For better or worse, growth is seen as good in still relatively sparsely populated Australia – from the top (where the Federal Government continues its policy of high levels of immigration) to the bottom (where struggling bush towns use inducements, including $1 rents, to attract newcomers).

Growth is endorsement and economic impetus all in one. It’s new customers and consumers as well as bulk and heft – no small matter for a nation whose communities are spread out across a vast continent.

Growth can provide momentum, boost confidence and encourage investment, but it can also alienate and infuriate if it isn’t managed properly.

As Sydney has wrestled with the question of how to maintain its amenity and liveability while squeezing in hundreds of thousands of new residents in recent years, Bathurst has been a beneficiary.

Through a combination of our stable economy, water security and simple geographic luck, Bathurst has been attracting so many unhappy Sydneysiders that our population growth rate has been one of the highest in the state.

New housing estates have marched out across our former farming paddocks, new businesses have sprung up in and around our CBD and we’ve seen NSW Government investment in our highway, our railway station (with its new car park) and our hospital (which will soon get its own new car park).

But what happens if we grow so quickly by welcoming unhappy Sydneysiders that we start creating unhappy Bathurstians?

A note of warning was sounded in a letter to this newspaper last week about the city’s increasing residential density and the loss of trees and yards going along with it.

The same letter attracted a lot of comment when it went up on the Advocate’s Facebook page – from laments about what Bathurst is losing as it expands to a warning from a couple of ex-Sydneysiders not to make the same mistakes their old home made.

Our rapid growth is a matter of pride for Bathurst Regional Council – and with good reason. There is a many a struggling country city in Australia that would kill to be enjoying our boom.

But we also need to be careful not to lose what made Bathurst desirable in the first place. There’s not much use attracting a whole lot of new residents if we start to lose a lot of the old residents in a few years’ time.