Albury 'better than the beach'

It was once quaintly known as a seaside resort. Now it’s like so much of Sydney. Too popular, a squeeze to get on to hot summer sand or into slick water-view cafes.

It was where Josh Broad most wanted to be. He was a boy from way out in West Wyalong who worked hard and smart enough to get well ahead.

He was an investment banker, doing all right, renting a place near the beach with his Albury-born and raised wife, Gemma.

Lifestyle box ticked. But circle a few houses in the real estate lift-out to buy? Unless you wanted to go way out of town, past the mid-summer hot box of Sydney’s south-west, it was in vain.

Rotting seaweed supposedly gave Coogee its name, drawn from the Aboriginal word “koojah”.

A rough translation is “smelly place”. Now all you can smell is the money, loads of it, in a city that recently broke through the million-dollar median house price mark.

Three years ago, the Broads gave up on a dream to keep living somewhere even remotely near their Coogee home of seven years.

They moved to Albury. It had got to the point, Mr Broad says, where the city “just got too hard”.

“We couldn’t see us buying a property where we wanted to buy, and we were getting to the stage where we wanted to start a family,” he says.

“We thought that Albury would be the best place to do that. We loved our upbringing in the country and wanted the same thing for our kids.”

The couple and their two-year-old boy, Beau, are now happily living a life even better than they could have expected, in Albury’s Forrest Hill. Mr Broad first worked with Mars Petcare and is now back in banking, with Westpac. 

They are so enamoured by their move that they gladly accepted Albury Council’s invitation to be ambassadors for the Evocities project.

Evocities was launched back in 2010. It involved Albury, Armidale, Bathurst, Dubbo, Orange, Tamworth and Wagga councils uniting to combat a lack of awareness about regional cities among Sydney residents.

The program doesn’t come cheap, with each city’s contribution to rise from $60,000 a year to $75,000 from 2018-19. Albury gets some relief through a $25,000 payment to do the group’s secretarial work.

But is it working? Three years ago then Albury councillor Paul Wareham doubted the campaign’s punch, questioning how Evocities’ marketing could be directly linked to the number of people re-settling in Albury.

That last point is harder to pin down. The Evocities group has stuck to a principle that individual town breakdowns don’t get released.

The best it can say is that 2375 families moved to the seven rural cities up until June this year. Another 1089 are tagged as being set to head bush.

One of those is Susan Owens. Like the Broads, she and husband Steve – successful, career-minded people – love almost everything the big city dishes up.

What had been growing less palatable is the congestion. Traffic gridlock avoided only by leaving their West Pennant Hills home at 6am to make an appointment within half an hour.

“It can then take me more than an hour to get back home at night because the traffic is so bad,” she says.

“You try to go to the local shopping centre, which is Castle Towers, and you can’t get a parking spot after 10am on a Saturday.”

Soon that will be no more. The house, “ in a very nice part of Sydney”, is about to go on the market. And the real estate madness will no doubt help, the price locally jumping 20 per cent in quick time.

By late October they will have settled on their new home in Glenroy, ready to expand their business, play a lot of golf and walk their black labrador on the tracks snaking along beside the Murray River.

They don’t have kids, so there will be no limit to enjoying the region.

“We’re both professionals and have our own company, which involves providing pressure management to businesses and organisational change management,” Mrs Owens says.

“It’s like when businesses put in new IT systems. Living in Sydney has been very beneficial for us in that line of work. But we know that Albury is a growth city. You’ve got some very major employers down there and also a lot of small businesses.

“From what we’ve seen of the digital strategy of the council it looks like a place that’s really going ahead.”

And they would not have had the confidence, she says, to bring their business to Albury if it wasn’t for Evocities.

Crucial to this was getting the type of demographic statistics that could provide an insight into the Border’s business mix.

Her own parents – who made a similar move, both in home and business, from Sydney to Mount Beauty – had their doubts.

“The first thing my parents said was ‘are you going to be able to get work, and is your business going to be able to operate in Albury?.’ From everything I’ve seen so far I’m quite confident that will be the case.”

Kevin Mack makes clear he reckons it’s better in Albury. That, he says, is because it’s a lifestyle choice, with the added bonus of being “a cultural, hip town with a lot to offer”.Top of the list is the soon-to-open art museum after an almost $11 million spend.

As Albury mayor it’s perhaps a given he backs Evocities, though the roll call of attractions gives that some credence.

“It’s cheaper to do everything here – education, living, food,” he says.

“You’re on the major river of Australia and you have access to the mountains and Lake Hume. Cities can’t offer that without the congestion and the stress.”

It all makes sense to him, so much so that it leaves him scratching his head. But not at what regional cities such as Albury can do.

It’s the clouded vision of politics mired in a re-election calendar centred on pouring untold billions of dollars into a sea of suburbs, on a never-ending path of sucking in thousands upon thousands of new residents.

“The federal and state governments should be working harder and offering greater incentives for people to be able to decentralise,” Cr Mack says

“They need to provide adequate infrastructure in regional Australia where it will be cheaper to do so.”

Instead, Cr Mack says governments take the “ridiculous” course of not tackling issues such as an improved freight network, or serious action on a very fast train.

“That’s what they should be investing in, not more roads in Melbourne and Sydney.” Evocities then, he says, is about presenting such alternatives.

“Until people get fed up with what they’ve got, they really don’t open their eyes wide enough. But when people come here, they’re exposed to the lifestyle, they’re exposed to the alternatives available.

“They realise it’s not the backwater town they might have thought it was.”

The what-ifs don’t come into it for Josh Broad. He and Gemma miss the Coogee cafes, a beach close by, “but not too much else”.

“I’ve definitely got no regrets, Albury’s our home now,” he says.

“It’s the best decision I think we’ve ever made .We don’t want for anything, everything is at our doorstep.”