15 January

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is Yorkshire, of a typical British industrial village, scattered throughout the UK. In the same sort of valley location Lithgow is found in, for the same reason, because the geography is the reason for the town existing. Coal is in the hills, the town is in the valleys. It’s even the same people, at its birth Lithgow imported miners who directly or indirectly came from these British industrial village towns. They brought the culture with them, and it’s that culture that’s very hard to define, to people who don’t live here. It’s like nothing else in any town or city in Australia that I know of. There are other industrial towns, but none that I can think of that also copy the geography of the British industrial valley towns. Even the original buildings copy those of the British industrial villages. The village form of life is (to me) the greatest invention of Western societies. It’s not really rural or urban, it’s everything all at the same time. It’s a community that has had to balance all of that, plus the landscape, at the same time. You’re as much a part of the valley as you are of the community, they’re all the same thing.