I always regarded growing up in a small country town as the quintessential Australian upbringing.

There were 18 kids in my street, and we just played together all the time. Nothing was organised and the 5.30pm nightly summer street cricket match was a given, as was the “six and out” over the fence rule.

You could pretty much disappear for the day and our parents were confident we would reappear to eat at the agreed time. Even if we ended up a long hike from home, we knew everybody, so it was safe to accept a ride home. The village raised the children.

For most of my childhood we didn’t lock the house at night or the car when we parked in the main street. People “dropped in” through the back door without phoning ahead and slide evenings were the price you paid for having relatives.

The “town” commercial area was small but still exciting and vibrant in its own way. Television and radio kept us linked to the national and global action and people that we liked such as Paul Hogan, Bert Newton, Graham Kennedy, and Ray Martin talked to us in a way that gave us comfort (and a few laughs) and made us feel part of something larger and communal.

When I travel back to my hometown now, the feelings are mixed. In some respects, it is like stepping into an oil painting.

When you leave your town for a long time and return, it is as if everything has changed in an instant, like a Pompei-esque calamity has befallen your childhood and turned your memories to faded shells and vaguely familiar aging faces.

The last time I visited it seemed like all the houses and buildings had faded and peeling paint. Perhaps they always did. I’d never noticed before.

The most dominant shops in the main street seemed to be op shops and cheapie chains. I’m sure it wasn’t like that before.

It is easy to write off small towns as a remnant of an era of small farms and mines, stagecoach stops and accidents of geography. In fact, much has been written about the decline of these towns and the Australian propensity to live in the big cities with the extra opportunities and facilities that come with that.

The reality is that this often-neglected subset of our economy, culture and social fabric is still remarkably resilient. At the time of the 2016 Census, one in 10 Australians still lived in towns with a population of less than 10,000 (closer to 12 per cent in Queensland).

We have more than 1000 towns with less than 1000 people (518,000 people in total) and another million people live in the 526 towns with between 1000 and 5000 people.

While plenty of small towns have done it tough (and some ended up as “ghost towns”) the number of people living in small towns still grew by 100,000 between 2011 and 2016 to 2.3 million.

These are not insignificant numbers. What’s more, as the product of a small town, I wonder whether we really do enough as a nation to support and enhance this living museum of our country’s traditions and cultural origins.

Small town main streets are a potpourri of innovation, retail serendipity and unique, multigenerational brands that often exist in just one place in the world. The cheap real estate and low rents allow experiments and mixed functions that you seldom see any more in the franchised big cities.

Similarly, there is plenty of research around the health benefits of being part of a community where you truly belong and feel nurtured.

Small towns encourage social interaction in a way that is hard to replicate in our busy metropolises where kids no longer play on the street and homes have become deadlocked fortresses.

As technology allows us to perform many jobs as remotely as we like, should we be doing more to promote the small-town lifestyle as an option? Should we be doing more to understand the role of small towns in our national economy and explore ways to give them fresh life?

Are we doing enough to help towns understand (or create) their unique selling points, so they don’t fade into the background through highway bypasses, tacky renovations and generic mediocrity?

We don’t talk much about population policy in Australia but personally I hope we never reach a stage where a road trip involves hundreds of kilometres of bitumen without the quaint villages, welcoming slow-life cafes and awning-fronted buildings along the way.

And sometimes I miss living in a place where I know who lives in every house and everybody knows my name.

Shane Rodgers is a business executive, writer, strategist and marketer with a deep interest in what makes people tick and the secret languages of the workplace.