Staying local in Katanning when big smoke beckons

Off the highway that carries a near-uninterrupted procession of holiday-makers from Perth to the seachange towns of WA’s south coast sits Katanning, slowly shrinking.

Cindy Doan and brother Jason outside their family Vietnamese restaurant at Katanning, in Western Australia. Picture: Colin Murty

Off the highway that carries a near-uninterrupted procession of holiday-makers from Perth to the picture-perfect seachange towns of Western Australia’s south coast sits Katanning, slowly shrinking.

The Doan family, led by patriarch Kiet who migrated to Australia from Vietnam in 1989, defied the trend when it moved to Katanning from the coast in 2018 to open the town’s first Vietnamese restaurant. The Doan children Jason, 26, and Cindy, 15, help keep Vietnamese Cafe & Pho open 12 hours a day, six days a week.

The family took a chance on an empty shop and the town has responded with enthusiasm.

“We have a line out the door every lunchtime,” Jason Doan says.

“It was a good decision to come but also it is such a lovely town. It’s only a short walk from the cafe to Woolworths and on the way at least three people will stop you just to say hello and ask you how the shop is going.”

Katanning, 300km southeast of Perth, is in a special category of stoic, cohesive communities within 500km of capital cities examined by demographer Bernard Salt in Inquirer on Saturday. These towns are not the outback nor are they regional centres. They have industry, yet they often struggle to hold on to young residents in search of big-city-based skills, training and job opport­unities.

Katanning Shire is projected to lose residents in more or less every five-year cohort up to the age of 54 over the next five years. The reasons are clear, writes Salt: the greater Katanning community of 27,000 residents requires shopkeepers, policemen, nurses, teachers and others to make it work.

These are arguments local MP Rick Wilson understands well. He was raised in Katanning on a farm and still calls it home. But five years ago he moved his family of six to the south coast town of ­Albany, also in his federal electorate of O’Connor. It is bigger, with more schools and better healthcare.

Agricultural land has never been more valuable in the pocket of Western Australia around ­Katanning: good commodity prices mean properties that sold for about $700 an acre 15 years ago are now worth $2500 an acre. But on this sheep and wheat country, mechanisation has become so ­advanced that one farmer can crop huge tracts of land.

Mr Wilson is on a parliamentary select committee examining the population falls in regional towns.

“What Katanning and a lot of these towns do have to offer is a wonderful sense of community,” he says.

“When someone’s down and needs a hand, the town will help.

“That is the sad thing about these communities losing people is they are great places to live.”

Amid the grim news about the declining number of permanent residents in Katanning there are ambitious ideas about tourism.

Entrepreneur Nigel Oakley shocked locals when he took possession of a disused flour mill in the middle of Katanning and spent $9m transforming it into a heritage hotel. He converted the cellar into the town’s first wine bar. Plenty of people thought he had done his money. But as of ­Friday, the Premier Mill Hotel was booked solid until March.