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

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.