Where I live, where I choose to live, where thankfully my presence is tolerated, would be described, if this was America, as ‘backwoods’. There are five commas in that opening sentence, and that’s the sentence I’ve really thought about. So we are possibly not in snappy, easy to read magazine territory. There may not even be pictures. My advice would be find something simpler somewhere else in the publication because that opening sentence is like a beacon of light compared to the structure of the article. Still here? OK, let’s press on. To recap:

I live in hillbilly country, for better or worse.

Randy Newman wrote a song one time that opened with the lines “We talk real funny down here, we drink too much and we laugh too loud” and there you have both a description of where I live, and why I live here. There is plenty of elbow room. Many are crazy, hardly anyone gets hurt. There is a small population spread across a glacial, mountainous island. It is hard enough to cut a road through to a lot of it – and a road is your most basic communication pathway – so much of the information revolution has not happened here. Much of it won’t, because of the technical difficulties, and the lack of any possible economic gain.

We know you have it though. We are not so far away that we can’t see you, mainland Australia, and your smart phones and internet–that’s-faster–than–a–pigeon. We can see the back of you as you march into the future. Confusingly, because we are in the same temporal zone, you don’t get further away and the sight of you marching into a future that we can’t see looks exactly like you’re trampling your perfectly good present into the dirt.

So I live in a place where we still make our own fun. In fact we make most of our own everything, but let’s settle on fun for now. We get our good duds on and go visit the neighbours, small groups of people gather to play appalling music (in private mostly thanks to modesty and the threat of violence) and football exists at a very local level.

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