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SYDNEY - If you are a female Australian looking for love, you could do worse than move to Nar Nar Goon, population 600, where single men outnumber women 12 to one.
The Victoria town is one example of what Bernard Salt, an Australian demographer, calls a "man
dam", an oasis of males in a country where women increasingly outnumber men.
Salt has published a book, Man Drought, in which he identifies areas of Australia where men and women of different ages stand the best chance of finding a partner.
His Love Map, or "Dater Base", shows single men are abundant in rural and remote areas, and cities are awash with unattached women.
That situation - a result of women leaving the countryside for better jobs and lifestyles - was highlighted last week, when the Mayor of Mount Isa urged "beauty disadvantaged" women to move to his Queensland mining town, where, he said, they would be assured of finding a man.
Salt decries those remarks as typical of the attitudes that prompt women to move to the cities in the first place, but applauds the basic philosophy.
Faced with gender disparities on the scale of Nar Nar Goon, or Glenden in Queensland, where each single woman has 23 men competing for her affections, Australians need to move house, he believes.
"There are man dams, little isolated reservoirs of men in suburbs across Australia, where, for some odd reason, there are more single men than single women, and you find a lot of them in rural communities," Salt said.
"If you find yourself in the wrong town, why not relocate to the right town?"
The book pinpoints the unattached man-woman ratio in every city, town, and village in Australia, arranged alphabetically.
Statistics show there are nearly 100,000 more women than men in Australia's population of 21 million.
In a similar study using data from Statistics NZ's Census 2006 and comparing it with results from Census 2001, Salt found there was an "undersupply" of Kiwi men aged between 25 and 34.
He said in February last year that, based on the statistics, the area around Waikato University had the largest concentration of eligible young men.
- INDEPENDENT, NZ HERALD STAFF