Contesting Development: Rural Transition in the Bega Valley Shire 1965-1996

Abstract

Between 1965 and 1996 the population of the area now incorporated in the Bega Valley Shire more than doubled. A set of factors transformed the economic, social and demographic profile and composition of the south-eastern corner of New South Wales. The region transitioned from an economy based on dairy farming to one with an increasing presence of rural residential living, 'alternative' and post-retirement settlement, the growth of a tourism industry and the establishment of new national parks. This process has been identified by geographer John Holmes as a multifunctional rural transition.

Histories of non-urban places in Australia during this period focus on declining communities west of the Great Dividing Range. As populations increased along the eastern seaboard, rural geographers and sociologists conducted broad, quantitative studies. But this history follows the call to explore local history from the 'parish pump to the cosmos' by considering the interplay of resident and local government responses to the differing aspirations and expectations of individual newcomers, layered with increasing state government regulation of the development of non-urban spaces. It explores what geographer Doreen Massey terms 'throwntogetherness'.

Contests over development were central to these transitions, particularly over land use, environmental values and issues of social, economic and cultural change. This thesis tracks several of these conflicts, assessing the interests and identities engaged in them and analysing the experience of those people drawn into new forms of political action, organisation and regulation. Exploring what was learned by participants in these contests over land use brings both individual and historical perspectives to the local negotiation of pressures and opportunities shaping many aspects of Australian society and governance at that time.

This thesis draws on testimony from interviews with nineteen participants who were leaders in disputes selected to illustrate these historical processes. Their experiences of, and reflections on, navigating regulatory structures and seeking satisfactory outcomes reveals how individuals came to understand the bases of conflict and the capacities required to move through and beyond them. Their testimony is placed in the context of wider debates and official responses, including the minutes of local government meetings, reports of local officials, newspaper reports and the policy and legislative frameworks in which local and state governments worked to understand the impact and progress of these debates. Studying a local area crosses subject boundaries, and this thesis draws on ideas from geography and sociology while focusing on personal stories of the struggles of people of diverse backgrounds as they attempted to fulfil their aspirations for ways of living and working in a challenged, and challenging, rural context. Legacies of these transitions have enduring consequences, many of which came into sharp focus in the conflagration that impacted villages and displaced residents and tourists in the Bega Valley between December 2019 and February 2020. Show more