Small town youth march to the big smoke
Nancy Burdett is a matriarch of Karoonda – a small town in South Australia’s Murray Mallee whose population numbers just over 500 (at last count).
The town’s Mayor, Kevin Burdett, is the middle-child of her five sons.
Over more than 70 years living in and around the home of the Big Ram, Nancy has kept a close eye on the rise of the town’s next, outward-facing, generation.
Globalisation, the internet and higher standards of education mean the youth of South Australia’s small towns is joining an exodus to the city experienced by small agricultural provinces across the developed world.
“If you were a farmer’s son years ago, you had no choice. You went to grade 7 at school and you naturally stayed on the farm,” recalls Nancy.
“Nowadays they’ve got the opportunity of a better education and a trade or a university degree.”
This values shift is one of the factors driving a slow erosion of small town populations in SA.
Over a decade (2003-2013), the Karoonda East Murray council area has lost 17.6 percent of its population.
Karoonda is struggling to fill its sporting teams, the doctor is in town just three days a week and banking is done via the post office or the chemist.
“You’ve got to get sick on the right days,” Nancy chuckles.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that many of the state’s towns lost between five and twenty percent of their respective populations between 2003 and 2013.
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According to Kevin Burdett, productivity in agiculture has gone through the roof because of vast strides in agricultural technology.
“These machines can do in 20 minutes what it took two men to do in a day,” he says.
But it’s left farmers out of a job as agricultural profit margins per acre subside and farmers buy out neighbours to build economies of scale.
“It’s economically impossible to own 2000 acres in the Karoonda area and raise a family. It’s just impossible.”
Both mother and son are keen to stress that while the population has decreased, it hasn’t dented the quiet, neighbourly charm of the town itself.
“People buy houses at Karoonda because of the lifestyle,” says Kevin.
Some mining towns, such as Roxby Downs, have bucked the trend, enjoying a 28 percent population increase in the town’s council area. Sea-change towns like Victor Harbor have had similar success attracting retirees.
But for towns like Coober Pedy, Karoonda, Wudinna, Elliston and Cleve, populations have been slowly diminishing for years.
Minister for Regional Development Geoff Brock said he was concerned by the trend, but optimistic about the future.
“Everybody’s concerned about it,” he said.
“I think population decrease across any part of regional South Australia is not only the minister’s responsibility – it should be on their mind – but on everybody’s mind, including businesses.
“It’s a challenge I think we all need to face.”
With the return of state parliament, Brock said he would be putting the regions first in this term.
“I’m going to be ensuring that the regions are focused to the front, and they are at the moment.
“My belief [is] that the regions now have got a real opportunity to refocus … It’s not about reversing the decline in populations; it’s about creating employment opportunities.”
According to demographer Bernard Salt, the erosion of country populations in South Australia is part of a broad, global trend.
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The phenomenon of small town population loss is felt in the same way in West Texas and the prairie provinces of Canada as across the Australian wheatbelt and on the margins of the outback.
Couples are having smaller families, and the children are looking to the cities for their education and prospects.
“There’s nothing the local community can do,” warned Salt.
“This economic regime is imposed from beyond.”
He said that the aggregation of farmlands and the advance of agricultural technologies were making jobs harder to come by in the regions.
“About 10 per cent of Australia’s 600 or so municipalities would be losing population from year to year and have done so for a generation or more.”
The protagonist of Banjo Patterson’s celebrated poem Clancy of the Overflow may embody the aspirations young South Australians of the 1950s and ‘60s, said Salt.
"‘As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know…’ – Banjo Patterson"
“We’ve shifted from Clancy to the Hipster,” he says.
“From valuing the skills and the iconography of our bush culture, we now value the metropolitan lifestyle.”
Modern South Australians are no-longer willing to accept “second best” jobs in their local area and are instead seeking the perceived glamour and job prospects offered by larger towns and cities.
According to fellow demographer, the University of Adelaide’s Graeme Hugo, small South Australian towns would now be even smaller had they not been buffeted against population by a wave of immigration in the mid- to late-2000s.
“There are around 100 rural LGAs (Local Government Areas) where the population would have declined were it not for the influx of immigrants,” he says.
In his research for the Australian Population and Migration Research Centre, Hugo and colleagues Helen Feist and George Tan described how the disproportionate settlement of immigrants in cities has shifted in recent years, in favour of rural centres.
Between 2006 and 2011, the number of immigrants settling in Australian capital cities increased by 29 percent, while the number of immigrants living in regional Australia increased 30 percent.
"‘This similarity in growth represents a small but significant shift since it is a reversal of longstanding trends of substantially greater growth in the capitals.’ – Graeme Hugo, Helen Fiest, George Tan, ‘International Migration and Regional Australia’ 2013."
Immigration rates are one factor in a series of contradicting elements pushing and pulling at regional population growth in Australia.
Hugo says that while a growing Asian market for quality food may create more jobs in the regions, mechanisation of labour, aggregation of farmland and government service centralisation are likely to pull the other way.
But the factor which says the most about our transforming national character, the values of our young people, may be the most interesting in the long term.
According to Salt, the aspirations of youth in developed countries like Australia could be in the course of a vast pendulum movement.
“[In the future] people might be able to discover themselves, reinvent themselves in a counter-metropolitan movement,” says Salt.
“I don’t see that in the short term, but it may well be something that grips Australia in the 2030s.”
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