12 October

I’ve posted a few times about how country towns are doomed when the extractive industries that founded them (mostly mining and farming) leave. This article details the calamitous stats. There is no such thing as the ‘country’, it’s just the resources arm of cities. Most try to become tourist destinations as a last gasp attempt to survive, which only turns them into frozen-in-time theme parks for bored city dwellers looking for a weekend away. And/or they gentrify, becoming cheaper versions of the rich leafy suburbs in cities, hoping to attract hipsters. But hipsters don’t create anything, except coffee, $25 hamburgers and haircuts. As remnant imperial cultures, we don’t inhabit space. We don’t inhabit the landscape, we live on it, not in it. It’s a ‘resource’, nothing more. When the resource is exhausted, our towns disappear too.