In one of Australia's fastest-shrinking regions, towns are fighting to remain

In the Yarriambiack Shire, in Victoria's rural north-west, virtually all of the towns are shrinking.

Brim is a town where history is literally carved into the streets.

Brick memorials honouring clubs, organisations and locals lost to time are set into the footpath where feet once fell far more frequently. 

Some of the last remaining signs of a bygone era.

The primary school.

Opened in 1890 and now demolished, the site is marked by a sign standing among adolescent gum trees growing in the deserted schoolyard.

The football club.

Established two years after the school, the club merged with neighbouring Warracknabeal in 2001.

The oval and netball courts in Brim are still used every now and then, but there's little life left nowadays.

Churches. An infant welfare centre. Sporting clubs. Families. The lifeblood of a town now consigned to etchings in brick.

From 2006 to 2021 Brim lost a quarter of its population, with about 180 people now living in the township.

It's a story repeated across the 15 towns dotted about the Yarriambiack Shire, about 350 kilometres from Melbourne in Victoria's rural north-west.

Virtually all of the towns are shrinking.

Fewer farms, fewer people

Mick Gunn has seen the contraction firsthand.

He spent much of his life in Brim, where he was a stalwart of the Brim Football club both as a player and later president.

But as the town shrunk, the club disappeared.

Brim was one of at least 16 town-based teams that played footy in Yarriambiack over the years. Today, there are just four.

"That's a difficult part," Mick says. "I played all my senior football up there, but as the years went by farms got bigger, less people around the club, and the club struggled for numbers."

"Brim was drawing out of [the nearby town of] Warracknabeal, which had the effect on Warracknabeal as well, with a shortage of players.

"It became an untenable situation 20 years ago and both clubs got together and decided … they would be better off merging."

When the Brim Eagles amalgamated with the Warracknabeal Lions in 2001, Mick settled into a new role at the merged club: collecting entry fees at the gates of Anzac Park — the Warrack Eagles' home ground, about 20km south of Brim.

"Football or netball in country towns is everything," Mick says, "You get together, not just to watch sport, but to have a yarn and talk about, you know, the weather, how the crops are looking and all that sort of thing."

Sarah Spicer, the Eagles' A-grade netball coach and a "three-in-one" farmer, office manager and stay-at-home-mum, agrees.

She's been involved in netball since she was a kid and knows exactly how important it is to the community.

"We're surrounded by small communities and we're all battling for numbers," she says.

"You can't deny that numbers are going a downward trend … and I guess our opportunities can be limited being in the country."

Victoria's fastest shrinking region

Yarriambiack has a rhythm to it.

Even the name — pronounced Yar-EE-am-BEE-ack — dips and dives with a cadence of its own.

Massive road trains have impressed a rhythm into the local roads too, with the tarmac's tell-tale rise and fall referred to as the "Wimmera Wave".

The region itself is a slab of land just a bit smaller than metropolitan Melbourne.

It's farming country. From high above, it's a patchwork of agriculture, with the land divvied up into squares and rectangles of mostly grains and sheep farms.

And since 2001, this land has been home to Victoria's fastest declining population.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics slices the country up into 2,473 "Statistical Areas Level 2" — or SA2s. These are generally the smallest areas used for comparing regions.

Population estimates show the Yarriambiack SA2 was home to 8,114 people in 2001.

Since then, that population has fallen to 6,283, at a loss of 22.57 per cent of its people.

It has been a relentless contraction, with the population dropping every single year — by as little as 0.14 per cent in 2018, and as much as 1.97 per cent in 2021.

The largest town in the region is Warracknabeal, where some locals reckon the population stayed steady at 3,300 for years on end back in the 80s or 90s.

Others argue this is a misconception — claiming it stuck on 3,300 only because nobody remembered to change the population counter under the 'Welcome to Warracknabeal' sign for a few years.

Census statistics show Warracknabeal's population fell 10.13 per cent between the 2001 and 2021 counts — from 2,478 to 2,227.

But Yarriambiack is not an outlier. Across the country, population is declining in regional and remote towns, University of Queensland associate professor of human geography Elin Charles-Edwards says.

Professor Charles-Edwin says this is due to both a natural decrease — "where deaths outnumber births" — and net migration losses — "more people leaving than arriving". 

"Ultimately, the combination of these demographic processes will lead to terminal population decline," Professor Charles-Edwin said.

"In the absence of large-scale structural changes (such as fast rail) or major industry or government investment, the process of decline is almost impossible to stop.

"Many Australian towns have been lost since federation, and this is likely to continue."

'If you don't use it, you'll lose it'

Andrew Ward is the fifth generation of his family to hold a senior position in newspapers in Warracknabeal — where Wimmera Mallee News now prints a handful of local papers. 

Since 1882, the Ward family has chronicled the happenings of Yarriambiack.

"A lot of it comes down to the farming and how that's changed now," Andrew says.

What was once a land of small farms and many families has become one where farmers have been bought out by neighbours and newcomers, again and again.

Now there are fewer, much larger farms and, as a result, fewer families.

"We went up to Hopetoun a few weeks ago. On the wall in the historical centre there, they have a map of all the plots of land, and there is a house every sort of block or two," Andrew says.

"Now there's probably a house every 20 blocks."

This consolidation of farms is also a national trend linked with economies of scale — a larger farm can reduce costs and protect against market volatility.

But Yarriambiack is a farming region, so those shifts have a far greater impact on this population.

As farm consolidation has driven families out, Andrew's father David explains, so too has the remaining population aged.

"A lot of them have gone to the cemetery, of course," he says.

But the demographic shifts have left a vacuum of young people. Yarriambiack's median age at the most recent Census was 52, 14 years above the state and national median of 38.

The number of residents aged 65 or older leapt about 8 per cent over 20 years, while the proportion of people 14 and under shrunk by about the same proportion.

Yarriambiack Mayor Kylie Zanker is adamant that having fewer people certainly hasn't diluted the identity of the region.

She is one of Yarriambiack Shire's six councillors — all of whom were elected unopposed at the last council election.

One quality Cr Zanker possesses — perhaps a mandatory quality for any country mayor — is a limitless enthusiasm about what makes the region remarkable.

"There's so much that's unique. But on an emotional level, I think what's unique is the people," Cr Zanker says.

Cr Zanker recently fell and broke her arm. In the days and weeks that followed, food packages kept arriving at her doorstep. Glancing out the window one day, she discovered neighbours mowing and weeding her garden.

"When the chips are down and someone needs something, everyone pitches in," she says.

"It's almost an unspoken expectation that you look out for each other. And that's what you do.

"I think it's that cliche of if you don't use it, you'll lose it. 

"We put in because that's what we want, that's the community and the world that we want to live in. So, we put into that."

A region taking control of its own future

There were once about 40 pubs across Yarriambiack. Now there are six.

Most are now closed. Many towns have no pub, while the region's population-centre Warracknabeal has gone from four pubs to one.

In 1958, Hopetoun, in Yarriambiack's north, built Victoria's first cooperative hotel — owned entirely by the community.

Steve Mccullough has been pulling beers at the Hopetoun Community Hotel for much of his life. His first job was here, and now he's the publican.

It's a place where the community is keenly aware of preserving a meeting place of their own.

"The locals in this place… have had the perfect opportunity to see what happens to a little town like this if the pub shuts," Steve says.

"You find a lot of locals who, being fully aware of that, having seen it happen, will come into a pub like this … not because they want or need to go to the pub, but because they understand what happens if they don't."

Many who come to the pub don't even grab a drink.

"It's more than that," Steve says. "It's a meeting place for everyone, from the Gardening Club to the Catholic Ladies Auxiliary, Red Cross, Probus."

The pub is a keen example of that maxim, "use it, or lose it".

"They've seen it first-hand with other pubs in other towns. If you had told people five years ago that there'd only be one pub left in Warracknabeal, they'd call you crazy," Steve says.

"But it happens."

'I haven't been able to leave yet'

Back at Anzac Park, on a patch of grass behind the clubrooms, a couple dozen juniors from both Warrack and Stawell kicked off an unofficial footy match shortly after the siren blew on their real match.

More British Bulldog than football, it's a bruising duel.

The kids are laying ferocious bumps, dumping one another to the ground with full-force fend offs, and rocketing into one another with gleeful abandon.

Despite the ferocity, there aren't any tears or injuries — beyond a couple of cases of bruised adolescent pride.

Kyle Cheney remembers playing these games, where all the kids would go "chips-in".

That was before he was pulled away from Warracknabeal as an AFL draftee in 2007 — enjoying a decade-long career.

Kyle returned to the Warrack Eagles in 2022, with a plan to enjoy just one more season at his boyhood club.

"[I] haven't been able to leave yet," he says with a grin, standing barefoot in the gravel by the oval, just before heading in to get changed for today's game. "I've just fallen back in love with the place and the people."

"Our first win — I can't remember who was against, it must have been Horsham — and the rooms after that was as if we'd just won the grand final.

"There's no secrets that country living is tough at times, and to be able to give back to the community with just one single win… you could just see that that was such a relief and there was so much passion in the room.

"There's so many elements that make this town drive the way it does, but, aside from farming, sport is the backbone of it."

Yarriambiack forever

A keen eye can see exactly how things work in Yarriambiack, during an Eagles home game at Anzac Park.

It would see Lauren Clyne shoot the lights out in her Under 17s netball match, before jumping into the line-up for the As. Later in the day, it would see her in a white umpiring kit after officiating a game or two.

It would see Lachie Stewart and Ned Grieve dishing out hot chips and gravy from the chip van, knocking off just in time to warm up for the seniors footy game.

It would see Paul Rowe chipping in wherever he's needed all day long, taking breaks to watch his kids play footy and netball, finishing the day pulling beers in the bar.

It would see sisters Isabella and Keeta Orszulak book-ending their netball game with shifts in the canteen and bar.

It would see a club which mirrors its town, and all of Yarriambiack.

As the region's population decline continues, its people work just as hard to ensure it retains its identity.

That identity is ephemeral, perhaps intangible.

But it continues and evolves too.

In Brim's iconic silo art by Guido van Helten, the first of its kind in Victoria, a multi-generational quartet of male and female farmers stand a couple of storeys tall.

Strong, earthy and resilient and as golden-brown as the surrounding plains heavy with new grain. They are symbols of those who stick around.

Unshrinking.

Credits:

• Story by: Harrison Tippet and Tamara Clark
• Photography: Harrison Tippet, Tamara Clark and Danielle Bonica
• Digital production: Judd Boaz