Bruce Pennay - Making A City In The Country
Bruce Pennay
Making A City In The Country:
The Albury-Wodonga National Growth Project 1973-2003
Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005
Pp. xi + 387 Paper. ISBN 0 86840 944 8 $49.95
Twenty years resident in Albury-Wodonga, the regional historian Bruce Pennay has produced an excellent commissioned history for the now-doomed Development Corporation, chronicling the project for a new inland city straddling the Murray. Announced in January 1973, the Albury-Wodonga project was not the brainchild of the new Labor government, but it did reflect Gough Whitlam’s belief that there was ‘room for another Canberra’ between Sydney and Melbourne (p. 8), while its location astride the New South Wales-Victoria border made it an attractive laboratory for a centralising regime. The prime minister’s decided to raise the target to 300,000 people, and the proposed city acquired the aura of ‘Whitlamabad’. Aiming big would justify investment in major infrastructure projects. One of the downsides of an official history is that it concentrates on what was achieved (complete with pictures of managerial types in suits) more than on the areas missed. Some of the shortcomings of the project, such as the failure to build a general hospital or the lack of a major airport, form minor themes in Pennay’s text. The early years were bound to combine a maximum of controversy with a minimum of delivery. Locals disliked outside intervention, and the thought of another Canberra. Wodonga, already the Cinderella community, did not wish to become a second Queanbeyan. 1977 brought a double blow. The Borrie Report revised estimates for Australia’s population downwards by several millions, casting doubt on arguments for a new metropolis. Then came the Dismissal. Officially the Fraser government supported the project, but it axed two agencies earmarked for decentralisation, and pegged its financial contribution to matching State funds. But the two State governments were only mildly enthusiastic. Neither wanted to locate their own services on their border, where half the hinterland was beyond their jurisdiction. Hence, Wagga Wagga and Wangaratta grew just as fast. In 1977, the population target was cut back to 150,000, and in 1989 the Development Corporation was earmarked for closure. It will survive until about 2009 simply because the Commonwealth government wants to avoid a fire sale of assets. It is to Pennay’s credit that he maintains the pace of the narrative throughout the prolonged post-1977 endgame.
Albury-Wodonga suffered from two fundamental weaknesses. One was the planning equivalent of ‘if you’re so clever, why aren’t you rich?’ As an OECD observer tactfully put it in 1973, ‘why, if it is a natural growth point, it has not developed much more rapidly’? (p. 93) Initially it seemed encouraging that pet-food manufacturer Uncle Bens had located in Wodonga in 1967 and quickly expanded. But two decades on, Uncle Bens was still the largest private employer. The second was the collapse of long-term political commitment. The twin cities were heavily dependent upon public sector activities (Wodonga relied on an army base) and were vulnerable to policy changes: Albury had lost railway jobs when the gauges were harmonised in 1962, and the local economy had suffered from the closure of the Bonegilla migrant reception centre in 1971. The proposed university, a central feature of the original scheme, was a casualty of Borrie: nobody in the late 1970s foresaw the massive expansion in higher education numbers yet to come. Instead, Albury acquired a campus of the Wagga-based Riverina CAE, now Charles Sturt University, while Wodonga became an outreach frontier of La Trobe. A single university as a research centre and economic driver would have been immensely preferable. Meanwhile, the State border survives to complicate everything from dog licences to daylight saving.
I have two reservations about this well-produced book. One is that it lacks precise population figures, which are the basic yardstick for the project. Albury and Wodonga had a joint population of about 38,000 in 1973, although some promoters talked of regional total of 55,000. By 2001, numbers had nudged above 100,000, and Thurgoona, the major Albury suburban initiative, contained just 4,000 people. Compared with naturally fast-growing centres such as Coffs Harbour, this is modest, and incidentally underlines the limited success of campaigns to persuade tourists to stay a little longer in Albury-Wodonga. The other defect is the lack of clear and specific mapping. Maps and plans appear as illustrations, but usually as contemporary artefacts. Still, this is a valuable account of a story that needs to be told.