Place-Making Report: Shepparton and Goulburn Valley Overview

This report provides an overview of Shepparton and the Goulburn Valley, focusing on place-making. It examines Shepparton's climate, history as an agricultural and manufacturing center, and its connection to the Goulburn River. The report highlights the role of the Shepparton Preserving Company (SPC) Ardmona (SPCA) in the region's development, its contribution to employment and manufacturing, and the challenges it faces, including competition and economic pressures. It also discusses the river connection and irrigation farming, including the redevelopment of Victoria Park Lake and its importance for water management and community well-being. The conclusion summarizes the region's development, emphasizing the importance of agriculture and manufacturing, and suggests the need for government action to address economic challenges and promote population well-being.

SHEPARTON and GOULBURN
VALLEY REPORT

Table of Contents
Theme: Place-Making......................................................................................................................1
Overview of Shepparton Town....................................................................................................1
SPCA sites...................................................................................................................................2
River connection and irrigation farming......................................................................................2
Overall conclusion.......................................................................................................................3

Theme: Place-Making
Overview of Shepparton Town
Shepparton is one of the cities located on floodplain of Goulburn River, having near about
242,190.9 ha land area within northern Victoria (Roth and Smith, 2018). It usually has a cold
semi-arid climate, where January is considered as the hottest month with maximum temperature
is about 89.2 F (31.8 C) and July as coldest with minimum 38.1 F (3.4 C). However, it also⁰ ⁰ ⁰ ⁰
receives rainfall during winters but quite low throughout the year. In the medieval of 90th
century, this city has begun as a sheep station, but today after major transformation as a railway
town, it has become an agriculture as well as manufacturing centre of irrigation system of
Goulburn Valley. Since, this city is situated nearby Goulburn Valley region, which is mainly
inhabited with aboriginal people (Dugdale and et. al., 2020). Therefore, indigenous peoples have
a strong presence in Shepparton. As per census report of 2018, currently, it has a population of
66,007 people, with Torres Strait Islander or Aboriginal people and other communities. Among
them, over 62.1% population are belong to working age of 15 to 64 years. In terms of ethnic
culture and religion, proportion of people belong from Catholic community is 24.5% of total
population, Anglican having 11.0% and No Religion 26.7%. Among them, Christianity is the
largest religious group which has been reported overall to 58.0%. Shepparton also includes a
small community of Jewish community within 1913, but till 1966 it has been completely
disbanded. In 2015, this city has commemorated for site of synagogue of Jewish community with
a monument (Barry and Yilmaz, 2019).
In terms of urbanisation, Shepparton has a number of shopping centre, commercial streets,
communication towers and more. It is also surrounded by three another towns of Australia
Mooroopna (towards west), Kialla (towards south) and Shepparton (towards east). In addition to
this, total number of organisations in respective town is near about 6371, where more employing
industry includes Health and social care. So, having the growing industries of agriculture and
manufacturing sector, help Shepparton to develop its economy continuously. One of the largest
producer of canned fruits of Australia i.e. SPC Ardmona, has its own subsidiary and production
facilities of Coca-Cola Amatil in Shepparton (Thomson and et. al. 2019). Therefore, this city has
become the major shopping centre and regional commercial of Australia, where the largest
employer J.Furphy & Sons has also opened many manufacturing companies.
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SPCA sites
Place-making refers to the multi-faceted approach used for planning, designing and
managing the public spaces, by capitalising community’s assets, potential and their inspiration.
Therefore, with intention to create public space for promoting health, well-being and happiness
state of people, SPCA has played the main efforts (Thomson and et. al. 2019). Shepparton
Preserving Company (SPC) Ardmona is one of the most established as well as significant
operator of Shepparton. It has provided a large variety of businesses in terms of employment and
manufacturing output, that helps in development of its region. It helps population in getting
accessibility to water from various river systems with valuable groundwater resources. Along
with this, Shepparton today, gives support to a large number of dairy, viticulture, horticulture and
entire irrigation-based industries, including large areas of dryland farming. Therefore, it has been
analysed that SPCA has remained a strong presence of manufacturing and agriculture industries
in GV Region, but from last few years, scale of its operations are continuously reduced
significantly (Barry and Yilmaz, 2019). The key factors behind contraction or increase threat of
closing operations of SPCA over Shepparton region include drought, increasing imports of the
cheaper product by the supermarket chains, with less export market share and strong as well as
sustained appreciation of currency or Australian dollar. In this regard, due to such commercial
conditions, it has created challenges for SPCA, where it has incurred the significant stock write-
offs currently. It has also demand for responding quickly towards falling demand levels due to
downgrading of Mooroopna, which is one of its major processing plants. This would result in
significantly reducing the levels of fruit intake from its regional fruit growers.
River connection and irrigation farming
River-connect refers to the core initiative of community of Shepparton and Mooroopna,
where various organisations like Parks Victoria, Goulburn Valley Water, Dept. of Environment,
Land, Water and Planning, Education and Training Dept., Goulburn Valley Environment Group
and more work in partnership, with purpose to meet needs of irrigation-based industries
(Dugdale and et. al., 2020). Now, for providing habitat to local wildlife, improve accessibility for
community around the lake, improvement of water quality as well as recreational opportunities,
etc. Greater Shepparton City Council has redeveloped the Victoria Park Lake. This terminal lake
with no flow of water, Goulburn River pumps water from nearby sources like Goulburn River,
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which is then discharged into southern end land and wetland outlet (Roth and Smith, 2018).
Under this process, water is mainly circulated by wetland, within 20 to 30 days turnover period.
Therefore, for achievement of above objectives, Victoria Park Lake Redevelopment has been
designed from one of the adopted concept designs via local engineering consultants, which has
also supported by the specialist sub-consultants.
Overall conclusion
Thus, it has been concluded that Shepparton Region has been developed more far, with
overgrowing industries which are mostly based on agriculture and manufacturing based. Behind
this development, Shepparton Preserving Company Ardmona or SPCA has contributed major
role. But it also suffers commercial related issues due to over import of cheap products with
economic loss of exports, therefore, Government needs to take proper actions for overcoming
from such challenges. Certain steps also need to take for promoting well-being conditions of its
population as well.
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REFERENCES
Thomson, M. K. & et. al. (2019). ORDINARY MEETING GOULBURN VALLEY REGIONAL
LIBRARY CORPORATION. Policy, 2019, 5.
Barry, J., & Yilmaz, I. (2019). Liminality and racial hazing of Muslim migrants: media framing
of Albanians in Shepparton, Australia, 1930–1955. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42(7),
1168-1185.
Dugdale, T. M. & et. al. (2020). Residues and Dissipation of the Herbicide Imazapyr after
Operational Use in Irrigation Water. International Journal of Environmental Research
and Public Health, 17(7), 2421.
Roth, G., & Smith, J. (2018). Rural RD for Profit: Smarter Irrigation for Profit-Leadership and
Co-Ordination. Roth Rural; University of Sydney.
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