Posted on 5-4-2004
Seachanges
03.04.2004
The city folks' rush to the coast is pushing locals aside and
changing the
face of Australian society. GREG ANSLEY reports
A decade ago Long Beach was a tiny cluster of modest homes and
weekenders
wedged beneath the coastal gums that rolled over the hills from
Murramarang National Park to the white sands of the Pacific.
Four hours south from Sydney and two from Canberra, it was the
kind of
sleepy hollow where you could pick up a place for less than
A$100,000
($114,750) even five years ago, and pop into nearby Bateman's
Bay where
the action happened at the local Soldiers' Club and the main
street faced
inward, ignoring the sparkling rivermouth with its pelicans
and dolphins.
That was then. Now Hollywood director Quentin Tarantino has
a stake in
Long Beach, along with the family of singer Kylie Minogue, and
the
residents of the original tree-clad settlement mutter darkly
about the
mansions crawling up the denuded hill at the other end of the
beach.
Land and house prices have trebled over the past three or four
years as
lifestylers in the green northern enclave marvel at demand that
has pushed
the price of three-bedroom townhouses just back from the beach
to
A$650,000 ($745,000).
On the big housing estate to the south, where majestic spotted
gums and
burrawangs have been clear-felled to provide sweeping views
out to the
islands known as the Tollgates - now a breeding reserve for
Grey Nurse
sharks - and the wide ocean beyond, house prices rival those
of Sydney.
Welcome to what demographer and cultural trends analyst Bernard
Salt calls
Australia's third cultural wave, an unstoppable tsunami that
is roaring
around the vast rim of the continent to change the shape of
its society
forever.
"Culturally, you see the subsidence of the Akubra hat and
the rise of
Quicksilver, Billabong and Ripcurl," says Salt, whose work
for consultants
KPMG has made him a demographic guru in Australia and, increasingly,
New
Zealand.
Australian iconography still harks back to bush poet Banjo Patterson's
epic Man from Snowy River, or his 1895 lament of a city clerk
yearning for
the outback life of a drover in Clancy of the Overflow.
"For Townsfolk have no time to grow," wrote Patterson,
"they have no time
to waste. And I somehow rather fancy that I'd like to change
with Clancy,
like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go
... "
"City clerks have no lament like that today," says
Salt. "If they do, it's
to be surfing down the coast."
Popular culture, reflected in the advertising that defines Australia's
changing aspirations, also tracks Salt's third wave. Surfing
is enjoying a
revival almost as significant as its 1960s heyday, with ads
depicting
tanned executives taking care of business on the beach via mobile
phones,
Malibus beside them in the sand.
Salt defines Australia's first cultural wave as the pioneering
drive of
the 19th century for the inland wealth of gold, sheep, cattle
and wheat,
powering the powerful bush imagery that still twangs a chord
in the
national psyche.
"It's a sort of romantic notion," he says. "So
I think there is a place
for the bush as a romantic place that no one really ever goes
to any more,
in much the same way as the Americans have that sort of cowboy
notion.
It's part of the historic culture of the nation, the same way
England, for
example, might have a romantic notion about Camelot."
Salt's second wave was the emergence of the big cities and their
sprawling
suburbs that became the cultural, economic and political powerhouses
of
Australia. And now, still in its infancy, is the third wave
that has
become known as the "seachange", after an ABC TV series
that surprised
everyone with the huge audience it created for a comedy-drama
tracking the
life of a big-city lawyer, played by actress Sigrid Thornton,
who gives it
all away for a new life in a small coastal town.
Seachange is a phenomenon that has not found a real equivalent
across the
Tasman. While the same demographic drivers may be at work, the
cultural
impact of the rise of the coast is far less - so far at least
- in New
Zealand.
"For all of the figures I have for Australia, there are
counterparts in
New Zealand," Salt says. "The Kapiti Coast, Coromandel
Peninsular,
Tauranga - all those sorts of places fit the mould extremely
well. But I
don't know if you can actually identify the cultural division
that is so
neatly pulled out of the Australian experience."
The enormous differences in geography probably explain why Australia's
cultural shockwave is not being repeated here. With nowhere
more than
100km from the sea, New Zealanders have always been, in a much
broader
sense, a coastal community.
"Because Australia was such a large canvas for over 200
years, it led to a
clearer, cleaner division between the different components of
the
Australian population," Salt says. "There was clearly
the bush, which was
clearly separate from the city, and is now clearly separate
from the coast
- Byron Bay (in northern New South Wales) for example - whereas
in New
Zealand those seachange places are for the smart set of Auckland
and
Wellington to go for chic weekenders.
"In Australia, places like Byron Bay, and certainly Cairns,
Port Douglas
and Hervey Bay are genuinely separate communities that fall
beyond the
orbital influence, the gravitational pull, of a capital city."
Cultural shocks aside, there are similar factors at work in
both
countries. In New Zealand three of the five fastest-growing
centres (in
percentage terms) of the past 15 years - Rodney, Tauranga, and
Kapiti
Coast - are typically seachange. The other two are Waimakariri,
near
Christchurch, and Queenstown.
In Australia, all but two of the top 10 are coastal: Busselton
and
Mandurah in Western Australia, Sunshine and Gold Coast, Hervey
Bay and
Townsville in Queensland, and Port Macquarie, Nowra-Bomaderry,
Forster,
Coffs Harbour and Eurobodella in New South Wales.
Technology, more flexible working hours and good roads are pushing
the
seachange further, extending the gravitational pull of the major
cities.
The flow of retiring baby boomers is being matched by another
stream of
lifestylers finding work in the growing coastal services industries
such
as tourism and hospitality, setting up their own businesses,
or
telecommuting.
Some physically commute. In booming Coffs Harbour, where the
city
council's growth strategy works to encourage affluent middle-aged
seachangers, a thriving airport and improved air services has
given rise
to commuters who spend the week in their Sydney offices and
the weekends
at new homes on the coast around Coffs Harbour. One of the most
prominent
seachangers there is actor Russell Crowe.
"You look at the demographics [of seachange] and every
age group is
represented," Salt says. "There is a certain cultural,
aspirational nature
to it as well. You find it around Byron Bay, Ballina and the
Northern
Rivers. It's almost utopian. A new world, a new arrangement
in life, which
is precisely what the seachange concept was all about - cutting
your ties
in the city and reinventing yourself in a new environment."
The figures are staggering. In rough terms Australia has four
million
people living in the bush, four million on the coast, and 12
million in
cities. The coastal population is growing at a rate of 70,000
a year, and
the bush's by 10,000. Within a decade the coast will have close
to five
million and the bush will have barely grown.
"We're building new cities," Salt says. "Roads,
infrastructure, services
and facilities need to be built in a new colony, a territory,
a new urban
frontier."
But the new frontier is as troubled as any of its predecessors.
The values
of seachangers frequently conflict with those of essentially
conservative
rural societies.
Environmental clashes, especially, are common, as traditional
industries
such as logging come under severe pressure. In the tiny settlement
of
Mogo, on the New South Wales south coast, bitter divisions opened
over a
proposed charcoal plant in a fight that eventually forced the
State
Government to back down.
Coastal developers are also facing tougher constraints. In Queensland,
Premier Peter Beattie has set up a new planning agency for the
southeast
corner of the state to try to balance environmental protection
and the
development of a region whose population will accelerate from
2.4 million
to 3.5 million in less than two decades.
Soaring property prices are a two-edged sword. So fast are prices
rising
that in coastal towns such as Lorne in Victoria, home lenders
are starting
to apply metropolitan lending rules for mortgages.
Close to major cities, coastal prices have skyrocketed. On the
NSW Central
Coast, north of Sydney, median house prices have doubled in
five years and
hit growth of 162 per cent at Chittaway Point, where the median
has risen
from A$156,000 ($180,000) to A$408,000 ($468,000) since 1998.
To the
south, at Rosedale, near Bateman's Bay, the family of actress
Nicole
Kidman recently paid A$1.5 million ($1.72 million) for three
log cabins on
the beach.
For many locals, the boom is fast pricing them, and their children,
out of
the market, frequently causing new resentments. For local councils,
the
growth means significant rises in revenue to offset - at least
to a degree
- the huge demands being placed on their budgets.
Two months ago the chief executive officers of 27 councils,
struggling to
cope with the seachange around Australia, met in a special summit.
The
biggest issues were the most expensive: the huge investment
needed for new
roads and traffic systems, and electricity, water and sewerage
networks.
There were no easy answers. Unlike cities, where population
is
concentrated, Australia's seachange is a series of narrow ribbon
developments that confound and frustrate planners.
"If you add four million people to a city, it's actually
easier to manage
and service with infrastructure because they're all tightly
bound around a
central business district," says Salt, who was a key speaker
at the
seachange summit. "When those four million people are strung
out along the
edge of the continent, it's really hard to grip and manage."
Nowhere is this more obvious than the Gold Coast, a 60km long
and 2km wide
strip growing at an annual rate of 3.5 per cent that will lift
its
population from 480,000 to 580,000 within seven years, requiring
6000 new
homes a year. In addition it hosts 4.3 million tourists a year.
Besides providing for the basic needs of its mushrooming population,
the
city is trying to develop industries beyond tourism to keep
pace with the
accelerating demand for employment. More urgently, it is trying
to deal
with the increasing nightmare of traffic.
"What the Gold Coast actually needs is a tunnel going under
Surfers
Paradise and a light rail running right up its length, but you
can't do
that when the population is thin on either side of the transportation
route. The configuration of coastal cities makes it incredibly
expensive
to the ratepayers you serve, to provide that infrastructure."
And, says Salt, the babyboomers expect their new communities
to provide
them with everything they had at home: a community arts centre,
a library,
cultural facilities and so on.
"They need the hard infrastructure but, bloody hell, it
doesn't stop
there. Then they want all this other stuff that the locals have
been happy
to do without for a while, but these new values have raised
the bar in
these coastal towns."
Life really is a beach
|