- Title
- Bricks and beaches: the suburbanisation of the Central Coast of New South Wales 1945-2001
- Creator
- Beer, Christopher
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2024
- Description
- Masters Research - Master of Philosophy (MPhil)
- Description
- During the second half of the twentieth century the Central Coast of New South Wales became part of the so-called ‘cream brick frontier’ of suburban expansion across Australia. At the 1947 census the region was rural, known as a leisure destination and for citrus growing, with a population of less than 30,000 people. By the end of the century, its nearly 300,000 residents lived within a new built environment of low-density housing, shopping centres, and business parks, tied together by a network of arterial roads. This thesis analyses the Central Coast’s suburbanisation via three lenses. The first lens is the distinct regional economy of suburbanisation that emerged and its currents of demand and supply. The region’s real estate market offered certain opportunities for households that were taken up by, among others, retirees and those willing to engage in long-distance commuting to Sydney. A wide range of businesses, the public sector, and civil society organisations both enabled such choices and otherwise responded to them though building infrastructure and tens of thousands of new dwellings. The second lens is consideration of the environmental tensions that emerged around urban development. As elsewhere along Australia’s coast, seachange migration saw conflicts across a wide range of issues as well as governmental attempts to manage these through the emergent institutions of the environmental state. In the Central Coast’s case these were overlaid by state government planning seeking to direct substantial population growth to the region and the local embedding of the sustainability movement as part of wider compromises. The third lens is the region’s federal and state electoral politics arising from its suburbanisation. Over time, the Central Coast gained its own electorates separate from Sydney and the Hunter regional and an identity as being distinctly marginal. This marginality was associated with its migration driven demographics and saw active competition across national, state, and local issues, as well as via differentiation by individual elected representatives and their opponents. Overall, the region embodied electoral tensions and reconfigurations seen across Australia but also highlights how these played out differently from place to place.
- Subject
- Central Coast of New South Wales; Australian urban history; Australian environmental politics; Australian electoral politics; Australian urban economics; Twentieth century Australian history
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1512398
- Identifier
- uon:56612
- Rights
- Copyright 2024 Christopher Beer
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 827 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |