At .id, we love diversity and bright minds, so we were thrilled to have our second Year 10 student for a week of work experience. Today’s blog is brought to you by Skyla, who takes a look at her hometown of Bacchus Marsh in Moorabool. Not many teenagers express an interest in cities and towns and how they’re changing, so we were happy to share our knowledge and experience with Skyla. She’s artistic and a bit of a bookworm and was really interested in our population forecasting, so we asked her to write a blog highlighting the characteristics of an area in Melbourne with which she had some familiarity. Here’s Skyla’s take on the population of Moorabool.
Moorabool? Where’s that?
Moorabool has been around for a while, but what actually goes on there? Located 80km west of Melbourne CBD with a small populace of 32,311 you wouldn’t really expect much and that’s alright because it’s a small country region with small country towns. It’s split up into 9 even smaller districts (although the people who live there generally lump Maddingley and Darley in with Bacchus Marsh making a total population of 18,585 – that’s more than half of Moorabool) all of which make up a total area of 210,952 hectares and a population density of 0.15 people per hectare. Bacchus Marsh is where I was born and raised for a total of 16 years so I should know how small it is – especially compared to places like Collingwood (an inner suburb of Melbourne where .id is located)!
Here’s where we are in reference to Australia.
Well, what sort of people live there then?
The most common sort of households you will find here are either couples with or without children. With a population mixed with couples riddled with baby boomers we have very few people moving in from overseas – mainly from other parts of Victoria and most people who live here work here too. Bacchus Marsh (and a lot of the other small towns around Moorabool) are expanding though with all these new housing estates popping up everywhere and so far this year we’ve had another 302 building permits approved to be built!
Okay then, what’s it going to be like?
By 2041 Moorabool’s population will be around 53,270, an increase by 64.86%, and Bacchus Marsh (again, including Maddingley and Darley) will be around 30,519. Here’s a breakdown of the growth by age:
We will also have more people migrating into the Moorabool area and those numbers will increase every year.
And the number for each household type will pretty much double between 2011 and 2041.
And we will continue to grow and expand like any town will so we won’t always be country towns, maybe one day we will even become a city!
If you are interested to learn more about Moorabool’s population and how it will change and grow over the next 20 years, check out .id’s population forecasts here.