'From These Youth Has Gone': Population Decline in the Lachlan Region of New South Wales, 1920-1947
This article analyses major events during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s affecting the Lachlan region, in New South Wales, in order to assess their relative impact on population change. The analysis juxtaposes the demographic changes taking place against the economic context of the time. The Lachlan region is compared with the four other wheatsheep regions of New South Wales and with the State generally. The paper demonstrates that population decline in the Lachlan region in the 1930s and 1940s was substantially greater than that of other wheat-sheep regions and of the State of New South Wales generally, and sets out to explain this anomaly. The Depression, the Second World War, drought over a sequence of years, and changing technology are shown, in combination, to be the underlying causes of substantial change that heralded the long-term drift of population from regional and rural NSW; especially so in the Lachlan region.