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