Greg Ansley: Charming time capsule embodies provincial dilemma

Some time ago my wife, Suzie, was driving back from the coast when her engine lost power, sighed, and died near the town of Braidwood, about an hour out of Canberra.

Braidwood is an exceptionally pretty village to break down in. It seems as timeless as its 19th century shops and houses, so unscathed by the 20th (and now, 21st) century that it is classified by the National Trust.

In the two decades that I have been passing through it on my way to and from the coast, nothing seems to have changed.

The pub at the bottom of the street has been embraced by the same scaffolding for as long as I can remember, and the hole in the bluestone where restoration was apparently under way never grew larger, or smaller. Only in the past year has real progress been apparent.

The notorious Ben Hall and other bushrangers used to ravage the district during the gold rush of the 1850s. It looks much the same now: Mick Jagger filmed Ned Kelly here in 1970 - shooting out in the street below the hotel room where then-girlfriend Marianne Faithful was shooting up heroin - following in the tradition of Robbery Under Arms, the Australia outlaw classic made in the same street 50 years earlier.

Once, when we drove through in the mid-1990s, the bottom half of the main street was covered by a thick layer of dirt for the filming of another icon of Aussie nostalgia, On Our Selection. Were it not for the power lines and advertising, you could have sworn you had gone back in time.

The point of all this is that we had always thought of Braidwood as a time capsule, chugging along under its own gentle momentum.

Not so, Suzie found. The local mechanic who towed her back into town lamented his inability to do anything but take a quick look at her car and recommend a tow truck for the rest of the way home.

This was a one-man business, for all our man wished for the contrary. He had no trouble finding people happy to come to Braidwood to work for him: his problem was getting somewhere for them to live. Finding a place to buy was hard enough: getting a place to rent was impossible.

This is the emerging world for those small country towns fortunate enough to have survived the exodus from bush to city, without evolving into large regional centres. People want to move to them, but run against barriers of housing and infrastructure.

Some of the larger towns, like Orange or Bathurst in New South Wales, have gained new life because they have critical mass sufficient to welcome and absorb a growing number of jaded Sydneysiders attracted by the lifestyle of increasingly sophisticated and vibrant rural cities. And the cost of living is way, way less.

It is not a gallop back to the bush. Demographer Bernard Salt notes that much of inland Australia continues to be depopulated by the magnet of big cities, or sopped up by what he calls the "sponge" cities like Dubbo in NSW, expanding through the cannibalisation of smaller surrounding towns.

But, especially within reach of the big cities, the lure of field and birdsong and grocers you know by their first names is pumping new blood into the fortunate bush.

In South Australia's Barossa Valley, wrapped in vineyards and the elegance of 19th century Selesian culture, the roads wind like north German lanes off the Sturt Highway from Adelaide, about an hour-and-a-half's drive away.

In the past year the Gawler region has had to adjust the boundaries of urban growth, with more than 300 applications for new homes, up 120 per cent on the region's 10-year average. In the township Nuriootpa, demand for homes was increased by plans for two new retirement villages.

While house prices languish in many other small rural centres, entry prices in much of the valley start about A$200,000 ($215,000) and bounce frequently into the A$300,000 to A$400,000 range - which, for those already living in their small piece of paradise, is the dark side of survival.

This takes us back to Braidwood, where the 21st century is finally arriving in the personage of Mark Barrington, a recent migrant from Britain, who fell in love both with the enclave of Georgian architecture nestling in the foothills, and the potential to make a buck.

Barrington bought a large block of land at the southern end of town and intends developing residential blocks sufficient for more than 122 homes.

His problem is that the town is split between those who are appalled at the prospect of losing the unique character of the town, and those who believe that without more people Braidwood is doomed to decline.

At least the town has a choice.