Previous research reveals that throughout the world rural areas struggle to remain
economically and socially sustainable for a number of reasons including a lack of
employment, isolation, shortage of leisure opportunities, poor transport, and a
romanticised cultural construction of the rural ideal which masks actual conditions
(Cloke et al., 1997; Little, 1999; Baines, 2012). Maintenance and development of rural
communities[1] seems a hard task in the face of the constant drift of people to
metropolitan areas in search of work and a higher standard of living (Doherty, 1941;
Knapp and Schmitt, 2008). However, maintaining rural communities and associated
services including those provided by accountants, is of strategic importance to regional
development because of, for example, small population numbers, large geographic space
and the resulting low population density, which makes profitable economic activity
difficult (Gray and Lawrence, 2001; Tonts and Haslam-McKenzie, 2005). While rural
communities are in general based on an agrarian or mining economy, they also struggle