Rural transitions in the Nambucca Valley: Socio-demographic change in a disadvantaged rural locale

Abstract

Within current rural research, an ongoing challenge has been to conceptualise the overarching dynamics driving rural transitions in affluent societies, while also recognising diversity and complexity in driving forces and trajectories over time and place. While amenity migration may continue to be influential, more recent research has revealed that there are multiple driving forces leading towards diverse multifunctional rural occupance modes and trajectories. With its oversupply of desirable rural destinations, transitions along the subtropical New South Wales coast have been marked by increasingly divergent socioeconomic trajectories, tied to perceived gradients in amenity and sequential gradients in affordability related to inherent and constructed place imagery. We explore early- and late-phase transitions in the Nambucca Valley, one region within this zone. Initially available at exceptionally low entry costs, a plentiful supply of former dairyfarms attracted undercapitalised migrants seeking a rural lifestyle and possibly a livelihood from on-farm or non-farm sources. With limited finances, near-zero borrowing capacity and an ill-informed, opportunistic approach towards initiating their prospective cropping and/or livestock ventures, newcomers were destined to fail. Notwithstanding its high natural landscape and liveability values, the Nambucca Valley has been bypassed during the later-phase, locationally selective commodification of rural hinterlands. With its now-entrenched image of disadvantage, Nambucca lacks the market-oriented positional values accruing to prime destinations elsewhere along the subtropical coast. Given the continuing inability of Nambucca's rural landholdings to support cropping and livestock livelihoods, and the compatibility between consumption and protection outcomes, there is a high probability of entrenching a complex multifunctional mode of rural occupance for the foreseeable future. In this mode, 'consumption of the countryside' by residents with modest incomes will be most influential in shaping rural socioeconomic futures, but with desultory production and protection activity together with reduced inputs into property management shaping rural landscapes.