15 July

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room Bathurst would be like a body without a brain or nervous system. A place without memory, doomed to repeat the same day over and over without any chance of accumulating hard-won knowledge and experience. This room is full of breathtaking treasures and insights. (Not open to the public, though people can request copies of files, just part of what I do every day is fill those requests.) Much of this material is now digitised, and is used every time you visit, ring or email Council, to shape what action your query will prompt, based on past precedent. That’s what bureaucrats do, stop us all living a permanent Groundhog Day of making the same decisions and mistakes over and over again. More than anything else it’s this room that gives Bathurst a functioning history. That gives the thousands who have come before a voice and influence even today, with the things they learned through often brutal and bloody experience, as they now lay in their graves. Bureaucracy is the past and future, acting in the present. Without it we learn nothing, living purely in fleeting fads and fashions. On what’s ’trending’ enough to disturb our temporary attention and boredom. Social media society. Elected folk who come to power through the fads, fashions and trending of social media, through their evanescent empires of likes and followers, openly question why Councils need to spend money on things like this. That tells you everything you need to know about the two worlds in collision here, and how social media society is doomed to destroy itself.