By Geoff Wells
Every morning, unless the westerlies are coming in wild, I walk the path around the boat harbour in the small Australian coastal town where I live. The path moves through native trees and shrubs which grow right down to the water’s edge, salt-tolerant. The first section of it is gravelled; then, without fanfare, it mounts a board-walk, built, in an unexpected act of grace, by the local council of a decade ago. Then you walk through the upper branches of the trees themselves, and the birds flash past, streaks of colour and sound.
Underneath the boards the tide floods in; if you look over the railing, and wait, you can make out the shapes of fish–are they mullet? or whiting?–wandering along channels through the trunks of the trees, both living and fallen, into the shadows and out into the pools of sun. Further out in the harbour submerged branches break the surface of the water and hold themselves erect against the wind. Cormorants roost there, their wings outstretched to dry. Pelicans sail and drift beneath them. Ducks flap and call and dive.
Walking every day, within touching distance of the leaves, almost in them, the seasons are very present. The wattles are out in late winter, in clumps of gold; then the white thrusts of the hop bush; and the vibrant red of the callistemon, the pink flowering gums, the fuzzy cream of the tea-trees, and the pollen waterfall of the casuarinas; and through them all the fiery wattle birds swoop and call, and golden honey-eaters spear the flowers, and the little fantails dance before you–just for you, you come to think–from shrub to ground and back again.
Further out, past the rocking boats, through the entrance, is the Bay, and beyond it, out past the reefs that fringe it, the southern ocean, open to the westerlies all the way to Antarctica. You wonder each day how this has become the place where you have been allowed to live.
Not long ago, a handful of generations, this was First Nations country, the country of the Bunganditj people; and that is a story in its own right. On one side it is to be celebrated, for the richness of the oldest living culture, old and deep beyond the imaginings of non-Aboriginal Australians; and on the other, the sombre history of colonisation and dispossession and all that has gone with it, and continues. So we begin, as First Nations people have requested of us, by acknowledging that this lovely place where we live, and work, and write, and care, and love is and has always been the country of the Bunganditj people, who are its traditional owners and custodians; we pay our deep respect to them, and to their elders, past, present, and emerging; and we accept the obligation for recognition and justice which flows from that acknowledgement and which must be met, without delay.
The First Nations people have, with unfathomable generosity, offered, and continue to offer, to us, the non-Aboriginal people of Australia, to walk their country with them; they have invited us onto it; and we accept that offer, with gratitude, to walk and learn. That acknowledgment sits beneath and frames all that happens here, and in every place and community throughout this country; it is never out of sight.
~~~
As I walk with those old voices in my mind, on most days there are others on the path. There are the runners, of various ages and degrees of fitness; some obviously athletes, on a mission; others more ordinary, earnest in exercise; some are young parents, pushing their children in designer vehicles (one can’t very well call them prams) with easy energy, talking together as they whirl past. Others, like me, more advanced in age (to put it in a kindly way) walk carefully, placing their feet; which has, however, the advantage of allowing time to look around; and I notice that the athletes tend to be looking either fixedly ahead or at the digital wrist devices which record their times; physiologically valuable, certainly, but missing, I can’t help thinking, much which repays attention, which nourishes.
Most people, if you stop and talk to them, love the walk. One day not long ago an older man, balancing precariously on two walking sticks, came towards me; an uncle, it turned out, of a friend of mine, indomitable. As he moved closer, he waved one of his sticks to me and called, “Peace and silence reigns! Peace and silence reigns!” So it did; so it does, often.
As with the seasons of trees and bushes, and the winds and storms that sweep in from the sea, so there are seasons of people on the walk. In winter most are people who live here. Many of them I know, and we stop and talk, pleased to be connecting and following the life lines that we follow, individually and together. The population of people who would, if asked, call themselves local, who live in this place and have taken some kind of root here, consists, so the latest census tells us, of about 1500 people; and for most of the winter the walk, and the town, is theirs.
In summer, though, a tide of people sweeps in, up to 20,000 at the height of the season. The walk becomes a river of faces I don’t know, although over the summer months some become more familiar. They overflow the streets, cram into the cafes so that getting one’s morning coffee requires such a degree of urban stamina and chutzpah that those of us with more provincial leanings prefer to step aside and make unconvincing coffees in homes, or in community spaces such as the Men’s Shed, until things calm down again. On the walk they tend to be the runners, working off city energy and focus, perhaps finding it difficult to believe that, for a little while, at least, there is time to walk, even to stop, and watch, and listen.
But it is a mistake to think of the visitors as homogenous. Many of them come from the city, situated as the town is between two of them, but also from towns and settlements and farms across the district, and from regional towns in the neighbouring state, or from other states. There is a steady flow of international people, from Asia and Europe, some, though fewer, from North America.
From time to time 4-wheel drive caravans or motorcycle clubs descend on the town. A good number of them come back every year. For the purposes of discussion about the town and its future, these are all called tourists; by which is meant that they live somewhere else, and are here for a relatively short period of time, during which it is of paramount importance, apparently, to persuade them to part with as much of their discretionary income as is possible. Whether that is the most appropriate way to think about them is problematic, as we will see.
And they are not all visitors, in the outsider sense. Many own houses in and around the town, which they occupy during the holidays and rent out through Airbnb or another online platform for the rest of the year. In retirement they move in and become part of the local population, whose fringes they may have occupied, on and off, in the regular rhythm of work in the city and holidays on the coast, for years.
On the walk, though, we are all together, wherever we came from and whatever has brought us here, in the weather the changeable ocean happens to give us, on this day, with the trees, and the birds, and the air as clean as any on the planet, and the water swirling under our feet, and the Bay and ocean stretching out before us.
~~~
Or so we like to think. Even here, in this place, it’s not so simple. More often, these days, walkers pass me with devices in hand, talking to them, looking at the screens, fingers active, or with headphones fixed and the preoccupied look that speaks of attention somewhere else, somewhere other than here. The place has become unimportant, almost immaterial; daily exercise has to be performed, and if it can be combined with social media connections or work online, then why not? Isn’t that also a valid kind of community activity? I am not, as will become evident, the only one to wonder about these things, to reflect on what it may mean. They could hardly, it is clear, be more central to the questions that we want to ask in this book; questions which in the end are about what it means to be characteristically—or, to use an overused but still largely irreplaceable word, authentically—human, now.
And there are people, even local people, who rarely appear on the walk at all, who are at or beyond the margins. The young–younger than the parents of families, but older than those still at school–are unlikely to make an entrance. In fact, it’s not easy to see them at all: they don’t occupy the cafes, or even walk much in the streets; some of them appear on one of the surfing back beaches; but for much of the time they are invisible, moving, apparently, among the cheaper clusters of the housing stock in the fringes of the town, or in run-down cottages in the country, out of town.
Many are unemployed, often from expected entry to the workforce, and often for long periods of time. They don’t come to community meetings, or join clubs or gatherings, and they are not consulted in community engagement planning initiatives. Their opinions are not sought, nor, if they are ever expressed in some way, attended to seriously. Yet the town belongs to them in a way that is out of reach of all of the rest of us: if they stay around, or come back, they will be here longest.
At the other end of the spectrum are the old. Many of them are on their own; more of these are women, since they tend to outlive their male partners. There are single old men too, and not always well. There are some community structures for them: the community bus which takes them shopping; Meals on Wheels; Probus, or the University of the Third Age (an engaging euphemism). But they are largely disenfranchised, like the young. Their opinions are not often sought, or listened to. They are expected, in the main, to get on with living out their lives. Unless they have the eccentric determination of my friend’s uncle, they don’t make much of an appearance, or a mark–certainly not on the walk.
One could think of an almost endless number of ways in which to think about the people who live here. You could slice them by socioeconomic measures, for example; the wealthy, the less wealthy, the least wealthy. But even there the complexities emerge. There is the old money, tied up with what are called, oddly (and that is another story) the pastoral families; there is the entrepreneurial money of those who are developing this place (‘develop’ carries a weight of assumptions, like ‘reform’); there are the fishermen, who worked in a time when the reefs were full of crayfish that commanded premium prices, and sold out while the going was good; and there is the urban money, the people who have bought property for their holidays, and rent it out the rest of the time.
There are the younger families making their way in trade, holding the place together as plumbers or electricians or mechanics, or, centrally, café owners. Or you could separate out, as indeed they often are, the newcomers of the last decade from the families who have been here across generations and think of themselves as its owners–setting aside in turn the ancient claims of First Nations people. In nearby towns in the district there are groups of refugees and immigrants, from Asia, and Africa, and the Middle East.
~~~
So as I walk, each morning, or sit on the cliffs overlooking the Bay, I find myself thinking about the people with whom I share this place. The collective noun that is used, more often than not, to describe them is ‘the community’. The casual confidence with which the word is used, as though of course everybody knows what it means and to whom it refers and what it brings to mind – just as clearly as one might speak of the weather, or the shops, or the beach – and expect, without a second thought, to be understood clearly, seems to me to be remarkable. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. There are almost as many versions of community as there are people you ask.
For example, in the previous paragraph I have, without thinking, employed one of the long-held assumptions about community: ‘the people with whom I share this place.’ We tend to think and speak of a community as physically, geographically located; in the city, a neighbourhood; in the country, a town or settlement. We automatically use the word ‘local’ with it: the local community, nothing could be more obvious. Can a group of people even claim to be a community if they are not in the same place? Not long ago such a question wouldn’t even have made sense. Today we would say, of course they can, and they do. Online connections of every scale and kind are distributed across the world.
When I see a group of young people standing around together, each on a phone, or a couple sitting over coffee, silently tapping their screens, it is clear that things have changed. Whatever you may think of that development, in human terms, there is no question that the term community is being applied to it, and that community means something quite different today than it did a generation, even a decade, ago.
Has it replaced the old way of thinking about community, or does it sit alongside? Is it a more extended idea of community, or has it in some way contracted? Is it now a hybrid term; or is it transitional, perhaps, on the way out altogether? Stubbornly, if you ask, here, in the country, place still matters to people, and that is part of our conversation.
~~~
The great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—the last of his kind, some would say—famously proposed that ‘meaning is use’. His supporting examples were drawn from ordinary speech, such as is used, he thought, by bricklayers on site.1
So working with how we use the term every day seems to be a good strategy for understanding it better. But community is a term that is also used in looser contexts. You will hear it in the policy debates and reports aired on media: ‘the community won’t put up with it’, ‘the community needs to step up’, ‘the community came together’, and so on. It occurs in the documents of government, legislation, regulation, and guidance. Local government documents, for example, routinely recommend, even require, ‘community engagement’, ‘community consultation’.
But it is far from clear just what activity is meant by this, and, particularly, who is included in it. I’s still largely an optional extra, desirable in some form or other, but not required, and certainly not specified. The one thing that is common to all these contexts is the assumption that everyone knows what community means — an assumption which is rarely questioned.
Yet if the assumption is unfounded — if on closer inspection we are found to be using the term in different ways, even radically different ways — then that confusion matters to peoples’ lives. It matters because the discourse about society and its practical reach is central to our common living. It matters by virtue of negative space: the word is used, but because of its vagueness and ambiguity it can’t be carried through with certainty to clear, agreed, practical actions. It becomes a placeholder for something undefined, or an enabler for something else, or it simply ticks that particular box — after a fashion. This retreat from shared meaning and action has real-world consequences for real people and their families. It matters.
In recent times, perhaps the last decade, ‘community’ has turned up in a related cluster of ideas in social thought and practice. These usually come as compound words: community-based, community-led, community-owned. The idea of these terms seems to be to move the social principles and actions away from the external world of government, or the economy — to something closer to home. It looks to start with people themselves, where they are, creatively making their own worlds, rather than with the forces or frameworks that are said to act on them.
Community is, on this view, active, not passive. Words such as agency and ownership and capability go along with it. Strategies of common responsibilities and decision-making, collectively grouped under the term deliberative governance, have grown out of it. There is much to recommend this view, as we will indeed document in this book. But the fact remains that even there, where community has been brought unambiguously into the foreground, where it has even become the foundation of thinking about our life together, the word is still largely assumed and unexamined. That seems to me to be puzzling, and challenging: how can we live and work together if we’re not sure who we are and what we’re talking about?
~~~
Beyond that is the question, in turn, of whether the local, with its people, is relevant in our times. We think of the community as inherently local, with concerns that are confined more or less to the people who live there, in that place. Yet we are told that overwhelmingly the challenges we face are global in scale. The interconnections of the global economy are a commonplace, for at least the past decades. The gap between the excessively wealthy nations and those still mired in poverty seems only to widen, with all its appalling consequences.
The sixth wave of extinction, permanent loss of global biodiversity, the global loss of the forests, and so on is documented with wrenching regularity. Of course, as we read every day, there is climate change and its multi-fold impacts–nothing more compelling and global, and urgent, than that. And, as if we needed reminding, the pandemic, which drove home our global identity in an utterly uncompromising and tragic way. So, it might be asked, in the face of these global hurricanes, why are we thinking about community?
One answer to that question comes from the very number and scale of these global challenges. There seem to be few effective global institutions capable of meeting them: national sovereignty prevails, even over the collective interventions needed to shield nations from them; as witness the relative impotence of successive UN Climate Change conferences. Top-down cooperation works only at times, and only in issues which are less controversial. As soon as it becomes unduly difficult, cooperation sinks under the weight of sovereignty.
The treatment of less developed nations during the recent pandemic has been another example, with vaccinations and their underlying technology hoarded or patented, ethically unconscionable and dangerous for everyone. The same could be said of all the global challenges. Perhaps, then, on these grounds alone, it’s worth looking again to the local, building from the bottom of the hierarchy.
A simpler view is that community matters because communities have always been there, across space and time, in all countries and places, throughout history and prehistory; even through deep time; as, incomparably, for Australia’s own First Nations peoples, across more than 60,000 years.2
Communities have been the primary form of social organisation of human populations until literally the last few decades, when urban agglomerations have surged. A century ago, about 10 percent of the world’s population lived in cities; now the figure is 50 percent, and accelerating. But even there, as Jane Jacobs showed us, people who live in American cities have spontaneously identified with neighborhoods and with the communities that go with them. They have been at the centre of city life, the anchors around which the daily tides of people swing and surge.3 Wendell Berry, a self-styled agrarian, has been documenting and advocating for American rural communities for more than six decades.4 The idea of community remains the most common and the most natural way to speak of living together in Australia’s cities and country.5
The Covid pandemic brought the idea of community into urgent focus everywhere, not least in Australia. Over weeks, sometimes months, of enforced lockdowns, the connections with others, all the networks and relationships that we live without a second thought, peremptorily evaporated. Social isolation, which had been largely a sad condition of the margins, moved into the centre. The most casual of contacts with others now came wrapped in fear. Faces became eyes above masks; when the masks came off, people found it confronting to see again what lay under them. The shock has been far-reaching; but how far is still almost completely unknown. It is only now being recognised as something critical; its mapping has just begun.6 For most people the loss or fracturing of these relationships, from family to community, runs deep. The scenes of airport reunions told their own stories.
~~~
So if ever there was a time to examine the roots of community, it is now. The questions are urgent, even critical, and multiple. What is the idea of community, actually, and to whom? What sits at its heart? How is it to be preserved? How does it adapt to change, or challenge? How is its resilience built and its capabilities best shaped and developed? Most importantly, who is going to provide answers to these questions, and on what authority? Does anything valuable of the past ideas of community remain to be taken forward? Has the idea of community been irrevocably changed by the modern ills of pandemic, and the online life into which we have been impelled?
The truth is that few convincing answers to these questions are to be found in either the academic or professional literature, or in professional social practice; and now they are being reframed all over again, perhaps beyond recognition. There is no reason why we shouldn’t think it through, for ourselves. We can draw on what others have thought and written, if we find it useful; they can walk with us in the conversation, but we don’t have to defer to them. Community is not an idea that is owned by those who have taken it as an object of study. It is something that is lived, by all of us. In that sense, we are all, if you like, experts in community. Our experience has a real value; it comes first. Other work can cluster around it, if it wishes to.
On the individual front, we need go no further than our own thoughts, feelings, and stories. There is richness in our lives together which we rarely have time to consider or to capture. The collective view is more elusive, as it must be, given the variety of human experience. The idea of community in First Nations Australia, for example, has its own unique resonance and reach. Across rural Australia the experiences of living together is different from place to place, as it is also in the city. Do ideas about community follow these divides? We don’t need anyone else to work this through. We can do it ourselves; and, in this book at least, we will.
I have in mind slow conversations: with ourselves, with our friends, with those around us, connected to us; and with the wider community of those who have written about community, in one way or another. Listening has a lot to do with the making of community, as with the community of those thinking about these things, being open to the other, even if puzzling or confronting or strange.7 Making judgements doesn’t have much to do with it; relationships don’t grow well in that freezing wind.
In the end, what are we seeking with this kind of work? It is work, after all, with all its interest and relevance to our lives. What is to make it worthwhile? Perhaps we could say: understanding; insight; recognition; valuing; sympathy; even compassion; in the end, good actions, which are ours, owned by us. It’s worth seeing what in our lives together is at the centre, and to be valued; how it’s put together, made, and built up; and how it’s changing, from inside and outside. Only then, perhaps, can we see how it is to be protected and strengthened, even as it evolves to meet these perilous times. Walk with me, to talk, if you will.
_______________________________________
1Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical investigations, eds G Anscombe, P. Hacker, and J. Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK, 2009, first published 1953, 4th edn, 43. Sandra Laugier, following Wittgenstein and drawing on Stanley Cavell, has written about the importance of ordinary language in thinking about how we live together, the ethics of care. S Laugier, Ordinary realism in ethics, in eds F Vosman, A Baart, and J Hoffman, The Ethics of Care: the state of the art, Peeters Publishers, Leuven, Belgium, 2021, 113-136.
2M Neale and L Kelly, Songlines: the power and the promise, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne, 2020.
3J Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961.
4W Berry, Another Turn of the Crank, Counterpoint Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995.
5E Farrelly, Killing Sydney, Pan Macmillan, Sydney 2021. G Chan, G, Rusted off: why country Australia is fed up, Penguin Random House, Southbank, Melbourne, 2018.
6H Alizadeh, A Sharifi, S Damanbagh, H Nazarnia, and M Nazarnia, ‘Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the social sphere and lessons for crisis management: a literature review’, Natural Hazards, 2023, 117(3):2139-2164, doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05959-2.
7Michelle Boulous Walker has written a luminous book about these kinds of slow conversations and slow readings, and what makes them work: M Boulous Walker, Slow philosophy: reading against the institution, Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2016. As I will explore, I have drawn largely on her ideas in framing these thoughts.
This presentation is made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Leave a Reply