Are cashed-up and bankless towns just watching the money go round and round? CASTERTON, Grenfell, Home Hill, Nathalia and Toukley. Five Australian towns that were until recently set apart by one dubious achievement shared by no others: they had all lost a full hand of the “big four” banks – ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac – since the 1970s. The days when all four branches were still open in these places was a time when banks were major employers in a town and the managers

BACKGROUND I have spent more than a year counting banks. It’s not an introduction to a story I could have foreseen myself writing 12 months earlier but when News Corp started cutting jobs in the rural mastheads, I found myself with time on my hands and a lot of unfinished business. Every time I wrote about another bank closure, my editor would ask me simple questions I couldn’t answer because either the information wasn’t statistically available or the banks wouldn’t hand it