VID Colloquium
Settlements at the Edge: Modelling demographic change in the small towns of remote Australia
Dean Carson, Flinders University, School of Medicine, Australia
Date: Tue, 20 September 2011 , Time: 10:00 - 11:00
Australia's two most sparsely populated jurisdictions are South Australia and the Northern Territory. While covering 30% of the continental landmass, they are home to just 8% of the Australian population. Outside of the capital cities of each jurisdiction, there are an estimated 1000 population centres, with the largest having a population of around 30 000 people, and more than two thirds having populations of less than 200 people. Governments face substantial challenges in planning human services in these areas not just because of the small size of population centres, but because of the distance between them. Vigorous public debates about whether and how to sustain human habitation in such a context have been only poorly informed by demographic research, largely because of the technical challenges involved in modelling population change in such small areas. This presentation describes those challenges and the results of a new research collaboration between government and universities which is attempting to develop new ways to understand and even predict population change.
About the presenter
Dean Carson is the Director of Research and Professor of Rural and Remote Research with the Flinders University School of Medicine clinical schools in South Australia and the Northern Territory of Australia. He is also a Professorial Research Fellow at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. He has nearly twenty years' experience researching the human geography of rural and remote Australia. Dean's particular focus is on mobility and why people do and don't spend time in remote places. He is a regular visitor to Austria, being an adjunct professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Krems in the schools of Tourism Management and Health Management. He has previously worked with Dr Bilal Barakat from the Vienna Institute of Demography on the book project Demography at the Edge where they examined the role the education system plays in shaping the demography of sparsely populated areas in Australia, Canada, Alaska and Europe's Arctic North. He is currently in Austria to examine techniques for modelling demographic change in very small populations.