- Title
- Making the Mid North Coast: a migration report
- Creator
- McIntyre, Julie
- Publisher
- Arts NSW
- Resource Type
- report
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- In a poem about the pilgrimage of holiday-makers to Australia’s Mid North Coast in the 1970s, Les Murray described the flow of cars heading north as a “Long Narrow City”. A luminous thread of headlights that wound its way like a “big stunning snake...looped through the hills, burning all night there”. This long thread of lights formed as thousands of families emptied out of the state’s cities on Friday afternoons, bound for the summer ease of the coastal-countryside of Forster and Taree, Port Macquarie and tiny seaside villages near Kempsey. They were drawn by the promise of “fumes of fun hanging above ferns”, barbecue smoke “steaming into the midday air ... a heat shimmer of sauces”, and evenings when “the stars of the holiday step out all over the sky”. Compared with the urban and industrial landscapes where the holiday-makers spent their working weeks, the Holiday Coast at the eastern edge of the adjoining valleys of the Hastings, Manning and Macleay Rivers was an untouched, tranquil wonderland of thong-footed freedom; of sand, zinc cream and mozzie spray. From the 1980s, the seasonal, internal migration of sun and fun seekers to the Mid North Coast inspired many holiday-makers from the Long Narrow City to move permanently to favourite summer sites for the long vacation of retirement. In the same era, the region’s pristine beaches, slow-paced hinterland townships and large tracts of protected bushland attracted younger anti-city dwellers to relocate to the seaside or to hobby farms in the countryside. These sea-changers and tree-changers were searching for an alternative to urban living or a more affordable way of life. For the Mid North Coast, this post-1970s counter-urbanisation has been a change as dramatic as the gold rushes of the 1850s in central western New South Wales. If you knew the place before the change, say long-time residents and visitors in the Mid North Coast, you can really see the transformation.
- Subject
- migration; Mid North Coast (New South Wales); sea-change
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1357356
- Identifier
- uon:31914
- Language
- eng
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