An Ecological Analysis of Demographic Variation in Rural New South Wales

Despite an outpouring of ecological work by geographers and others over the past fifteen years, interest in the ecologies of rural areas has been low and firm generalizations about, for example, variations in social and demographic characteristics within rural regions have been slow to emerge. The objective of this paper is to discern the extent to which variations in demographic structures and processes within rural areas are patterned according to the nature of the agricultural economy. Some significant associations between age-sex structure and measures of agricultural intensity and type of farming are discerned for the New South Wales case, but the patterning is complex and owes much to differentiating forces not examined here.