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Trouble in Paradise? GoverningAustralia's multifunctional rurallandscapesNeil Argent aa Division of Geography and Planning , University of New England ,AustraliaPublished online: 01 Jun 2011.

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Trouble in Paradise? Governing Australia’smultifunctional rural landscapes

NEIL ARGENT, Division of Geography and Planning, University of NewEngland, Australia

ABSTRACT Australia’s rural lands are undergoing a process of intensive re-evaluation

whereby previously unthought of, ignored, and excluded interests are gradually but

emphatically asserting themselves. This re-interpretation, which itself reflects a transfor-

mation in established relationships between local communities, the three tiers of government

in Australia and the private and non-governmental sectors, is being expressed in spatially

uneven ways. Neoliberalist governments have ‘rolled out’ new models of so-called locally

led, bottom-up entrepreneurialism and community development as the panacea to regional

inequality. In this context, this paper critically scrutinises the evolving character of

governance in one zone undergoing dramatic change across the spectrum: the high-amenity

rural landscapes of New South Wales North Coast. In particular, it seeks to explore

whether or not the advent of neoliberalist modes of governing that centre on the ‘active

citizen’ and, by extension, the ‘active community’, necessarily produce a genuinely

inclusive politics of community participation. Recent land-use disputes in the Mullum-

bimby region are emblematic of a case of locally led community development in which

deeply concerned local citizens build social capital to form factions in defence of their cause

but which also generate considerable disunity*antipathy, even*between rival factions.

KEY WORDS rural governance; neoliberalism; amenity landscape; community

development; Mullumbimby; Australia.

Introduction

As in many other parts of the industrialised world, Australia’s rural lands are

undergoing a process of intensive re-evaluation whereby, inter alia, previously

unthought of, ignored, and excluded interests are gradually but emphatically

asserting themselves. As has been argued elsewhere, extant patterns of uneven

development are being reconstituted and, in many cases, reinforced by the spatially

selective impacts of population shifts, changing agri-environmental policies and

perturbations within global food and fibre markets (Marsden 1998; Wilson 2001;

Gray & Lawrence 2001; Holmes 2002, 2006; Argent 2002; Cocklin & Dibden

2005). However, this transformation in established relationships between local

communities and the three tiers of government in Australia, together with the

Australian Geographer, Vol. 42, No. 2,

pp. 183�205, June 2011

ISSN 0004-9182 print/ISSN 1465-3311 online/11/020183-23 # 2011 Geographical Society of New South Wales Inc.

DOI: 10.1080/00049182.2011.572824

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private and non-governmental sectors, and what it implies for the management of

local places, will not be the same everywhere (Marsden 1998), given the complexity

and apparent spatial unevenness of the shift from a productivist structured

coherence to a multifunctional agricultural regime (MAR) (Wilson 2001; Holmes

2002, 2006). A new, highly variegated geography of rural development, settlement

and land use is immanent to these processes, producing many different ‘rurals’,

each with varying developmental capacities. Not surprisingly, this evolving mosaic

has been accompanied, to a greater or lesser extent, by shifts in political structures,

agency and representation.

Different regimes of accumulation and modes of regulation at a societal level tend

to beget more or less complementary modes of spatial organisation (Lefebvre 1991;

Harvey 1991), including governance arrangements. To use Peck and Tickell’s

(2002) evocative terms, neoliberalism has both ‘rolled back’ much of the Keynesian

statist approach to regional development practised (periodically, it must be said) by

the nation’s federal and State governments and subsequently ‘rolled out’ a new

model of so-called locally led, bottom-up entrepreneurialism and community

development as the panacea to regional inequality (Beer et al. 2003; Maude 2004;

Herbert-Cheshire 2000; Cheshire 2006; O’Neill & Argent 2005) and under-

development. In this context, this paper critically scrutinises the evolving character

of governance in one zone undergoing dramatic change across the spectrum: the

high-amenity rural landscapes of New South Wales North Coast. In particular, it

seeks to explore whether or not the advent of neoliberalist modes of governing that

centre on the ‘active citizen’ and, by extension, the ‘active community’, necessarily

produce a genuinely inclusive politics of community participation.

The changing and varied governance of Australia’s multifunctional rural

regions

The preconditions and principal causal factors underlying the shift from the formal

and centralised administration and regulation of populations and territories better

understood as ‘government’ to the decentred and decentralised mode of political

management known as ‘governance’ have been more than adequately laid out in the

literature and do not require further repetition here (see Giddens 1998; Stoker

1997). In relation to the rural areas of advanced industrialised nations this shift can

be accounted for within the heuristic framework of the productivist-multifunctional

countryside transition (also known as the post-productivist transition (PPT))

(Wilson 2001, 2008; Holmes 2006; Argent 2002; Evans et al. 2003). Three key

processes are widely accepted as being important here: (1) the increasing public

regulation of farm production techniques in order to prevent and/or control

environmental and welfare outcomes; (2) the withdrawal of longstanding support to

the sector; and (3) in-migration into select rural areas that has introduced a new

‘class’ of rural residents who have actively challenged the hegemony of farmers over

the directions of local social and economic development (Curry et al. 2001;

Goodwin 1998; Marsden & Murdoch 1998; Woods 1998, 2003; Murdoch &

Abrams 1998; Tonts & Greive 2002; Smailes 2002).

Beyond the local scale, non-government organisations (NGOs) representing a

wide variety of sectional interests have similarly risen to prominence in rural affairs,

with catchment management authorities, for example, now firmly embedded in the

corporatist management of agriculture’s environmental impacts (Higgins & Lockie

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2002; Lockie et al. 2006). Supra-national single-issue interest groups such as

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have joined the expanding

number of organisations scrutinising farming in Australia and have, in combina-

tion, contested agriculture’s ‘licence to operate’ (Barr 2009). In a very real sense,

then, rural industries, land uses and communities are now firmly bound up within

an expanding and overlapping mesh of networks governing their activities from a

variety of scales, from the local through to the global (Marsden 1998; Edwards et al.

2001).

As has also been highlighted, though, this growing intrusion of non-local and

non-agricultural voices into the governance of rural affairs has not proceeded evenly

across space (see Argent 2002; Holmes 2006; Marsden 1998). This is hardly

surprising given that different physical environments beget locally appropriate

primary production systems, and the fact that each rural community faces its own

set of political issues (not to mention varying political systems in different

countries) (Marsden 1998). It is critical, therefore, to incorporate this varying

picture into our accounts so as to develop a deeper understanding of the rise of

governance and its influences at local and other scales. A recent reformulation of

the PPT provides an apt framework for this task.

The notion of the post-productivist transition*in many respects rural geogra-

phy’s equivalent to Fordism/post-Fordism*is now well known and has been quite

thoroughly critiqued. Within the antipodes*the regulatory antithesis of the EU

context in which the PPT notion was originally conceived (Ilbery & Bowler 1998;

Dibden et al. 2009)*the general concept, if not its dichotomous structure, has

been applied to Australian conditions by Holmes (2002, 2006). Drawing upon

Wilson’s (2001) notion of the MAR, Holmes (2006) formulated his multifunctional

rural transition (MRT) to be applied to Australian rural space. Within the MRT,

multifunctionality ‘. . . is extended to encompass all modes of broadscale rural

resource use and is not solely an attribute of agricultural use’ (Holmes 2006, p. 143;

see also Dibden et al. 2009).

For Holmes (2006), the MRT is powered by the three forces of: (1) changing

societal values; (2) agricultural overcapacity; and (3) the increased economic, social

and political significance of alternative amenity-oriented rural land uses. Changing

societal values refers to the tendency within many affluent societies for a growing

proportion of the populace to be concerned*and actively so*with the sustainable

and ethical management of natural resources. This concern also extends into the

realm of safe food production. Agricultural overcapacity relates to the now well-

known fact that 80 per cent of farm profit at full equity in Australia is attributable to

approximately 10 per cent of Australian farmers (Barr 2000, 2005). Underlying this

statistic, of course, is the large-scale exodus of farming families during the 1980s

and 1990s and subsequent amalgamations of farms to create larger, more

economically efficient units, together with the growth of small-scale, hobby-type

operations associated with counter-urbanisation currents (Mendham & Curtis

2009). With farm productivity at such high levels in this country, there is also little a

priori reason for governments to regulate to keep all existing farmland, even high-

quality agricultural land, under agriculture. From the demand side of the equation,

this opens up the potential for new social groups and classes to find their expression

in rural land (Barr 2002).

The rise of alternative, amenity-oriented rural land uses overlaps strongly with the

previous point. In strategically located regions, rural land is increasingly valued for

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its perceived aesthetic, capital gain and status characteristics rather than solely for

its productive capacities. Hence, rugged coastal ranges are sought after for home

sites overlooking the ocean and coastal valleys; small, historic towns and old dairy

farms are desired for their heritage ambience and close proximity to large regional

centres. Rural settlement and land use are being driven increasingly by consump-

tion values and not solely by production.

One of the attractions of the MRT concept is its sensitivity to geographical scale.

Via the dialectical relationship between actors at differing scales (e.g. farms,

NGOs, tourism operators and government agencies), Holmes identifies seven

modes of rural occupance (see Table 1). These describe the immanent qualities

identifiable within Australia’s major rural landscape types, and give some useful

clues as to the different governance issues and challenges that each is likely to face.

A perhaps neglected dimension of the MRT is the increasing diversity and

complexity of political activity and representation in rural areas. This point is

implicit in Holmes’ (2006) identification of protection (e.g. of Aboriginal lands and

environmentally significant parcels of territory) as one of the three forces driving

rural settlement and land use today. As Woods (2003) observes in relation to rural

Britain, the corporatist alliance struck between the various farm peak bodies and

the nation-state from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, and which helped entrench the

agricultural sector’s dominance over virtually all facets of rural social, economic

and environmental policy (Lowe et al. 1993), has been progressively undercut by a

growing plethora of well-organised, media-savvy, special (often single) interest

groups with comparatively flat organisational structures. Unlike their more

monolithic counterparts in the farm lobby, these groups are adept at coalescing

with other movements around high-profile campaigns (e.g. anti-fox-hunting

protests).

Woods (2003) identifies five key aspects to the rise and growing prominence of

the new rural political movements in Britain: (1) the undermining of the corporatist

relationships between the nation-state and the farm and rural lobbies by the

infiltration of neoliberalism as an ideology of public-sector management; (2) the

changing socio-economic and demographic composition of rural communities

through counter-urbanisation and related regional migration streams; (3) the

increased centrality of ‘rural amenity’ and its preservation as an organising theme

for local political activity; (4) the inability of older established political movements

to represent the increasingly diverse views of their respective communities of

interest; and (5) the seeming inability of central governments to manage ‘new’ rural

political issues (e.g. food quality, GMOs, environmental quality, amenity preserva-

tion, humane treatment of animals) with the degree of predictability attained in the

era of ‘agricultural exceptionalism’.

There is little common ground between many of the new and more traditional

rural political groupings, other than a loose coherence around disparate and

contested senses of the ‘ideal rural’ (Little 2001). In fact, Woods (2003) identifies

three ideal-typical and distinct ‘ruralisms’ deployed by the new rural political

movements. First, a ‘reactive ruralism’ associated with more conservative groupings

in defence of so-called traditional and, presumably, threatened rural ‘ways of life’.

Second, more radical, ‘grassroots’ movements enact a ‘progressive ruralism’ that is

resistant to corporate, industrialised agriculture. Third and finally, ‘aspirational

ruralism’ relates to the NIMBYism (Not-In-My-BackYard) of in-migrants and

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TABLE 1. Holmes’ (2006) seven modes of rural occupance

Mode of occupance General incidence Driving forces Core attributes

Productivist Prime agricultural lands inhigh rainfall and coastal areas;inland ‘heartland’ areas; majorirrigation zones; primerangeland regions

Local economic and social dependence onagriculture; farm viability dependent oncompetitiveness; limited opportunity fordiversification; increased concern regardingenvironmental, economic and socialsustainability

Land values tied to agricultural income;‘agricultural treadmill’; prosperous butunstable farm incomes; ongoingpopulation and urban decline except inirrigation areas, near major regionalcentres

Rural amenity Peri-metropolitan fringes;prime tourist destinations;town fringes

Time�space compression; advancesin ICT; discretionary residential location;increasing metropolitan�rural differentials inhousing and living costs; incentives for rapidcapital accumulation via land conversion anddevelopment

New ‘geographies of value’: real estatemarkets driven by consumption ratherthan production; farming as residual orincidental activity; environmental valuestied to lifestyle and real estate values

Small farm or pluriactive Widely distributed inaccessible and attractive highrainfall areas, esp. in former‘closer settlement’ projectsand sub-tropical dairying zone

Agriculture’s continuing role as significantactivity; ongoing loss of farm viability;household viability maintained viapluriactivity; amenity premium precludesfarm build-up; non-farm land uses barred byplanning and dominance of part-time farming

Complex, volatile land markets; diverseeconomic opportunities for farmhouseholds, influenced by personalpreferences, lifecourse stage and skills;increasing semi-retirement by farmers;sporadic maintenance of productionlandscape; ongoing challenge of findingbalance between farm and non-farmactivities for farmers

Peri-metropolitan More or less flexible zonespatially, depending uponaverage commuting times, butsurrounding major cities

Tied to metropolitan demand for ruralresources, such as waste disposal, aggregate,water supply; intensive horticulture andfactory farming; rural residential lifestyles,tourism; service corridors

High accessibility; high land values forall uses; multiple land markets, withconsiderable speculative component;substantial infrastructural investmentbut rapid depreciation; substantialpotential for local conflict; prominenceof local land and land-use regulation

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TABLE 1 (Continued )

Mode of occupance General incidence Driving forces Core attributes

Marginalised agricultural/pastoral

Marginal lands of lowproductive potential

Agricultural overcapacity; combination ofeconomic and environmental stress leading tountreated land degradation; ecosystem servicepotential; protection values unrealised due tocomplex of financial, political and culturalbarriers

Remoteness; incapacity to attractcapital, labour or management; largelyreliant on survival of existinglandowners

Conservation Largely on land of lowproduction values across allland types

Agriculture’s retreat from sub-marginal lands;growing recognition of environmental stressand ecosystem damage; increased publicdemand for pristine, high-biodiversitylandscapes

Lands are of low market value forproduction or consumption; lack ofprivate or public infrastructure; manylands with significant wilderness values

Indigenous Dominantly represented inremotest lands; Indigenousownership of reserve andCrown lands recognised onlyrecently; some land transfersrecently following recognitionof common-law native title

Political and judicial responses to internal andinternational pressures for recognition ofIndigenous rights in land; growing realisationof limited potential of marginal remote lands

Dominantly held under inalienablenon-transferable freehold title bytraditional owners; multifunctionality ofland uses but precedence given tocultural values for Indigenous owners;complex land management issues

Source: adapted from Holmes (2006).

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more established rural residents alike in defence of the idyllic features of ‘their’ rural

land- and townscapes. For Woods (2003, p. 312):

The sum effect of these changes is a shift from ‘rural politics’ to a ‘politics

of the rural’. Whilst the former is defined as politics located in rural space,

or relating to rural issues, the latter is defined by the centrality of the

meaning and regulation of rurality itself as the primary focus of conflict

and debate.

For the remainder of this paper, I investigate the extent to which the hypothesised

trajectories of Australia’s high-amenity rural regions, as defined by Holmes (2006),

are accompanied by a matching set of political issues and approaches to governance,

or whether there is more continuity with older approaches to political management

than a shift to ‘new’ rural governance. In a manner not dissimilar to ‘regional

political ecology’ (Walker 2003), I also draw upon Woods’ notion of the ‘politics of

the rural’ to explore in greater detail the various agencies that insinuate themselves,

or are drawn, into these political contests. The empirical focus of the paper is the

community of Mullumbimby, incorporating the township of the same name and its

rural hinterlands. Data were collected for an ARC Discovery-Project that was

concerned with investigating perceptions of population density within south-east

Australian rural communities. Further methodological details are available in Argent

(2008).

FIGURE 1. New South Wales study area, showing location of Mullumbimby socialcatchment.

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Rural governance in the Australian high-amenity zone: Mullumbimby

The rural community of Mullumbimby is located in the Byron Shire within the

broader region of the Far North Coast of New South Wales (see Figure 1). This local

government area is best known for the internationally recognised resort town of

Byron Bay, notwithstanding its humble beginnings as a port and abattoir town even

though the Shire Chambers are located in Mullumbimby, approximately 6 km inland

as the crow flies. The North Coast, in which Byron Shire is located, is one of the key

‘sea change’ zones identified by Burnley and Murphy (2004). Like many other ‘sea

change’ localities, and members of Holmes’ small farm or pluriactive rural occupance

mode, Mullumbimby’s economic base and land uses were, until relatively recently,

dominated by farming and forestry. With logging of the once abundant and much

prized red cedar and other native rainforest timbers petering out during the 1950s,

mixed farming (predominantly small-scale dairying) became the dominant land use

(Mills n.d.). However, as Holmes (2006) argues, declining pasture productivity

coupled with the UK’s accession to the European Common Market in 1973 helped

end the butterfat economy of this region, and simultaneously created an avenue for

other interests to find their expression in the landscape.

Rapid in-migration, driven largely by counter-urbanisation flows of alternative

lifestylers (Hugo & Bell 1998; Kijas 2002; Burnley & Murphy 2004), including

attendees of the inaugural Aquarius Festival held in nearby Nimbin in 1973

(Hannan 2002), has rapidly and radically changed the demographic and socio-

economic composition of the many small, formerly agriculture-dependent towns

and communities of the region. Table 2 shows that agriculture lost its position as

the single main industry of employment in the early 1980s to become a relatively

minor though nonetheless important source of employment 20 years later. By

contrast, the tertiary service industry sector has absorbed more of the Shire’s labour

market. This shift is at least partly attributable to the district’s, indeed, the region’s,

expanding reputation as a tourist destination, particularly for surfers, music fans

and the environmentally conscious (Gibson & Connell 2003). In this sense, a

productivist, natural-resource-based mode of capitalist development has been

increasingly supplanted by a competing economic pathway but one which relies

no less than its predecessor on the valorisation of the local landscape (see Reed &

Gill 1997; Tonts & Greive 2002; Walker 2003).

The growth of the tourism sector is, of course, a key stimulus to the rural land

conversion process central to the transition from a more or less productivist to an

amenity mode of rural occupance (Holmes 2006; Table 1). As noted by Essex and

Brown (1997, p. 276), ‘. . . tourism can represent the initial stage in the resettlement

process whereby satisfied tourists may ultimately return as part of a future wave of

permanent working or retiree migrants’. Between 1983 and 1993, visitor overnight

stays in Byron Shire nearly doubled to 1.5 million (Essex & Brown 1997, p. 276).

Most of these stays were attributable to domestic tourists, yet between 150 000 and

200 000 international visitors also holidayed in the Far North Coast annually

during the 1990s (Gibson & Connell 2003, p. 170). Despite recent attempts to add

more resort-style facilities to the region, the Byron district’s (incorporating

Mullumbimby) status as a generally more informal accommodation provider is

evidenced by the 55 000 backpackers who also visit annually (Gibson & Connell

2003, p. 170).

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TABLE 2. Trends in employment and agriculture, Mullumbimby, 1981�2006

% Shire emp. inag. and mining

1981

Shire emp. in ag.and mining

2006

% Shire emp. intertiary services

1981

% Shire emp. intertiary services

2006

FarmNos.1981

FarmNos.2006

% change1981�2006

Avge. farmsize (ha)

1981

Avge. farmsize (ha)

2006

% change1981�2006

Mullumbimby 18.1 7.6 40.4 52.8 512 342 �33.2 58.5 54.8 �6.3

Source: ABS (1981, 1989, 2007, 2008).

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TABLE 3. Demographic trends in Mullumbimby, 1981�2006

Shirepopn.1981

Shirepopn.2006

% change1981�2006

Townpopn.1981

Townpopn.2006

% change1981�2006

Ruralpopn.1981

Ruralpopn.2006

% change1981�2006

Ruraldensity1981

Ruraldensity2006

% change1981�2006

Mullumbimby 15 426 28 767 86.5 2234 3129 40.1 4479 10 346 131 367.8 796.3 116.5

Source: ABS (1989, 2007).

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As shown in Table 3, the total population of Byron Shire almost doubled between

1981 and 2006 after decades of slow growth and occasional periods of decline. This

table also reveals, though, that the highest rates of population growth have occurred

outside of town boundaries as in-migrants have bought up cheap ex-dairy farmland

and ‘bush blocks’ in this scenically attractive region. The small and stable average

farm size of farms in the Mullumbimby hinterlands is instructive. It underscores

the generally small scale of farming operations, even after the initial impacts on the

local dairy sector of the British accession to the European Common Market, the

inroads made into domestic butter consumption by margarine, and the introduc-

tion of new guidelines in the 1970s requiring dairy farms to invest in on-farm bulk

refrigeration facilities (Fisher 2004). At around 130 acres (52.6 ha) these blocks

would have been an ideal size for cashed-up ex-urban migrants*either as sole

occupants or, as was popular from the mid-1970s onwards, as a communal group*to buy up for their own pursuits. The fact that average farm size has changed little

over the ensuing two decades*an era in which the mean size of rural properties in

Australia’s inland broadacre zones has increased substantially (see Table 2)*also

attests to the ongoing demand for small rural properties in the district. As predicted

by Holmes for the small farm or pluriactive mode of rural occupance, the strength

of this external, consumption-oriented, demand for land has also hampered the

capacities of local farmers to expand operations in order to attain greater

economies of scale. The lifestyle focus of this demand is also evidenced in the

annual average of 400 development applications lodged with Byron Shire between

1981 and 1993 (Essex & Brown 1997, p. 271). For Holmes (2006, p. 156), ‘[t]he

low-income production-oriented drudgery of the ‘‘productivist’’ dairy-farming era

has been replaced by an alternative low-income ‘‘post-productivist’’ lifestyle,

involving a heterogeneous mix of locals, retirees, welfare recipients and alternative

lifestylers’.

The first waves of new, young, ex-urban and relatively poor settlers to arrive in

the Mullumbimby hinterlands preceded the 1973 Aquarius Festival (Fisher 2002)

but were quickly followed by others who selectively colonised the ranges between

Nimbin and Mullumbimby. These groups established numerous ‘intentional

communities’, many of which were influenced by Eastern philosophy and/or

religion, including the Tuntable Falls community (Hannan 2002; Fisher 2002).

This counter-cultural, land-based movement coincided with the apogee of political

protest against the Vietnam War, second-wave feminism and growing environ-

mental awareness, together with more locally specific factors, such as structural

changes within the local farm sector, which created openings for these new interests

to find their expression in the land. The political complexion of the Shire’s

representatives has undergone gradual but substantial change as ‘green’ and anti-

mainstream development community members have grown in numbers to rival

councillors representing more traditional interests. The socio-economic and

cultural transformation of the many communities of the NSW North Coast can

also be seen in the declining fortunes of that great stalwart of Australian

conservative rural politics, the National Party (formerly the Country Party),

in representing the region within the federal parliament. The party had held the

seat of Richmond, incorporating the coastal and rural hinterland communities of

the Far North Coast, including Byron Bay and Mullumbimby, for most of the

twentieth century. However, from 1990 the seat changed hands twice, falling to the

Australian Labor Party (ALP) in 1990, only to fall to the National Party again in

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1996, before the ALP regained the seat in a narrow victory in 2004, with the

substantial assistance of Australian Greens’ preferences. Many of the booths in

Byron Bay, Mullumbimby and the nearby ranges upon which communes became

established produced only weak support for the National at this election (Australian

Electoral Commission 2005). In 2004 the Shire elected to power a ‘green’ Mayor;

one of the first in the State.

The new settlers’ experimentation with the established tenure and land planning

system was sanctioned by the State institutions of land apportionment and

management. Conventional rural planning legislation prevents the subdivision of

rural land officially zoned ‘agricultural’ into blocks smaller than 40 ha (100 acres)

for residential development, and equally proscribes the building of more than one

dwelling on blocks of this size or smaller. The 1980 State Environmental Planning

Policy 15 (SEPP 15) for Multiple Occupancy of Rural Land permitted the

collective ownership and management of land by low-income people, brought

together by a shared affinity for ecologically sustainable settlement and communal

living. SEPP 15 was repealed in 1994 but eventually reinstated, its central

objectives and numbering preserved, but with an amended title, as SEPP 15*Rural Land Sharing Communities.

As might be expected in such an increasingly socially and economically

heterogeneous region, land-use conflict and, therefore, its regulation, is to the

fore in community affairs. It is in this milieu, and the more immediate context of

rapid and diverse population growth and settlement expansion since the 1970s, that

the Byron Shire sought to regulate the alienation, use and management of its rural

lands.

‘The Byron Rural Settlement Strategy’ (1998) was an extremely ambitious

document. Not only did it aim to identify the maximum number of rural lots

available for the various categories of development (e.g. rural residential, multiple

occupancy); simultaneously it sought to preserve high-quality farmland, potentially

valuable quarry and mineral exploration sites, the natural environment and the

Shire’s ‘. . . unique image, diverse lifestyle and local character’ (Byron Shire Council

(BSC) 1998, p. 17). The Strategy was also envisioned as being harmonious with

the Council’s Local Agenda 21 principles and plans*themselves a direct response

to the Agenda 21 charter emanating from the UN Rio Earth Summit held in 1992.

But it was not just the global and local scales that were important in forming

the Strategy, for it also needed to complement State planning policies and

guidelines concerning rural settlement and regional and coastal development

(BSC 1998, p. 15).

The Strategy focused on ending the environmentally, socially and economically

unsustainable consequences of the rather haphazard residential development on

rural land that had proceeded from the rash of commune-style settlements

from the early 1970s. Rather than simply seek to outlaw multiple occupancy or

land-sharing tenures, the Strategy instead aimed to constrain community title

settlements and multiple occupancy communities to suitable land parcels in

the major towns, villages and farm lands (see Figure 2), and establish

robust performance criteria for their location and development (BSC 1998).

Under the guiding influence of the Shire’s then strategic planner, David

Kanaley*himself an authority on these and similar settlement types (see Kanaley

2000)*the document identified a total potential supply of 669 dwellings for

smallholdings, community title settlement communities and multiple occupancy

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communities over the ensuing decade, with a possible further 125 dwellings in

the various small towns and villages, subject to further detailed site analysis (BSC

1998, p. 20).

FIGURE 2. Proposed settlement scheme, Byron Rural Settlement Strategy.Source: Byron Shire Council (1998).

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The Byron Rural Settlement Strategy received widespread approval for its

apparent success in enshrining ecologically sustainable development (ESD)

principles in an area of planning and in a region in which ‘aspirational ruralism’

FIGURE 3. Proposed release areas for community titles, Byron Rural Settlement Strategy.Source: Byron Shire Council (1998).

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(Woods 2003) had gained ascendancy over established farming interests and the

more utopian strain of new settlers. The 1998 Strategy, in its own words:

. . . has not set out to simply project past demand for rural settlement

forward and then to find sufficient rural land (supply) to meet that demand

without due regard to ecological, social and economic considerations. That

is without due regard to the basic underlying capacity of land to absorb

population growth while still maintaining our community’s quality of life

and its assets, sustainable land uses and economic activities and ecological

resources to pass on to the next generation. (BSC 1998, p. 4)

As Figure 3 shows, a substantial portion of land to the immediate north-west of the

village of Main Arm, itself several kilometres north-west of Mullumbimby, was

identified for release for rural landsharing (approx. eight properties) or community

title (approx. 135 dwellings; within the village also) (BSC 1998, p. 35). Main Arm

is a small village with few services, save a local bushfire brigade station and local

shop/cafe. It lies in picturesque country at the headwaters of the Brunswick River,

and mid-way between Mullumbimby to the east and the more rugged country of

the Koonyum Ranges and Nightcap National Park to the west. Following the final

approval and gazetting of the Byron Shire Rural Settlement Strategy, local

environmental research and design firm ReGenesis Enterprises purchased two

Main Arm properties*one of 10 ha virtually within the village itself, and the other

a 45 ha rural block adjoining the first property. These were acquired for the explicit

purpose of building an ‘eco-hamlet’ on the village block and a lower density

clustered housing development on the community title portion on the other

(ReGenesis 2004). Combined, the two developments would yield an extra 25

dwellings*split approximately equally between the village and rural properties*and double local dwelling densities. This proposal, and local responses to it,

provides some instructive examples of the reconfigured governance of this

increasingly amenity-focused region. It is via a consideration of what might be

called ‘The Battle for Main Arm’ that we can see the complexity and profundity of

rural change refracted through the lens of Holmes’ MRT framework, and Woods’

conceptualisation of rural politics and protest.

According to ReGenesis Enterprises, the two projects are more or less genuine

applications of its (admittedly self-professed) credo of ecologically and socially

balanced economic development. In its own words (ReGenesis 2005), ‘[w]e hold a

vision for integrating ecological sustainable development of living environments

that create or re-create our connection to the land and to nature’. The company’s

goal for the Main Arm settlement is to:

. . . create a traditional clustered hamlet community centred on a village

green and open to the larger community of Main Arm. This community

will be surrounded by an extensive revegetated rainforest commons

replete with walking trails and ‘edible’ landscape . . . The vision also

includes the gradual evolution of an economic hub that can house offices

or workshops . . . and become a point of confluence for the larger

community and new settlers. The idea is to eliminate the need to

commute elsewhere for those who might choose to live and work on site

in the general area. (ReGenesis 2005, p. 1)

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Not content with this prospective rejigging of the local space economy and

settlement pattern, the innovative and ecologically focused tone of the proposal

incorporates state-of-the-art architecture and urban design principles that accent-

uate energy conservation and efficiency and visual harmony with the landscape (see

Plate 1). ‘What is envisioned is a community nestled into a purpose-designed forest

garden . . .’ (ReGenesis 2004, p. 1).

Given ReGenesis’s ethos and background, one may have expected the established

residents of Main Arm to welcome the proposed eco-hamlet development. If the

ReGenesis representatives imagined this scenario, they would have been in for a

rude shock. The eco-hamlet proposal has been resisted vehemently from its public

announcement via a combination of more or less overt practices and strategies.

Anyone visiting the village is made well aware of the strong local resident antipathy

towards the project (see Plate 2). Perhaps ironically, Main Arm Residents’

Association (MARA) has found itself at loggerheads with the now Green-

dominated Byron Shire Council which, not surprisingly, sees the development as

an important application of its Rural Settlement Strategy. Speaking in support of

the eco-hamlet, the current mayor enunciated the Shire’s new vision for its rural

lands: ‘rather than carving up rural areas for massive sub division to build houses

PLATE 1. Selected images of ReGenesis residential development, Main Arm.Source: http://www.regenesis.com.au/ecovillage.html

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for the newly arrived, Byron’s hills will be full of happy farmers, living on

community title acreages and making a living producing organic produce from the

soil’ (ReGenesis 2005, p. 4). Such has been the strength of the local campaign

against ReGenesis and its village development that the firm has been forced into

an extensive, carefully planned and conciliatorily worded public relations campaign

in order to placate opinion in Main Arm, issuing three lengthy newsletters and

project updates to the community since 2004. Despite these efforts, MARA took

their campaign against ReGenesis to the State Minister for Planning, Mr Frank

Sartor, in June 2007 (see Plate 3). This move was ultimately unsuccessful, with the

minister approving the full village development on 24 June 2007 (ABC News online

2007).

It would be easy to categorise MARA’s struggle against ReGenesis as simply

overt and unbridled NIMBYism. However, it also reflects broader concerns

regarding multiple occupancy/rural land-sharing ventures in the Shire. One of the

more contentious ‘intentional communities’ in the Mullumbimby hinterlands is

Mevlana, located on the outskirts of Mullumbimby. The community is a diaspora

of the Antelope (Oregon, USA) community of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also

known as Osho) which disbanded in the late 1980s amidst charges of financial

corruption, bigamy and immigration violations (Brouwer 2001). The majority of

the residents of Mevlana, also known as Sannyasins, are refugees from Antelope

(Brouwer 2001, p. 31). The community occupies 160 ha of land overlooking Byron

Bay, with 22 residential dwellings grouped into clusters, a meditation hall,

PLATE 2. Main Arm Village protests against ReGenesis eco-village development.

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restaurant and bar, all separated by swathes of parkland. The community grounds

and facilities are host to numerous celebrations and workshops annually. The

periodical influx of large numbers of participants, many from overseas, has been an

irritant to neighbours and other residents since Mevlana’s inception (Byron Shire

Echo 2004). The generally affluent character of Mevlana’s residents has been a

further source of contention, with accusations circulating within the broader

community and in the local media that they are more ardent adherents to the

worship of Mammon than their nominated spiritual god, Osho (Brouwer 2001;

Byron Shire Echo 2004). ReGenesis Enterprises has been forced to explicitly deny

that its Main Arm Village concept is nothing more than a front for a Sannyassin

community (ReGenesis 2005).

The contestation over the residential development of Main Arm is just one

instance of a wider uneasy transition in occupance occurring in the Mullumbimby

region; a transition from a small-scale dairying, beef cattle grazing and banana-

growing farm sector to a social and economic landscape oriented around

pluriactivity and the consumption of amenity (Reed & Gill 1997; Walker 2003).

In this process local land and housing prices have been bid up to the extent that few

of the young people who moved to the region during the 1970s to establish new

communal settlements would now be able afford to live in the area. In the words of

one local resident:

The local population has been affected dramatically with the cost of living

increases on house prices and rents due to the influx of a new, often

monied, population. There has been an increase in overseas investment in

properties in this area also. As I work as a volunteer in emergency relief, I

see how profoundly this has affected the ability of low income people to be

able to survive decently in this area. Also there has been an enormous

increase in homeless people in the area*there is no infrastructure (e.g.

Salvation Army hostels) to cope with this. I have noticed a dramatic and

noticeable increase in the ‘have-a-lots’ compared to the ‘don’t-have-

PLATE 3. Main Arm residents’ protest against ReGenesis eco-village development goes tothe press. Source: Creagh (2007, p. 6).

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muches’ . . . I know of many people, some with children, who have had to

leave the area*taking their children out of the school and away from

friends as they could not afford to live in the area anymore. (Respondent

#6405-1)

Here, Woods’ (2003) new ‘politics of the rural’ allows us to discern conflict at the

level of the perceived and lived: between a genuinely progressive ruralism (also see

Halfacree 2007) and a largely self-interested ‘aspirational or reactive ruralism’. In

this troubled context, any notion of Mullumbimby’s rural lands moving towards a

‘radical rurality’ of an alternative economic land ethic is being frustrated by the

mutual hostility and suspicion of the many different factions existing within the

broader Mullumbimby community.

The Mullumbimby district has, therefore, been increasingly made over as a

consumptionist space in which land is progressively valued for its aesthetic and

amenity attributes. In many areas of the Byron Shire, the use values of rural land,

expressed in ‘intentional communities’ and other communal ventures, are

substantial, and certainly exceed the potential exchange values to be had from

farming. This, together with the actual exchange values attaching to local land for

little more than rural residential use, is ensuring the effective marginalisation of

productive agriculture. In addition, though, it is creating a demographically and

socio-economically unique local population in which conflict and contestation over

rural land use and other forms of development become increasingly prominent in a

form of ‘defensive localism’ (Walker 2003; Woods 2003) that seeks to preserve the

sense of amenity captured by in-migrants over the past 20 years.

Conclusion

County planning processes, in particular, represent a key arena in which

competing social groups, reflecting quite diverse economic and cultural

interests, compete over the future of the West . . . Such seemingly mundane

matters as drafting county General Plans and decision on minimum parcel

sizes represent not just bureaucratic technicalities but struggles over compet-

ing imaginaries of the Western landscape and contested local rights, claims

and moral economies. Banal tasks of planning are infused with the politics of

power and culture. (Walker 2003, p. 20)

Rural regions across the Western developed world are undergoing profound

changes, emanating from numerous sources, both endogenous and exogenous. As

this paper has argued, an appreciation of the geography of these changes and their

downstream impacts is critical to a deeper understanding of the social, economic,

cultural and ecological trajectories that each locality, region and zone is borne

upon. This understanding is itself vital for the creation of realistic developmental

goals that relate directly to local needs, diverse as they may be. As Holmes’ (2006)

MRT framework emphasises, each broad zone faces quite different pressures and

opportunities. In the once small-scale, productivist-oriented zone of the NSW

North Coast, where demand within the British Empire for food and fibre staples

helped create a regional butterfat economy, a massive transformation has occurred.

Productivist agriculture has increasingly been forced to the margins by a largely

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ex-urban population in search of rural amenity (Essex & Brown 1997; Walker 2003;

Argent et al. 2007); a search that now forms the crux of substantial local political

conflict. However, this is not a dispute that can be neatly divided into the old, well-

worn battleline scenarios of, say, business-as-usual agriculture vs conservation. The

transformation of local formal political institutions at all three scales of Australia’s

federal polity via the impact of migration on the changing values of the constituency

underscores this point. Instead, and at a finer scale of resolution, we can see the

politics of rural amenity, and the governance of rural space, being played out

between MARA*a group that would have once espoused a discourse of

‘progressive ruralism’ but which now appears on the margins between a ‘reactive

ruralist’ and ‘aspirational ruralist’ vision*the Byron Shire Council and ReGenesis.

These battles over the ‘ideal rural’ also challenge established approaches to land use

planning, necessarily drawing in other scales, such as State Governments.

Community development in the contemporary era is increasingly shrouded in the

discourse of the ‘active citizen’ and locally led, or bottom-up, community

development in which deeply concerned local citizens are only too happy to build

social capital to form factions in defence of their cause. However, what we see in the

case of the ‘battle over Main Arm’ is a situation in which contestation over local

land uses has come to symbolise a broader, but still local, conflict over the whole

economic, social and cultural trajectory of the community and region. In this sense,

the Mullumbimby case study considered in this paper stands in contrast to the

developmental issues confronting remoter communities located in, for example,

Holmes’ (2006) marginalised agricultural/pastoral mode of occupance, and the

various tools and techniques proposed by neoliberal State and federal governments

for their remediaton (see Herbert-Cheshire 2000; Cheshire 2006).

One may justifiably question the value of a single case study of this kind in

shedding light on the ‘new’ governance of rural Australia. Certainly, contrasts and

comparisons involving case studies from other modes of occupance would have

indeed been instructive yet lay beyond the word limits of a single paper for this

special issue. Nonetheless, given the common historical geographies of many

coastal regions along the eastern seaboard of Australia, the politics of rural amenity

are likely to be played out in similar fashion, and with similar impacts on the local

and State planning systems, as in Mullumbimby. The challenge will be to manage

the growing pains associated with amenity-led migration and development in such

a way that economic, demographic, social and cultural heterogeneity is preserved

rather than driven out by the exclusivist politics of the ‘ideal rural’.

Acknowledgements

The research upon which this paper is based was funded by an Australian Research

Council Discovery-Project Grant (DP 0452602) 2004�2005. The author also

gratefully acknowledges the detailed and constructive comments of three anony-

mous referees on an earlier draft of this paper.

Correspondence: Neil Argent, Division of Geography and Planning, University of

New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia.

E-mail: nargent@une.edu.au

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01 1

9 N

ovem

ber

2014