Phil Taylor was backpacking around the world when he found a coastal retreat in Byron Bay.
“For a kid from rural New Zealand, this place was a dream come true.”
Eventually, he settled in the surf town and took over a local institution – the Byron Bay General Store.
“Byron had this lovely undercurrent of being a solid working-class town in the sense that it had this charm about the place – people were always coming and going, there was all this entertainment and live music and new people,” he said.
Mr Taylor spent years enjoying the waves, which were considered a secret to the locals, and it was not until two decades later that he began to feel the change.
The 1970s atmosphere that had attracted his attention was slowly fading, while the characters — who had brought color and life to the city, according to Mr. Taylor — were slowly leaving.
Instead, Hollywood’s biggest stars — including Zac Efron, who briefly dated a waitress at his store — began frequenting his store.
Experts had warned of the impact of urban modernization on small regional cities before the pandemic, but the global crisis Internal migration figures have been on the rise.
Many Australians have been selling their capital city homes and moving to the countryside in an effort to cut their expenses, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that regional Australia has maintained this trend since the peak of the pandemic.
In the last financial year alone, regional Australia saw a growth of 117,300 people, or 1.4 per cent.
While many councils have welcomed the increase in population, it has come at a cost for locals like Mr Taylor.
Mr. Taylor said he has watched housing prices begin to rise, the cost of doing business rise, and the vibrant city he knew change irreparably.
“The process has been slow and gradual, but it has certainly accelerated as the Covid pandemic has spread,” Mr Taylor said.
“This was the final nail in the coffin of the end of an era.”
“These people were moving here, and the hardest thing was you couldn’t blame them,” he said.
“The problem was that they had an enormous amount of financial power, and of course, they were simply crushing the local population; all the working class people.
“They were the ones who really brought the energy and the atmosphere.”
Mr Taylor said when he accepted that Byron Bay was a shadow of the community he once loved, he decided it was time to leave.
“I sold my business and got out of there completely, because the reason I lived in that city and loved it was because it was an oasis where I thought the sense of community and the beach would last forever.
“I saw this change, and I realized I didn’t want to be a part of this.
“Change sucks, and I don’t want to be that guy who complains about how good things were in the past, so I left.”
He moved back to the coast over the next few years, towards the country’s more expensive capital.
However, rather than being forced to pay more to move closer to Sydney, Mr Taylor found his living expenses – including moving to rented accommodation – were significantly reduced.
The illusion of affordability
Dr Tony Matthews of Griffith University said it was no longer true that living regionally was the economic choice it once was.
“You may have what is considered a relatively affordable real estate market in a remote regional location, and then that location becomes popular for one reason or another,” he said.
“This drives up property prices and therefore rents, and suddenly all the people who could previously afford to live there can no longer afford to live there.”
The number of people moving from cities to regional Australia has hit a 12-month high, sending property prices soaring across the country, a study by the Regional Australia Institute (RAI) has found.
“Regional living continues to dominate the market, with around 24.2 percent more people moving from cities to regions than moving in the other direction, in Q3 2024,” the report said.
“This compares to an average prevalence of 21.9 percent in the two years before Covid emerged.”
Besides housing, the cost of living in regional Australia is also high with an increase in natural disasters leading to higher insurance And Shipping costs, Which in turn led to forcing Grocery price In parts of the country.
While the figures continue to show significant movement to the regions, it is still unknown how many regional Australians have been displaced in recent years due to the ongoing influx of internal migration.
According to CoreLogic, the average rental price across Australia is $544 per week.
In North Western Australia, which includes both tourist towns and mining areas, the average rental price is $881 per week in the town of Broome.
On the East Coast, rents on the Mornington Peninsula are around $675, and $770 on the Sunshine Coast.
In Australia’s leading wine-producing region, Margaret River, the price is around $634.
In Taylor’s old town of Byron Bay, rent can go up to $1,200 a week.
The average house price peaks in the Sunshine Coast, at $1,044,279, followed by the Illawarra, Richmond and Tweed, Southern Highlands and Shoalhaven.
The average regional home value in Australia is $627,872.
Dr Matthews, an urban planner who predicted urban gentrification in parts of the Sunshine Coast during the height of the pandemic, said it was clear that parts of the Sunshine Coast, regional Western Australia and the northern NSW coast had changed in recent years.
He said an increasingly mobile workforce meant capital income was making its way to regional city centres and raising prices for long-term residents.
Dr Matthews said this revealed the failure of some councils to adapt to the upward trend in internal migration.
“This partly gives people a reason to reconsider regional life as well,” he added.
Proactive planning for urban renewal – filling service gaps in health and education for a larger population – will be essential to protecting the fabric of communities in the future, Dr Matthews said.
While some councils have been proactive in tackling population growth, rising living costs and urban beautification, Dr Matthews said it was important for regional Australia to remain vigilant.
“I think urban renewal is one of those things that can be good or bad, depending on your point of view,” he said.
“You can understand that there will be an improvement in the quality of places and [services].
“but [gentrification] “This is also an inevitable result of more people moving to other areas.”
Mr Taylor said that while he was pleased with his choice, he remained optimistic that parts of Australia affected by the changes it had seen due to the pandemic would return to normal.
“We saw that when we got hit sideways before. [NSW] “The floods…were brutal,” he said.
“But what it did was restore the original society to normal.
“I witnessed and experienced a sense of community that I thought was lost in that city – but it showed me that people were still there and they were all feeling the same way I was.
“You know, they just needed a reason to do something good again.
“It made me realize how lucky I am to be a part of this community.”
