When towns lose hope

Larry Schwartz  
THE store window announces a Tupperware demonstration, a quilting display and, to go to a good home, a pure-bred shar-pei male called Sully. On the door is a caricature of one man with a gun; another, fleeing, has dropped his suitcase. “We shoot every third salesman,” it says. “The second one just left.”

The Bon Bon cafe is open for business this morning. The woman behind the counter remarks on the bitter cold, then adds cheerily that summer is coming. Winter first, you tell her. Yes, she says, but summer will follow soon.

Some in the Mallee wheatbelt town of Hopetoun might say summer ended on a muggy night in January 1995 when shire councillors and guests clasped hands and sang Auld Lang Syne at the last meeting of the Shire of Karkarooc, one of 29 north-west Victorian municipalities reduced to nine in local government mergers at the time. “…One hundred years was in our sight,/ But alas! That all ends here tonight,” said a poem penned by the then shire president. Most of Karkarooc merged with Warracknabeal, Dunmunkle and part of Wimmera shires to create the Shire of Yarriambiack, covering more than 7000 square kilometres and with its head offices in Warracknabeal.

Five years on, some in Hopetoun will tell you the loss struck at the heart of this community named for John Adrian Louis Hope, the seventh Earl of Hopetoun and the first Governor-General of Australia.

“The roads are falling apart and so is the infrastructure,” says retired farmer Terry Sheehy, 75, treasurer of the RSL and bowling club, who jokes that the pigeons roosting in deserted shops might be the town’s only growth industry these days.

Nor is Hopetoun alone in mourning the loss of its council. In Penshurst, in the state’s south-west, Marie Ewing, mother of 10 and immediate past president of the Advance Penshurst lobby group, explains how council mergers ended the town’s role as seat of the former Shire of Mount Rouse. “We had to establish
our identity again,” she says.

Hopetoun and Penshurst are case studies in a new joint study by RMIT and Deakin University. The authors cite the withdrawal of local shire offices as a contributor to “a shift from feelings of self-satisfaction to feelings of apathy, despair and isolation”.

They also note: “Attempts made by community members to sustain their communities are largely frustrated by external policy and other structural arrangements.”

Hopetoun had provided infrastructure support for services such as water, electricity, natural resources and environment. Rationalisation resulted in increased costs to the community to fill the local pool and artificial lake and disruptions to supply, the study observes. Home and Community Care Services were relocated, “resulting in depersonalisation and loss of local knowledge”. Three regional hospitals were merged to create a facility for which locals had lobbied with vigor. Some regarded this as “the only fight we’ve won”.

In Penshurst, changes in floor-pricing of wool and a poor beef market reduced the community’s income. The National Australia Bank branch closed soon after local government amalgamation and more than $1.5million it had held was transferred to Hamilton, the administrative centre of the new Southern Grampians Shire.

Penshurst no longer had its own library and water board. The ambulance service was downgraded and the post office privatised, which was “seen as an example of lack of government commitment to providing services in rural areas”.

The authors of the RMIT-Deakin University study warn that “the wellbeing of entire communities is under threat from the cumulative effects of policies that have sought to rationalise and centralise services”.

At the World Congress of Rural Sociology in Rio de Janeiro next month, Associate Professor Erica Hallebone, of RMIT’s school of management, will present a paper examining the impact of such policy changes on Hopetoun and Penshurst. She believes their concerns reflect frustrations common in rural Australia.

Hallebone, who had previously researched Hopetoun for the Country Fire Authority, suggested it for the study and spent time here with a colleague.

“We were aware there were enthusiasts in both towns trying to overturn the dying process,” she says. “There are people who believe the towns are dying and others who believe they’re not.”

Residents’ views on such issues as changes to farming practices, local government, public utilities, banking, health care and education suggested a disenchantment evident in last year’s state election result and, more recently, the National Party loss in the Benalla byelection.

“When we were doing the study, (then Deputy Premier and National Party leader) Pat McNamara visited Hopetoun,” Hallebone says. “People were getting ready with their questions on what he could do for them or offer them from his party. But he only spent enough time to wave to people.”

THOUGH he is confident the town will endure on a smaller scale, Terry Sheehy has no illusions about the prospects for “blue tongues”, as he calls the town’s youngsters.

“It doesn’t worry us old people,” he says. “We’ve got all we need to see us out to Boot Hill. We’ve got everything here in the way of medical services and so on. It’s depressing for the young people because they can see the place folding up.”

Sheehy grew up on a soldier settler block his father had farmed from 1921. He remembers brighter days when the big social event was meeting the passenger train at 10pm. The passenger line closed in the mid-’70s, but is still used to transport wheat to ports.

Sheehy accompanies us on a tour of a town in which almost a third of the 670 residents are older than 65. He points out landmarks including the former home of Edward Lascelles, largely responsible for opening up the Mallee for settlement, and a sportsground that is home to the Devils, bolstered since the club at nearby Yaapeet closed.

Sheehy left his father’s farm at 15 and worked in Melbourne as a clerk on the railways and served in the navy before returning to set up his own farm. You could do that then.

“Hopetoun, Premier Town 1973 to 1975,” says peeled white lettering on a brown backdrop at the entrance to town. A jaded welcome from happier times.

With the population declining by an estimated 23 per cent in two decades, the number of students at Hopetoun Secondary College has dropped from 317 in 1971 to 117. The school has been downgraded, leading to a loss of teachers and less effective rotation of staff, contributing in turn to a further loss of families.

Increasing suicide rates among rural youth have intensified pressure for pastoral care and Hopetoun Secondary College has appointed a part-time chaplain.

Principal Paul Cheel says the decline in school population is even more marked when you consider that retention rates have increased considerably since the early 1970s. Only a few remained in town afterwards, working on family farms or as apprentices, but such opportunities were limited.

Cheel has taught here for 21 years. He says seasonal change is reflected in the faces of his students. When parents are anxious in times of drought, the children mirror that anxiety. Rain has a pacifying effect and means a quiet attentiveness in class. “You can feel the strains of what’s at home.”

Grey skies loom overhead. Rain has come. One of 13 students in year 12, Mikala Roberts, 18, is the elder of two sisters. Her father farms wheat and barley; her mother works part-time at a newsagent. Mikala is fond of Hopetoun. She feels safe in a town where everyone seems to know everyone else.

She intends to study primary teaching at TAFE in Ballarat or Geelong (not Melbourne, where there are too many people, she says). There’s very little opportunity for work here, “unless I go on the farm, and dad doesn’t expect me to”.

Also the elder of two, Brennan Poulton, 17, plays back flank with the Devils. He rarely gets an opportunity to venture to the city to barrack for Essendon.

His father is a handyman and masseur; his mother works at the pharmacy. Brennan intends to study business management in Melbourne or Geelong. Though he may not end up living in Hopetoun, he says “this will always be my home town”.

THE community has a new focal point. A community services, education and development agency, Gateway BEET (Business Education Employment Training), has taken over the old Karkarooc chambers, offering some of the over-the-counter services the council once provided, including VicRoads and
a St George Bank agency. The Commonwealth Bank is still in town, but a Westpac branch closed.

Shoppers from Hopetoun now bypass even Warracknabeal and head to Horsham and, increasingly with Sunday trading, Mildura.

One of the Gateway staff, Anne Neville, came to Hopetoun from Melbourne in 1964. The town was vibrant then, she says. She gestures down the main street, which once housed one stock and station agent after another. Now there is just one. A grocer has gone, as have a drycleaner, a tyre service, a billiard room and a men’s barber.

Even so, says Neville, there is little you can’t get in Hopetoun itself. A nearby shop stocks everything from clothing to giftware, curtains, crockery and haberdashery. There are still two grocers, two pubs, two butchers and more.

There is both guarded optimism and a deal of scepticism about recent initiatives including tourism facilities and a water filtration plant at Lake Lascelles. There is just enough here, a local explains, to justify a four-to-five-hour drive from Melbourne.

Such mixed feelings come through in the canvassing of local opinions by the RMIT-Deakin study, which began in late 1998, but only a minority in each town were optimistic about the future.

“While individual perceptions of the health and wellbeing of the communities obviously were influenced by the resident’s individual stance or position,” the authors note, “the sense of powerlessness against outside threats was very strongly articulated by every group.”

Marie Ewing and her husband leased their farm in Mortlake five years ago and run Penshurst’s only licensed supermarket with a St George Bank outlet and espresso coffee bar.

At last count, 503 people lived in Penshurst. Though some locals shop as far afield as Ballarat, Hamilton Warrnambool and Geelong, Penshurst has a hairdresser, farm-supply business, electrician, plumber, hotel, newsagent, takeaway and post office. It also has a hospital and a doctor.

Marie Ewing believes the population decline has been arrested. But she concedes it has been difficult for many in the community to adjust. The former council gave the community a focus.

Hopetoun. Hopetown. You wander the streets on a bitterly cold morning. Across the way is the hotel. The licensed billiard saloon opposite is padlocked. The shop alongside offers organic waxing, eyebrow shaping, eyelash tinting, false nails and manicure. There doesn’t seem to be much demand yet. Paint peels in what was once a menswear shop – one of several vacant premises in a town that has seen better days.

“The owners were getting a little long in the tooth,” says Terry Sheehy. “They couldn’t be bothered. You can’t sell it and you get too old to carry on. The only thing is to walk out and close the doors.”
The Age, 20-Jul-2000