Moving to the coast : internal migration and place contestation in Northern New South Wales
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2002
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The study of place was often divided between the spatial interests of geographers and
local historians intent on constructing heroic lineages. In the period of accelerated
globalization however, discrete discourses on time and space are no longer tenable.
Histories of place engage the transdisciplinary approach of recent scholarship in
understanding the complexities and fluidity of the world in which we live. Places are
constructed out of the enmeshing of the material, social and cultural. The reasons why
people migrate both within and to particular places are also critical to the ongoing
perceptions of that place, and the dynamics by which local communities operate within
global networks.
This thesis is an historical study of a recent sewage ocean outfall dispute
between residents and the local council at Emerald Beach, in the Coffs Harbour region
of New South Wales' Mid-North Coast. Alongside documentary sources, it uses oral
testimony to examine the factors that contributed to people's understanding of their
place, and the processes that resulted in the public contestation over that place. It argues
that the positions taken in the sewage dispute cannot simply be perceived as a function
of individual residents' responses within a bounded local context, but were a result of
the complex processes of internal migration to the region since colonisation, and
especially since the 1970s, that brought competing visions for the same place.
In exploring the historical traces of the dispute, the thesis examines the first
wave of non-Aboriginal migration to the coastal hinterland before turning attention to
the second intensive wave of migration in the postwar period. Attention shifted away
from the hinterland to the coast, and the chapters examine competing uses for the coast
as local born residents, tourists and the influx of new settlers from the 1970s brought
diverse dreams for the warm North Coast. In particular, the sewage conflict that grew
into the direct-action protests at Emerald Beach provides clear insights into the flows of
migration and settlement that led to the particular mix of people who fought for their
divergent conceptions of place as critical to their lifestyle and residency.
Without examining historical representations of places and events, conflict
situations such as the sewage dispute at Emerald Beach cannot be fully illuminated. By
demonstrating the force of internal migration on perceptions of, and contestation within
place, this thesis provides one framework from which other places might be
investigated.
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