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¹ The word ‘seachange’ (or words sea change) have become important in the Australian vernacular, underscored by the ABC series of the same name. It has come to represent people wanting to escape the city to pursue Arcadian, nostalgic, or alternative lifestyles.

² A survey conducted in 1999.
Regional Development Council (1999), Living in the Regions: The Wheatbelt Report, Department of Commerce and Trade, Perth, shows that regional Western Australia is highly mobile and that only 16% of all respondents had grown up in the area where they now lived. This is consistently supported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and particularly for non-metropolitan residents.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004), Regional Population Growth, Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, Cat. No. 3218.0.55.001.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2003), Australian Social Trends: Family and Community – Living Arrangements: Farming Families, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (2001), Population by Age and Sex, Western Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, Cat. 3235.5.
Australian Bureau of Statistics (1996), Census of Population and Housing, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, Cat. 2015.5. The trends show that more than half of non-metropolitan residents had been in the current region for 10 years or less and a third for 5 years or less. The survey suggested that about a third of people who move to the regions come from Perth and a quarter from overseas or interstate. The remainder move from within their current region or from another Western Australian region. This survey has not been replicated and more up-to-date information in the same format is not available.

³ Up until the 1996 census, women were not formally counted as rural workers. Ironically, just before some Australian women became among the first in the world to get the vote more than 100 years ago, the government decided to officially ‘hide’ the fact that women laboured in agriculture, fearful that this would send the wrong message ‘home’ to England about the industry’s viability in Australia.
Lake (1987) The Limits of Hope, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. When formulating census categories, government officials decided not to classify farmer’s wives as engaged in agriculture because of the shame it would bring on a progressive developing country like Australia to admit that ‘women were in the habit of working in the fields as they are in some of the older countries of the world’ (Lake 1987, p. 179). For these reasons it has been difficult to properly ascertain the number of women working on farm enterprises.