Armidale - Refuge/Prospect, Armidale, by Virginia Wong-See architecture@altitude. Winner of the Award for Small Project Architecture. Photo by Brett Boardman.This year's 2018 NSW Country Architecture Awards featured architecture and architects from across the broader New England.
Joint Council Organisations in Regional
NSW
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Joint
organisation
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Council
areas forming joint organisation
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Hunter Joint Organisation
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Cessnock, Dungog,
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Gunnedah, Gwydir, Liverpool Plains,
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Armidale, Glen Innes Severn, Inverell, Uralla, Moree Plains, Tenterfield, Narrabri.
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Northern Rivers Joint Organisation
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Ballina, Byron, Kyogle, Lismore,
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Mid
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Port Macquarie-Hastings, Kempsey, Bellingen.
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Other
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Illawarra Shoalhaven Joint Organisation
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Kiama, Shellharbour, Shoalhaven,
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Orana Joint Organisation
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Cobar, Gilgandra, Mid-Western, Narromine,
Warrumbungle.
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Riverina and
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Albury, Berrigan,
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Riverina Joint Organisation
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Bland, Coolamon, Cootamundra-Gundagai, Greater Hume,
Junee, Lockhart, Temora. |
The decline in the use of the words New England was not the only semantic change affecting the North. Words are important because they affect and reflect changing perceptions. In 1950, the word country was commonly used to describe NSW outside Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. While the use of this term divided Newcastle from the rest of New England, a divide that at least reflected cultural and political differences, country was at least a broad, commonly understood, geographic term.
By the 1970s, country was losing favour, in part because of the growth of urban centres whose residents did not identify with the term. In its place came the word regional. This fragmented in turn. By 2000, there was something of a crazy patchwork quilt of words – country, regional, rural, remote, coastal – that overlapped and were used in different combinations. This growing confusion in terms reflected in part the increasing use of ARIA.
ARIA, the Accessibility/Remoteness Index of Australia, was developed by the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care and the National Key Centre for Social Applications of GIS. ARIA measures remoteness based on the physical road distance between a settlement and four classes of service centre . In 1999 a further revision of ARIA called ARIA+ was developed that incorporated more information on the location of service centres.
While ARIA was a simple geographic descriptor intended to measure remoteness from services, its widespread use by the Commonwealth Government for statistical purposes and to guide service delivery affected the use of words. In 1950, the Australian states still retained a substantial degree of independence. By 2000, the Australian Government was involved in every aspect of policy once the preserve of the states. To the officials in Canberra seeking mechanisms to allow for national uniformity in service delivery while also taking geography into account, the ARIA classifications seemed a useful device; very remote, remote, outer regional, inner regional and major city were now firmly added to the semantic mix.
The difficulty from a New England perspective lay in the way that these various terms cut across the area’s natural geography, further fragmenting the sense of New England or Northern identity, while creating problems for integrated service delivery based on geography. We can see this if we look at New England’s Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay Aboriginal language group who occupied the Western Slopes and Plains. Their traditional territory was variously classified from very remote to inner regional, a classification that affected the services provided. People with a common culture sharing common problems received different benefits depending on just where they lived. Social Change in Australia’s New England 1950-2000, paper delivered in the University of New England Humanities seminar series, 8 April 2011.
Mary Edwards, The Orchid 1935, Hinton Collection, New England regional Art Museum.
