Smart village networking for the future

Born of the gold rush in the 19th century, its wide central boulevard remains lined by gracious buildings of weatherboard and brick. The lettering above the porch on the Mechanics' Institute stands proud, the rotunda in the middle of Main Street is neat as a pin, and the window of one of the shops still bears a hand-painted advertisement for Bushells Coffee.

For all its appeal, however, the settlement, with a population of just over 1000, is gradually succumbing to the harsh economic realities of rural Australia. Several shopfronts on the main strip are up for lease; the heritage-listed Criterion Hotel closed its doors a while back; the little railway station, nestled next to a long-disused line, has been converted into a public toilet.

In today's trade-driven world, being pretty isn't enough. To survive, you also need to be smart. And Rushworth, about 150 kilometres north of Melbourne, in an odd twist of fate, is set to become the smartest village in the state.

Given its population, the village should fall beneath the threshold for priority connection to the National Broadband Network, so it came as something of a surprise to locals to discover in May that Rushworth is an NBN Co target for full fibre-optic connection. Given luck and a fair wind, the Shire of Campaspe town should be hyper-connected by 2016 – well ahead of larger settlements in the shire, including the largest, the administrative centre of Echuca.

Guided by an unusually switched-on local government team, Rushworth looks set to become the exemplar of the 21st century rural outpost – quaint and charming on the surface but thrumming with high-speed, high-tech activity beneath.

Campaspe councillor Paul Jarman foresees an immediate benefit for residents, once the network is installed, in terms of the ways health and education services are delivered.

"In health, there will be online consulting, diagnosis and monitoring, so people don't have to plan day trips just to see a specialist," he says. "And the local school principal is genuinely excited by the fact that he will have an early opportunity to become part of education change."

Indeed he is. Brad Moyle, head of the Rushworth P-12 College, thinks high-speed broadband will change the parameters of education service delivery.

"It's an opportunity for the school to link with the community," he says. "We're looking to move beyond the hours of 9 to 3.30 and giving our families access to educational material and services 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"We're essentially putting learning into the hands of families – and we as a school will be able to support them. We've got the chance to have families buy into the process of education and support us by putting their own flavour on the delivery – reinforcing what they want to reinforce at home.

"That could be maths content, or online delivery of VCE content from other schools, to support what we're doing here at the college. It's about giving kids a better pathway as they move beyond the college."

It's also, Cr Jarman points out, a rather apt demonstration of the adage that it takes a village to raise a child.

Both Mr Moyle and Cr Jarman see the fibre-optic network as the key to potentially reversing a problem common to small rural communities – the diaspora of the young.

After completing year 12, those seeking further education have to leave town. With high-speed broadband, accessing online tertiary education will become a viable alternative.

"Tertiary institutions offer contact hours in a digital framework, and our students will be able to access that easily," Cr Jarman says. "If that means they have to be on campus only, say two or three days a week, for someone who lives in Rushworth that could be the difference between leaving town or staying."

To put it crudely, and implying no insult to locals, the advent of the NBN in a village like Rushworth will likely result in collective intelligence quotient rising.

Cr Jarman sees more tertiary-educated young people staying in the community. Daniel Strachan, the Shire of Campaspe's strategic initiatives manager, sees locals participating directly in council decision-making in real time via broadband videoconference links. And both predict an increase in net-savvy professionals moving to the village to set up businesses.

"This provides the opportunity for people in Rushworth to undertake meaningful work from home," Mr Strachan says.

"Then there are 'footloose' industries – those industries that don't need to be in a particular location. Think about businesses like online retailing, web services, that sort of enterprise. For those people who want to do that sort of thing, but also want the country village lifestyle, Rushworth now becomes a serious option."

Cr Jarman sees Rushworth becoming attractive to professionals such as engineers and architects. The idea of a home-office with pleasing rural aspect is nice, but throw in the ability to send and receive large volumes of data at high speed and the thought becomes a lot more than a daydream.

The crystal-ball hope at the Shire of Campaspe is that a decade on from the arrival of the NBN, Rushworth will experience net population growth of between 3 and 5 per cent, owing to the combined effects of incoming businesses, net-savvy tree-changers and youth retention. It sounds a modest enough goal but, bar a couple of celebrated food-and-wine hubs, most Victorian small towns are recording net population decreases.

The shire has begun an NBN education campaign for existing residents. It highlights the advantages of high-speed broadband for the region's keystone agriculture, and encourages people to think carefully when upgrading home equipment such as computers, fridges and televisions.

"Most of the people in Rushworth come into town in their utes," Cr Jarman says. "Most of our community are grassroots people who choose to live in Rushworth because of lifestyle. This is a value-add for the existing people. This is a really good, strong, prideful community. To help them embrace the advantages is totally the responsibility of local government – and upgrading home equipment at a natural rate of expense is one part of that."

The message, it seems, is getting across.

Kerrie Raglus, the career practitioner at the college, has lived in Rushworth for 36 years. She's not entirely sure whether that qualifies her as a bona fide local, but it's got to come pretty close. "I think there's more hope than anything in town at the moment," she said. "Who knows what it's going to bring, apart from fast access? I think there's a hope that it could attract to our area some things we've wanted for a while. We'd love some new business and industry."

On the weekends – sunny ones, at least – Rushworth's main street fills with day trippers, but the empty shopfronts attest that curious tourists aren't enough right now to arrest the village's slow decline.

In three years, however, the fortunes of the place may well turn around, as Rushworth begins its odd transition from old-fashioned to ultra-modern, and from pretty to pretty clever.