According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in the 2006 Census (held on 8 August 2006) there were 48,146 persons usually resident in Clarence Valley Local Government Area, of which 49.6% were males and 50.4% were females or in raw numbers 23,875 were male and 24,271 were female.
That represented an undifferentiated gender imbalance of 396 more females than males spatially distributed across 44 towns, villages and city environs over approximately 10,440 sq. kms.
Of the 38,597 residents 15 years of age and over; 51.4% were married, 26.8% never married, 13.8% separated or divorced, 8.1% widowed and about 4,893 stated they lived alone.
A fairly typical regional profile in the coastal sea-change cum tree-change belt I would have thought and one that was not all that remarkable. So imagine my surprise when I woke one day last week to find that there was a ‘man drought’ occurring in Grafton which is the main commercial centre in the Clarence Valley.
On the basis of a newspaper table showing that for every 95 Grafton men aged 20-29 there are 100 females in the same age bracket and for every 80 Grafton men aged 30-39 there are 100 similarly aged females, an unidentified local journalist has stoutly issued the drought declaration.
Now I’d be the first to admit that in 2006 the Grafton statistical area showed the resident population was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.
However in 2006 when it came to Graftonian adults in the 20-29 age range there was only one more female than there were males and, in the 30-39 range there was only 41 more females in total than males. Making the overall gender imbalance between 20 and 39 years of age in Grafton City and environs a mere 42 extra females.
When looking at presumed ‘availability’ of the unmarried then there were 2 more females who had never married than total males in that same category and, probably around 11 more "not married" women between 20 and 34 than there were men of the same age who had no wife or de-facto partner.
However, if a man drought is really occurring then Grafton women have to have lost the ability to socialise outside city boundaries because there are 10,000 plus people without spouses or partners living in the Clarence Valley local government area and some of those have to be males of the species.
Of course the possibility exists that many of those 20 to 39 year-old women mentioned in the newspaper article are quite happy being footloose and fancy free and, are chortling over the idea that a ‘man drought’ is something to seriously worry about.
A little background on the MSM's love of the notion of a man drought.
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