The book examines the extent to which the sustained population growth of Australia's heartland
regional centres has come at the expense of demographic decline in their own hinterlands and
ultimately of their entire regions. It presents a longitudinal study over the period
1947-2011 of the extensive functional regions centred on six rapidly growing non-metropolitan
cities in south-eastern Australia emphasising rapid change since 1981. The selected cities are
dominantly service centres in either inland or remote coastal agricultural settings. The book
shows how intensified age-specific migration and structural ageing arising from macro-economic
reforms in the 1980s fundamentally changed the economic and demographic landscapes of the case
study regions. It traces the demographic consequences of the change from a relative balance
between central city minor urban centres and dispersed rural population within each functional
region in 1947 to one of extreme central city dominance by 2011 and examines the long-term
implications of these changes for regional policy. The book constitutes the first in-depth
longitudinal study over the entire post-WWII period of a varied group of Australian regional
cities and their hinterlands defined in terms of functional regions. It employs a novel set of
indices which combine numerical and visual expression to measure the structural ageing process.
