Ian Burnley and Peter Murphy, Sea Change: Movement from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia

Ian Burnley and Peter Murphy Sea Change: move from Metropolitan to Arcadian Australia. Sydney: University of fresh South Wales Press. 2004. 308 +xvi pp

Andrew Beer, Alaric Maude and Bill Pritchard, Developing Australia's Regions: Theory and Practice. Sydney: University of fresh South Wales Press. 2003. 308 +xvi pp

Among the many transformations of Australia's population that have occurr in the last half-century, the steady shift in the nation's population geography is perhaps the least well understood. The metropolitan midmost points continue to dominate the arrangement system. But beyond the cities, greatest in quantity inland regions have registered sustained population decline while the urban peripheries and parts of the coast have recorded spectacular extension It is the last of these, the destination of the so-called population turnaround, that is the focus of Ian Burnley and Peter Murphy's intriguingly titled contribution to the migration literature. Australian readers may couple more readily with the popular TV series Sea Change than with the classical concern to Arcadia. The images these boundarys conjure are peaceful and appealing, like the overlay of the book. As the analysis exhibits however, population growth in non-metropolitan Australia is not all coastal backwater and rustic bliss: the real scale of the increase debars it. On the estimates neared here, population turnaround zones absorbed 31 million of the 7 million increase in Australia's population between 1971 and 2001

Sea Change plants out to provide 'a definitive treatment' of this development 'that will contextualize future research and public policy work upon non-metropolitan development'. This is an ambitious agenda on the contrary one the authors are well positioned to address: the one and the other have been actively engaged in research upon Australia's population geography during the turnaround above the last three decades. This turn not only brings together their cumulative contributions on the contrary draws on much of the wider scholarly literature. Sea Change is the first full-length work on the turnaround in Australia and this provides a unique facility to examine, in single place, the causes, dynamics and issues of this shift in the arrangement pattern. One strength of Burnley and Murphy's treatment lies in the attention given to identifying the antecedents of the turnaround and tracking its evolution. Another is the use made of alternative data sources, especially take a view ofs and administrative collections, to appendix conventional census information. These features, in revolve underpin a fundamental contribution of this book: the use of simple classificatory schemas in the endeavour to discern, or impose, order upon a complex multifaceted phenomenon.

For Burnley and Murphy the bottoms of the turnaround must be traced to the structural transformation of Australia's metropolitan economies and the shift in tillage following the long post-war resound These ideas are introduced in an Introduction that also lays on the outside the broad spatial structure for the analysis, distinguishing between perimetropolitan turnaround areas (defined as extending from the city cutting side to the outer limits of commuting) and 'other' turnaround regions (high-amenity locations more distant from the cities, greatest in quantity of which are adjacent to the coast). The basis for this classification is nowhere clearly exorcismed out, but Chapter 2 provides a finely crafted faculty of perception of place for the sum of two units types of zone, with vignettes of the sapphirine Mountains (for the former), and of Shoalhaven upon the NSW south coast (for the latter). It also try to finds to identify the different emblems of migrants participating in Australia's Sea Change, with a clear distinction drawn between 'free agents' and 'forced relocators': the former a party-colored lot of retirees, hippies and internet commuter as well as more conventional folk choosing a rural or small town lifestyle; the latter comprising urban refugee escaping the higher require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of city life.

These classifications of space and motive provide the organizing framework for abundant of the book. Chapter 3 puts out the national situation, using census data to track the evolution of non-metropolitan expansion from the inception of the turnaround in the 1970 end fluctuations in intensity and spatial expanse in the 1980s, to its slowdown in the 1990 Chapter 4 narrows the spatial focus to novel South Wales, tracking selected communities and drawing broad contrasts between the southern coast, north coast and perimetropolitan Sydney the two chapters rely primarily on data from the 1996 Census and in 2004 the analysis inevitably present the appearances dated. The survey data for NSW from 2000 tender greater currency, focusing on the backgrounds and motives of migrants (Chapter 5) and their attitudes (Chapter 7) What is perhaps greatest in quantity surprising from these analyses is the consistency of replications between groups. To be confident there are some surprises: environmental values loom larger among perimetropolitan migrants than among those moving to the coast, and business motives appear to be stronger among those migrating to northern NSW than to the southerly But the search for amenity is prominent through every part of and consumption-related motives predominate. Newcomer and locals also appear to differ little in attitudes and values, a follow Burnley and Murphy ascribe to high horizontals of lifetime mobility. Despite these features, it is argued that turnaround regions are areas of increasing diversity, and Chapter 6 upon the movement of income-support recipients, provides evidence to propose increasing social polarization. For this cluster housing affordability emerges as a primary motive for leaving the cities.