of national identity are distinctive small town and rural community values that evolved as part of the pioneering settlers’ and their descendants’ response to the harsh conditions of frontier life. In Dance with the Community, Robert Fowler Booth observes that the bucolic image of small town America is looked upon as the repository of the nation’s traditions, norms and values. In Australia it was the "bush", loosely defined, rather than small country towns that was central to development of a distinctive Australian legend or ethos.

Unlike the Australian colonies, which were centrally administered, the expansion of European settlement in the United States in the nineteenth century involved the development of hundreds of relatively independent incorporated small towns. Australians, through films and novels based on life in American small towns, are familiar with town meetings where the residents, rather than some distant government department made key decisions about "our" school, "our" hospital and "our" police service. Faced with this loss of government services and the apparent indifference of an increasingly urbanised Australia to their plight, should Australia’s declining country towns look to adopt American models of community governance in order to have increased influence in determining their own futures? For reasons that should be readily apparent, I believe that moves towards this type of arrangement would not be in the interests of Australia’s declining small towns or rural regional Australia generally. Rather, I would support the development of wider, more autonomous regions of the kind recently proposed by the former Federal Minister Chris Hurford in his Australian Constitutional Renewal paper.

Regretfully or otherwise, there are no long-term solutions for most small towns in decline in non-coastal Australia and the American Midwest. My time in Kansas and other Midwestern states, where the visible signs of small-town decline are much more dramatic that for most of regional Australia, brought this reality into sharp focus. "Solutions" such as using cheap and vacant housing to attract working-poor or welfare-dependent families to reside in small towns will create more problems than solutions. Nor are the interests of small-town communities in obvious decline served by well-meaning but "false wizards" in the form of consultants, politicians or other experts who suggest that all would be well if only these communities could work together to develop "innovative" yet totally unrealistic "visions for the future". Small-town communities need to be provided with objective information so as to be able to plan sensibly for their future. For certain small towns in rural Australia facing ongoing decline the best long-term "solution", for those who wish to leave, may involve a managed movement of population into larger viable regional centres. A challenge for all concerned with the future of small towns in ongoing decline is to assist these communities to come to terms with the realities and consequences of the historical processes outlined in this paper.