No abstract

Examining a database of 2,856 festivals in Australia and survey results from 480 festival organizers, we consider how nonmetropolitan cultural festivals provide constraints as well as opportunities for economic planners. Cultural festivals are ubiquitous, impressively diverse, and strongly connected to local communities through employment, volunteerism, and participation. Despite cultural festivals being mostly small-scale, economically modest affairs, geared around community goals, the regional proliferation of cultural festivals produces enormous direct and indirect economic benefits. Amidst debates over cultural and political issues (such as identity, exclusion, and elitism), links between cultural festivals and economic development planning are explored.

Tourism is often seen as a panacea for the ills of declining rural communities. The paper argues that there is an element of blind optimism in this view although a shift of focus from production to consumption within advanced economies like Australia's will undoubtedly provide opportunities for the development of the leisure, recreation and tourism industries, both in metropolitan areas and in rural areas. The paper suggests that an increased focus on lifestyle will come to characterise Australia. Some rural communities will be able to capitalise on this, both for temporary visitors and for in-migration, but many will not. The well established concepts of threshold and range, when coupled with the idea of specialisation, will have a big influence on which places 'win' and which 'lose' in any lifestyle-led and leisure-orientated society. 'Place marketing' will become increasingly important for towns competing against each other for 'the leisure and lifestyle dollar'.

Much of what has been written on the topic of Australian rural youth migration trends and processes has often proceeded from data‐free, or data‐poor grounds. In this context, this paper analyses recent trends in youth (15 to 24 years of age) migration for a temporally‐consistent set of Statistical Divisions (SDs) in inland rural Australia, and for local government areas within the Northern Tablelands and Slopes and Ranges of northern New South Wales and the Western Australian Central Wheatbelt. The paper finds that rates of youth loss from rural regions have increased over the past twenty years. Yet the patterns, processes, causes and impacts of rural youth migration are distributed in a spatially‐uneven fashion. Some remote areas are receiving net migration gains while booming ‘sea change’ coastal regions have experienced heavy losses. While the ‘flight to the bright city lights’ syndrome is evident, relatively high proportions of young people in the Northern SD of NSW move within their immediate region. Nevertheless, some common understandings concerning youth mobility were also confirmed. Gender differentials in migration propensity between women and men are evident even at quite local scales. Young people are also more likely to search out capital cities than the rest of the population. Most inland areas still continue to experience heavy losses of local youth. A more precise understanding of rural youth migration trends is an important stepping stone in the establishment of a reinvigorated research effort into young rural people's perspectives of their changing life chances in their home communities.

The notion of sponge cities has attracted considerable attention in the media, in the policy arena, and in academia. It rests on the notion that some regional centres 'soak up' population and business from a 'pool' of surrounding areas, thereby appearing as 'oases' of growth in areas of population decline. Specifically, the notion of sponge cities rests on two premises and a deduction: some large towns and provincial cities are growing; surroundings areas are losing population; therefore, the growth results from the relocation of people from outlying farms and smaller towns to the nearby growing centres. Despite its popularity, the notion has largely gone untested. Investigation of migration trends in Dubbo and Tamworth (New South Wales, Australia), frequently cited as sponge cities, over the period 1986Á2001 shows that the reality is much more complex than the simple metaphor suggests. The contribution made by the 'pool' to the growth of the regional 'sponges' is relatively minor. This calls into question the value of the notion of a sponge city*and the use of metaphors in social science more generally.