I’ve been doing a bit of driving between Sydney, Canberra (where cousin Libby lives) and Wagga Wagga, where my brother Tony lives with his family.
Wagga Wagga is about 500 ks from Sydney, just about equidistant between Sydney and Melbourne. It’s the biggest inland town in New South Wales with a population of around 57,000. My brother has lived there for a long time now. Personally I wouldn’t want to live there, as I wouldn’t want to live in Canberra, the seat of federal government (population around 250,00, purpose-built less than a century ago and designed in a series of concentric circles, very easy to get lost in).
One thing I’ve noticed about Wagga and that is the people I’ve met who live there seem very happy to live there. In fact by and large I’d say they are happier than the people I’ve met who live in London. I don’t know if this is cause and effect, or effect and cause. If you weren’t happy to live in a quiet, easy-to-get-around place where not a lot happens then you wouldn’t live there. Does that make sense?
The people who live in Wagga by and large don’t want to live somewhere like Sydney, or even Canberra, because of the people/noise/traffic/crowds/difficulty of getting around. I can understand the appeal of being able to drive to the post office in a couple of minutes and park right outside and when I listen to them talk I sometimes wonder to myself why I don’t go and live there.
I have lived in London almost all my life and I’m not sure if I love it or hate it. Sometimes I think the only reason I go on living there – apart from the fact that most of my friends live there, it’s where I work, it’s the cultural centre of the world, it’s where things happen and I know my way around it, parts of it – is because I am afraid if I ever left it I would never have the courage to come back.
So when I hear people talking about Sydney traffic jams and chaos and noise and too many people, I am tempted to say buddy you should see London. But then I think about American students telling me how slow and quiet London is compared with New York. It all depends where you’re coming from. When a friend (Australian) who’d recently arrived from London complained that Sydney was like a graveyard – nobody about, nothing going on – having just arrived from places where there really was nothing going on I found myself defending the place. Maybe I’m becoming a Sydneyite. Before I know it I’ll be standing on the left hand side of the escalator.
Anyway as I said I’ve been doing a bit of driving around the New South Wales countryside. There is something hugely appealing about country Australia – you can drive for hundreds of miles and the scenery barely changes. Or so it seems. The more you drive the same highway however the more different it looks. There’s a world of difference for instance between the green, wooded countryside south of Sydney and the bare, brown hills around Wagga.
Australia has been suffering the worst drought in living memory. You can see the devastation as you drive. The drought has been headline news more or less constantly all the time I have been here. A couple of weeks ago it broke; that’s to say some rain fell, in some places quite heavily. But one fall of rain does not break a drought like this one.
Farmers have suffered worst of course. I’ve been told a farmer kills himself every four days. There is very little support from the government or state, and being Aussies, and largely male, they find it difficult to ask for help. Many of them are extremely isolated.
I stayed on a farm for a few days. The farmer, my friend, was then spending $1000 a day – one thousand dollars a day – on feed for his sheep, in lieu of the grass that wasn’t growing. While I was there the police called round to talk to his manager. Apparently the manager’s ex boss had had a breakdown, and the police were calling to see whether or not the manager might have lent him a gun. This is what they are doing, farmers, some of them – shooting all their stock and reserving the last bullet for themselves. If somebody asks to borrow a gun, says my friend, on no account do you lend them one. If they say they want it to shoot their stock you offer to do it for them.
When I drove through the same part of the countryside a few weeks later the difference was marked. It doesn’t take a lot of rain to bring the green back, but it may only be surface green – ‘painted on’, as my farmer friend said.
It’s a very tough life, being a farmer here. Wool was what first put Australia on the map, back in the 19th century. Now farmers are going under. Nobody seems to know if the drought is just part of some general weather cycle, or something to do with El Nino and La Nina, or global warming, or whether this – the drought – is the norm and the balmy years when rain fell were exceptions.
I love the Australian bush. I was going to come and live here once. I had a vague ambition from an early age to marry an Australian farmer, someone living on thousands of acres in the middle of nowhere. It was the connection with the land that I found so appealing. As it happens, sadly, it didn’t work out. I will never quite know why.
