22 May

The secret sauce of Lithgow for those who don’t live here, is that it’s one of the few places where the entire town is a community. Most larger and newer towns are fractured now by cars, people live in widely dispersed suburbs and it takes specific ‘events’ to try to make them all feel part of the same community. But Lithgow has changed little since 1952 when this footage was taken, that sense of community is in its DNA. People in town often have very little in common, but it doesn’t matter to that feeling of community. You just feel it here, it’s very hard to define. Partly it’s living in a valley, which prevents too much physical spread, and you can still walk to pretty much anywhere in town from anywhere else in not much time, which is more important I think than we often realise. But it’s more than that, I can walk the streets of Bathurst or Orange for example and not feel that same sense of community, except in abstract ways. I grew up in Bathurst and didn’t feel it. In Lithgow you feel like you’re a Lithgow person first, and an individual second. The community gets into you somehow, it defines you. This footage also a bit special for me, because my dad is in there somewhere. Lithgow was the first place he lived when he came to Australia, and he described attending the Marjorie celebrations to me before he died.