8 April

I often post about how culture is invisible to the people living it. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. And that Western culture has no idea of ‘place’. No meaningful connection to the ground under its feet, no groundedness. I met the Project Elevate people in Bathurst last night. They want to make Bathurst’s tourism more premium, to up the ‘spend’ by tourists. Pretty much every country town is doing this now, to survive. With almost no exceptions, if you look at the history of every country town, it began as a place people lived while working some extractive industry (usually agriculture and mining), for the cities. There is no such thing as ‘the country’, what we call that has always just been the resource-extraction arm of city life. You can see it clearly on the map. Nearly all of Australia huddles into a tiny land area, in a few cities, on the coast. Just about all of the country is uninhabited, in any meaningful way. The ‘land’ means nothing to us, except as resources to be extracted. If it meant something to us, we would live there. But we don’t. Those who do live there again are remnants of the old extractive industries. Many love country towns because they provide a city life, but with fewer people. There’s no specific ‘country’ culture to these towns. And so now as the extractive industries die, they try to sell that - the ‘lifestyle’. It’s a type of geographical prostitution. They transform themselves into lifestyle theme parks, with good food and wine and tourist ‘experiences’, to attract bored, cashed-up city people on their days off. Cultures who understand place work it into their culture. Like Aboriginal culture, that many think of as primitive. They didn’t need tourists to survive, they had the land, and the land needed them. It was a mutual relationship, and it wasn’t land as in a paddock to be ploughed or a mine to be dug. It was incorporating all elements of the landscape, all living and non-living things, into the culture itself. The landscape was life itself. You didn’t need a ‘job’ to survive, you didn’t need to sell the landscape to passing tourists. Ask yourself what actual meaningful connection your town and its people have to the landscape they live inside. I guarantee it will be a ‘resource’ at best - land to sell as real estate. Minerals to mine. Ploughed fields to harvest. ‘Sights’ and ‘experiences’ to sell, to tourists. We’re end-stage ‘imperial’ cultures, who only know how to move around and accumulate things, to send back to their cities. All roads lead to Rome. They never ‘come into land’. They’re not grounded. They can’t just BE. When they get bored at home they travel abroad, to continue the accumulation of sights, sounds and resources there.