Regional revival: faith, VESPAs and the Goldilocks Zone

For years the faith of regional Australians in their way of life was tested by drought and the steady seepage of youth and energy and services to the big city or at the very least to larger regional cities.

Lake Eildon in Bonnie Doon is filling up again after being at its lowest in 5 years. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

For years the faith of regional Australians in their way of life was tested by drought and the steady seepage of youth and energy and services to the big city or at the very least to larger regional cities.

It reached a crescendo in the summer of 2020 when bushfires scorched what seemed to be left of life in regional Australia. But, as with all stories of redemption, there came a divine or at least a precipitous sign from above.

The heavens opened and delivered both hope and salvation: it was rain and it fell not in sprinkles but in splashes; it soaked, and it pooled; it deliciously drenched the land and its people. Nothing defibrillates the Australian regions into life more than rain.

What we didn’t know at this time, late summer 2020, was that another apocalyptic trial would soon befall the Australian people, that of pandemic. But whereas drought and bushfire primarily scar the regions, the coronavirus curdles and clusters in our biggest cities.

And now, more than year into the pandemic, and with the experience of rolling lockdowns and outbreaks cruelling the metropolitan way of life, the imagery of regional Australia has shifted. To the extent that many city types are leaving the capitals – especially Melbourne – in search of sunnier, freer, healthier, friendlier, climes.

I have tagged these urban exiters the VESPAs or Virus Escapees Seeking Provincial Australia. For the VESPAs are right now revving their engines waiting for word from their premiers that they may resume scootering out of the city in search of their very own Bonnie-Doon retreat.

To some extent this is a familiar story for the Australian people. From the Great Depressions of the 1890s and of the 1930s when men went “on the wallaby” in search of work, rural Australia has been regarded as a place of refuge, a romantic idyll, an ennobled place of reprieve from the divine retribution then being (maybe justly) wrought upon the wickedness of the city.

And so it is again.

The regions prayed (to a god or the universe) for deliverance from drought and bushfire and are now reaping the benefits of that sublime act of faith with restored lands, filled dams, lifted spirits and with their faith and belief in the country way of life restored.

But this is only part of the good news story for the regions.

The pandemic has only lightly touched the great Australian interior. The VESPA movement has lifted property values even in remote towns that somehow seem “safe”.

There is nothing more affirming to a people who have for a generation tithed their best and brightest to the cafes and offices of global cities than an influx of city types. And especially millennial VESPAs bringing their kids, a dose of ambition and maybe even a smattering of football and netball playing skills.

But it doesn’t end there. The pandemic has triggered a shift in geopolitical thinking to the extent that Australian businesses are considering the issue of supply chain security.

This translates into more value-added input to Australia’s agribusiness output. The beneficiaries are the manufacturing sheds (and businesses) on the edge of country towns.

But wait there’s more. Perhaps the greatest behavioural shift effected by the pandemic – apart from the greater use of hand sanitiser – is the freedom to work from home.

The Australians will not let this go; it’s too valuable; it feeds directly into our addiction: it delivers a hit of lifestyle euphoria.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of jobs increased between February 2020 and May 2021 in 15 regions mostly flanking our biggest cities.

VESPA workers, millennials mostly, I think, are making their way up the Hume Highway from Melbourne (oddly, the road that leads to Bonnie Doon) perhaps taking their job with them (see map, table).

The biggest double-digit percentage increase in local workers (jobs) over the 15 months to May 2021 are regions that fall within a Goldilocks Zone of the capitals: the Illawarra (mostly Wollongong), Geelong (Melbourne overspill), Toowoomba, the Gold Coast, the Southern Highlands.

Job growth has continued despite the pandemic across the Bowen Basin (eg Mackay) and throughout regional Western Australia outside the wheatbelt and the South West (eg Port Hedland, Karratha). China still needs our gas and iron ore.

But what I like about this reorganisation of life and work in regional Australia is the way that job numbers have risen in everyday communities far from the glamorous rural retreats of Bowral.

Places like Tassie’s north, the Barossa (I hope Nuriootpa is going gangbusters because I like saying Nuriootpa), the Northern Rivers (which is so much more than Byron) and Victoria’s northwest (I understand that VESPAs have been sighted in Nhill).

For decades, perhaps for generations, Australian culture has revered the city but perhaps what we’re going through now is a change in direction where the regions going forward will be better appreciated for the quality of life they offer workers, residents, VESPAs, treechangers and others looking to live in or beyond the Goldilocks Zone.

Bernard Salt is executive director of The Demographics Group; data by data scientist Hari Hara Priya Kannan.