Ageing Australia: changing location patterns of older people in South East Queensland

This paper investigates a decade of changes in the location patterns of older people in the ‘sunbelt’ region of South East Queensland (SEQ). Despite the accentuation of public policies to better cater for older people in an ageing Australia, little attention has been directed towards exploration of the changing spatial distributions of older people over time. This paper partially redresses this gap in the literature, by exploring changes in the spatial distribution of older people in SEQ over the decade 1996 to 2006. The findings highlight a marked spatial variation in numerical and structural ageing across SEQ, in which numerical ageing has become more pronounced, whereas structural ageing, particularly in the coastal areas, has, largely, not eventuated.