6 April

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism, of building things for society, of ‘public works’, accompanied here by the typical 1960s cheerful string soundtrack. Now public works has become a site for people to form protest groups and complain about things. We’ve lost that sense of ‘we’, everybody battles for status for their particular grievance instead. The anti-wind farm loons are targeting Bathurst now (where no wind farms are planned), probably because everybody else is sick to death of their whinging. Only major catastrophes silence the whinging and create that sense of we called the ‘public’. We had about 6 good decades. It took two world wars, a Great Depression and Spanish Flu pandemic to shut up everybody’s petty grievances.