In recent years, the town has become a poster child for rural redevelopment ever since the establishment of the Blue Derby mountain bike (MTB) trails in 2015 began bringing in tourists by the thousands.

The town's apparent success has become part of a wider public narrative surrounding Derby and its past - a narrative helped in part by the Ride Blue Derby website, which tracks a 150-year history from tin mining to biking boom town.

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According to the site, "Derby reached its peak in the 19th century" as a tin mining town before befalling a flooding event that killed 14 of the townspeople.

That event led to the temporary closure of the mine, which never fully recovered and ultimately closed down permanently in 1948. The history ends there, and the intervening six decades before the bike trails were opened are summed up in the below sentence.

"The population soon dwindled from 3000 to 173. This series of tragic events is what led Derby to soon become a place where only tourists would visit as a pit stop between Launceston and the East Coast."

While those 67 years may not be of note to many, they remain an important epoch for the community that lived in Derby before the bike trails came and changed the town forever.

In 1980, Terry Smith and his wife Christine were living on the mainland and considering their future.

"We were about to stitch ourselves up in Sydney with a business and a house," he said.

That was until a chance visit to Mrs Smith's sister brought them to Derby. A few months later, the pair sold their Sydney business, bought a condemned house in the town's main street for $400 and began building a new life.

The Smith's story is a familiar one to Gayle Scott - who's been living in the town for almost three decades.

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"Derby does that to you, doesn't it? You visit it once and you just have to come back," she said.

Ms Scott may be familiar to some readers, as she was profiled in The Examiner in the early 2000s for her commitment to 12 separate community groups servicing Derby and the surrounding region. At the time, Ms Scott said despite the town's isolated reputation, the sense of community was strong.

"It was such a good close community. It was only a couple hundred people but everybody stuck together," she said.

Likewise, another long-time resident of Derby, Rob Thomson, characterised the town in the early 2000s as a haven for "artists, craftspeople, retirees and eccentrics".

The comments of the long-standing residents of Derby are not intended to suggest that, in the lead up for 2015, the town was flourishing economically. Job prospects in the region had remained depressed and there had already been several failed attempts to drum up tourist interest in Derby and the surrounding Local Government Area of Dorset.

Consequently, population decline continued to affect the whole region. Many of the issues facing the area came to a head in 2012, when a landmark study compiled by the University of Tasmania and Anglicare chose Dorset as a key LGA case study in the growing issue of food insecurity in rural Tasmania.

Stuart Auckland - one of the UTAS researchers who compiled the report and the current program coordinator for community health development at the Centre for Rural Health - said at the time of the study the food issues facing Dorset towns like Derby were a cause for concern.

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"In your smaller townships like Derby, your supply and access to different groups of food was much more limited," he said.

Access to key infrastructure also presented a problem. By 2015 TasWater had yet to connect Derby and the other Ringarooma river towns with a consistent access to clean drinking water. Likewise, sewage and waste disposal presented persistent issues for the townspeople.

Clearly, as the MTB epoch dawned, Derby was facing problems and a fresh influx of tourist money and national attention may have been just what was needed to fund and enact positive change. Then why didn't it?

By 2017, the biking trails were catching on quicker than anyone could have expected. Derby was hosting the Enduro World Series MTB trials, bringing thousands of tourists and international attention to the town. But clean drinking water still wasn't available.

At the time, then-Local Government Minister Peter Gutwein revealed that TasWater had been forced to ship "thousands of bottles of water and five 15,000-litre water tanks" into Derby - due to the low quality of water coming from the town's faucets. Months later the Ringarooma towns would finally be hooked up to the TasWater network, but clean water wasn't the only problem that had been resolved amid the supposed boom in the town's prospects.

Likewise, despite the unprecedented levels of tourist cash, food insecurity remains an issue. The town now boasts four separate bike shops, but residents are still driving 30 minutes to Scottsdale for access to fresh vegetables.

The flood of cafes, shops and accommodation complexes has left little room in the town for any community infrastructure to remain, let alone develop. Following a property sale, the post office, one of the few public assets that was accessible in the town, moved from its own building and was relegated to a corner of Derby's small general store.

"It's like living in a theme park," Mr Smith said.

Looking back a decade since his study was published, Mr Auckland conceded that little had changed to improve the issues raised in the 2012 report.

Further, the town's dwindling population, which has often been cited as a key issue pre-2015 may in fact have been accelerated - rather than reversed - by the advent of the biking trails.

In 2011, Census data tallied the town's population at 208. Five years later - in the year after the bike trails were opened - the population had shrunk by more than 15 per cent to 173.

This may seem peculiar given that the tourist economy now brings thousands of visitors through Derby, but the push to house and equip those tourists has weakened the town's ability to hold a permanent community.

Despite housing about 200 people in recent decades, the town now boasts about 70 AirBnB stays - with more added each month. Many of these abodes boast room for more than five guests, meaning the capacity in Derby to house a population is greater than ever. That said, with property prices hovering near investor-only levels and nightly AirBnB prices eclipsing those of the rental market, the number of houses available to those wishing to permanently live in Derby is dwindling.

As of February 5, 2022, there were no properties listed for rent in Derby, though several houses and plots of land were listed for sale at prices above $500,000. As a result, few, if any, of the town's shopkeepers or hospitality staff are able to live in the town.

And with the town's resident population now under more pressure than ever to sell up and ship out, much of the community that was there before has faded away.

After almost 30 years in the town Ms Scott said the sudden transformation of the town into a global MTB destination "came as quite a shock to a lot of us". Of those 12 community groups Ms Scott belonged to in the early 2000s, only two remain. Similarly, Mr and Mrs Smith feel they've lost a 40-year social network overnight.

"We lost a few in a hurry, but we're still losing people all the time. In such a small town, you were somebody. Now - just like that - we're nobody. We're just in the way. We're speed bumps," he said.

By Mr Thomson's calculations, as little as one quarter of the town's original pre-MTB community remains, though Census data expected later this year will reveal how accurate this figure is.

More importantly for Mr Smith, however, the impact of mass tourism on his home of 40 years has left him feeling like a stranger in his own town.

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"I planned my retirement 40 years ago. That's why I came here. But those retirement dreams have become a nightmare," he said.

When two of Ms Scott's remaining friends sold out and moved to Western Australia last year, the real estate agent remarked that he could sell Ms Scott's house for $750,000.

"I don't want $750,000. I just want my home," she said.

All the long-standing members of the Derby community quoted in this article repeatedly expressed that they did not oppose the MTB trails or the spurring of new jobs, money and visitors to the town. Their concerns instead centred on the pace of development, the impact of mass tourism on a small town and a lack of community consultation.

One would struggle to make a case that the advent of the bike trails in Derby hasn't been an economic success and a boon for the region overall. That said, the widely believed narrative that the Derby community was saved by the MTB era avoids a more complex story about trade-offs and consequences, about who the trails were really built for and who continues to benefit from them.

In a letter to an unnamed national newspaper that published an article on the unprecedented success of Derby's MTB program, Mr Thomson quoted an American general from the Vietnam War who once remarked, "We had to destroy the town to save it".

That letter was never published.

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