Where are Australia’s ghost towns?

The year is 1875, and two men discover a lode of silver in the far west of New South Wales, a 13-hour drive from Sydney today, or a four-week expedition then. The site sits close to the South Australian border, flat and dry. Even now, the town that grew there is a handful of dusty streets and old stone buildings, with a desert horizon all around.

The town is Silverton. Within 10 years of that first strike, its population multiplied from fewer than 300 to more than 3,000. But people left as quickly as they arrived once the high-grade ore ran out.

Today, about 48 people are recorded as living in Silverton, now famous as a film location and tourist destination. It’s the poster child of Australia’s outback ghost towns, but hardly the only one. Many were created and abandoned for similar reasons: gold rushes, railway shifts or mining closures.

But outside these ghost towns, Australia is a country with a lot of life in its homes. The ABS equivalent of an abandoned home is an inactive dwelling. Out of 10 million dwellings, only 1.3 per cent, or 136,278, are considered inactive. Sydney and Melbourne have the highest counts of inactive homes, with around one in three coming from the two cities. Regional NT, however, stands out with the highest share at 4.5 per cent, followed by regional WA at 3.2 per cent.

Among areas with at least 1,000 dwellings, the top of the list is mostly what you’d expect. Esperance Surrounds in regional WA, which includes Condingup, Salmon Gums and Grass Patch, has the highest rate at 11.4 per cent. Three others are tied to mining: Alligator in regional NT, which includes Jabiru, built in 1982 for the Ranger uranium mine that closed in January 2021; Newman in regional WA, an iron ore town where BHP owns most of the housing; and Broadsound - Nebo in regional Queensland, coal country. Mukinbudin and Gnowangerup are wheatbelt. Derby - West Kimberley is remote, with a large share of social housing.

Three are true outliers: Lorne - Anglesea in regional Victoria, Civic in Canberra and Darwin City. These aren’t the industry ghost towns of Australian imagination. They’re modern ghost homes: holiday houses left unused for long stretches, and dense apartment markets, likely including investment properties waiting on tenants. 

Rank areas by the number of inactive homes and the list looks nothing like a ghost-town map. Abandonment takes on a different meaning inside cities, because some of these areas are where you would imagine the most people live. Or at least that’s how it seems on the surface.

Seven of the top 10 are in Victoria, and they fall into two groups: coastal sea-change and holiday areas (such as Point Nepean and Phillip Island), and dense inner-city markets (such as Melbourne CBD, Docklands, Southbank and Carlton).