Rural and/or remote places

Rural places are areas where most land is used for primary production or conservation rather than continuous building: cropping and grazing country, irrigated horticulture, forestry, mining leases, national parks and conservation areas, together with the small towns and regional centres that serve them. Remote places are defined mainly by distance and access rather than by land use.

In Australia the Australian Bureau of Statistics groups places into five Remoteness Areas (Major Cities, Inner Regional, Outer Regional, Remote and Very Remote) using road distance from a place to service centres of different sizes. A wheat farm in an Inner Regional area is rural but not remote; an opal-mining town in the far north of South Australia is both rural and very remote.

Describing location precisely is the first geographical skill. Absolute location uses latitude and longitude or a grid reference. Relative location describes position in relation to other features, for example ‘about 850 km by road north-west of Adelaide on the Stuart Highway’. A strong description combines both and then adds site (the physical land the place occupies) and situation (its links to surrounding places, transport routes and resources).

Characteristics can be grouped as natural, built, economic and social. Natural characteristics include climate, landforms, soils, water and vegetation. Built characteristics include roads, airstrips, pipelines, housing and service buildings. Economic characteristics describe how people earn income, such as grazing, mining or tourism. Social characteristics include population size and age structure, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population, and the services available.

Many rural and remote places share a small, dispersed population, dependence on one or two industries and long travel times to hospitals, universities and specialist services.

Satellite images and aerial photographs help identify these characteristics: geometric green patches beside a river usually indicate irrigation, pale circular spoil heaps indicate small-scale mining, and long straight lines are often roads, fences or pipelines. Scale also changes the story. A town that looks isolated on a state map may be the centre of a large local network of pastoral stations, Aboriginal communities and tourist routes.