There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the 'amenity' of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises 'amenity' in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio-economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south-east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in-migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro-scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in-migration rates has increased substantially between 1976-1981 and 1996-2001.
This paper takes a differential demographic change in six rural settlement categories within rural and regional Australia as the starting point for the measurement of differential ageing using a Relative Ageing Index which compares ageing in sub‐populations with the national norm. The spatial units employed are 412 rural communities, approximated by social catchments each consisting of a country town and its surrounding dispersed population. The study covers the period from 1981 to 2006 and includes the rural areas of New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia, excluding major cities, peri‐urban areas, and the remote rangelands. It examines demographic change and differential ageing in a selection of the rural settlement categories recommended for further analysis in the report of the ‘Demographic Change and Liveability Panel’, one of three advisory panels established in 2010 by the then Commonwealth Government seeking to develop a sustainable population strategy for Australia. Ageing profiles are produced for the whole study area, for the individual rural settlement categories, and for the urban and rural components within each category separately. Results show that differential ageing is least advanced in the ‘regional cities’, most advanced in the ‘sea change’, but of most concern in the agriculture‐based rural settlement categories where it exacerbates the effects of overall population decline. In all categories, ageing in the dispersed rural population element exceeded that of the urban component. Results emphasise the vital role of the ‘regional cities’ category in future public policy development supported by ameliorative and collaborative measures for their surrounding agriculture‐based communities.
Rural population density has a very significant independent influence over important socio-economic and demographic characteristics of developed world rural communities. Additionally, it is a fundamental variable in public policy and planning, both expressing and influencing the relative cost-efficiency of servicing populations. Yet density is itself produced by more fundamental qualities (e.g. environmental resources, nature and time of colonisation) which may themselves change over time. Treating rural population density as a dependent variable produced by a wide variety of factors, we build and test two causal models that attempt to explain the observed pattern of rural densities across south-eastern Australia (n = 414 communities). We distinguish between a ''productivist'' model-applicable for most of white Australia's history-and a consumptionist model that takes account of recent counter-urbanisation trends. These models are applied to the entire study area and, in recognition of the study area's internal heterogeneity, to five clusters of communities. In the drier inland and remoter zones, the productivist model exhibits the greatest explanatory power, while in the more accessible and well-watered ''multifunctional'' zones, an expanded model that incorporates a measure of ''amenity'' produces the best results. The research finds that simple environmental factors, coupled with relative location within the national space economy, act as dominant controls over rural population density in early 21st century Australia.
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