Ideas@TheCentre
When to move town
I recently spent nine days driving 4,500 kms across remote NSW – from Wagga Wagga to Ivanhoe, Broken Hill, Wilcannia, Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett, Lightning Ridge, Collarenebri, Moree, Boggabilla, Toomelah, and Dubbo. Aside from giving me an appreciation for how vast Australia is, the field trip also highlighted the changing fortunes of country towns.
The beautiful, old sandstone post office at Wilcannia conjured up more prosperous times when the town was known as the ‘Queen City of the West.’ Today, boarded-up shops with barred windows line the main street; only a service station, pub and a few shops remain open. Even the larger town of Broken Hill is showing signs of decline, with ‘for lease’ signs in front of many shops on the main street and old pubs and motels closed down.
Locals told me of the changes wrought by multinationals buying up land to grow cotton, irrigation depleting the rivers, the clearing of trees removing shelter needed to raise sheep, and the run-off from fertilizers and pesticides killing the weeds needed for oxygenating rivers.
The sides of the road across the Moree plains looked as though it had snowed recently because of the large amounts of cotton that had fallen from the bales on their way to cotton gins. Cotton farms now employ only a few people as just about every process has been mechanised.
Those towns that have found ways to adapt are doing slightly better. Although the opal industry has dwindled, enterprising locals in Lightning Ridge have found other ways to make a buck. One miner has transformed his 100-year-old mine into a gallery by carving more than 500 beautiful sculptures into its walls and enticing tourists with his creations.
Others, such as the Toomelah community on the site of an old mission 14 kms from Boggabilla, are clearly going backwards. Over the years, I have visited many different Aboriginal communities but I have never seen as many houses so obviously vandalised as those in Toomelah. Two out of three of the 50 or so houses had holes kicked into the walls, windows smashed, parts of the roofs missing, and graffiti painted over them. The sense of rage and despair in the air was palpable.
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald in May suggested the government was considering closing down Toomelah and relocating residents elsewhere. Tracker denied this was ever the case, and that the story was based only on the words of a frustrated government employee fed up with trying to improve a community resistant to change.
Whatever the truth may be, propping up towns artificially clearly is not working. Toomelah is no better off despite millions of government funding over the last two decades. The question that needs to be asked is, should government and townspeople let natural attrition and decline continue or should they do something about it? Residents of Toomelah, like many country folk before them, have to ask themselves why they want to stay and what is there for them in the future?
Sara Hudson is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
