26 September

I’m old enough to remember a Bathurst where civic life was people rolling up their sleeves to help build a community. Where even when the work day ended, you joined a community organisation, like Rotary or Lions or Apex, to keep building actual community things, even in your spare time. Now largely replaced with online groups fighting vacuous online wars with each other, often imported from Trumpian groups overseas, claiming to speak for the community while building not one single thing. Using the physical town as fodder. In-between buying barista coffee or vastly overpriced restaurant food, in branded clothes, towns gentrified into lifestyle resorts with no functional foundation. Posting and podcasting their daily fascination with themselves, as kidults.