THE question that comes up in conversation often is – why are young families leaving rural towns?
The answer is multifaceted – lack of services, lack of housing, the list could go on and on.
For my family, we returned after a 15-year stint living in regional cities, because we felt the pull for our children to have more in life than the small suburban backyard. Our ties to the community are strong and the desire to gift our children a connection with the land in which we grew up has endured years of living across other regions of Victoria and Australia.
I am a registered nurse and midwife with a passion for delivering exceptional care to women and families. I have a strong belief that your postcode should not determine the care you can access.
I am privileged to be able to provide care to local families spanning multiple generations. This is why I choose to work in a rural town – I choose to provide care to my community. Let’s be frank – a nurse and midwife with exceptional experience and qualifications could work anywhere across Australia in the current COVID climate, but the difference for my family is we choose to live here. We choose to call Cohuna home.
What we don’t choose is the unending search for a rental property. We have spent the better part of 12 months living between family and a caravan. We are a family of five – myself, my husband and our three children 5, 7, and 9, we have a cat and a pup. This story is not solely ours; this story is the reality of many individuals and families across Australia. The fact that we have a supportive family who allows us to share their space makes us lucky, but it doesn’t always make us happy.
Across social media, we see posts desperately seeking rental accommodation, and these calls for help continually remain unanswered. Rental properties are scarce and in my personal experience pre-approved applicants have been accepted into tenancies before the listing is even publicly available.
I am not saying the problem is with the real estate agents, I am merely stating that the demand far outweighs the supply.
On paper we are the perfect tenants, if such a thing were to exist. My husband and myself are both employed locally full time, our children attend local schools and both pets have amazingly calm dispositions and are properly trained. Our hobbies border on those of generations past – gardening, animal husbandry, preserving and cooking homegrown produce, bicycle rides in the summer evenings through local fire trails – and we both contribute to the community through our job roles.
The sad reality is that after a fruitless 12-month search our family may be forced to move away from this town and land we love and connect with. This means another young family moving away from a rural town. In our case though this also means the loss of a health professional from an already struggling workforce and the loss of a dedicated employee from a local business.
I like to think we don’t want a lot from life, our dream is to build a shipping container home – to most unconventional, but to us a dream. We want a small parcel of land to grow our own produce, raise chickens and establish an orchard.
We want the idyllic small rural lifestyle and quiet tranquillity that comes with it. We want to reduce our mark on this world that we occupy so briefly and leave it a better place for our children. There is nothing that brings us more pleasure as a family than summer evening bike rides or kayaking down our beautiful creek system.
Where will the solution come from? The rental crisis is sweeping across Australia, and for families not already in the home-ownership market the buy-in nowadays is so incredibly difficult and the interest rates are skyrocketing. It really is a seller’s market, and small-town buyers cannot compete.
I will add I need to recruit health professionals, specifically midwives to our town, but when my family has no place to call home, how can I actively pursue people to move here and care for our community, when there is no place for them to live?
Caitlin Fehring,
Cohuna
