A few years ago I was watching a documentary on some city in India.

The British reporter was looking at the conditions that many Indians live under in some of the slums of this city.

Rooms were tiny, space at a premium and luxuries minimal.

Whole families shared a space approximating the size of your lounge room and the electrical systems involved one power socket and a spaghetti of extension cords, often stretching from a neighbour’s house.

The part of this that has stuck with me is that, near the end of the documentary, the reporter made the observation that; for all the physical discomfort and intrusion, the people who lived in these areas were unfailingly happy, gregarious and community minded in a way he rarely saw in Britain.

He alluded to the incredibly unhappy, lonely situation of an old Briton who had died, but whose body had not been discovered for six weeks.

He then mused that, for all its lack of appeal, it was impossible to imagine someone dying alone and lonely in the slum he had visited.

He suggested that perhaps, for all its flaws, there was something we in the west could learn from life in a Indian slum.

I thought of this recently, when a similar juxtaposition showed itself one recent Saturday.

I was settling down to the Saturday paper and was reading an article, the strength of which was about how much should one consider one’s parents during the COVID-19 lockdown?

The author clearly found family connection a trial and was wondering – very publicly – how much they could get away with ignoring their parents. I must admit, I found the whole premise of this to be very sad indeed.

This contrasted with neighbours of mine, who fall into the “parents who are nowhere near as young as they once were” category.

During normal times their house is a revolving door of children and grandchildren coming and going.

Cheerful greetings, fond farewells and expressions of love, pride and gratitude are as common as the sun rising in Narrabri.

During lockdown, the flow has lessened considerably, but I notice (I realise that I am coming across as quite the prying neighbour here!) that still, family members are bringing essentials and just checking to make sure that everything is OK.

I am no health expert, or expert on anything really, but I would be willing to bet that my neighbours are far happier, or to put it in 21st century parlance, have “better mental health outcomes” than the no doubt well paid, highly educated, vastly travelled author of the opinion piece I alluded to before.

That for all the material benefits accrued by a correspondent for a national publication, there was a sadness even pathos, that is conspicuously lacking in the street of Narrabri where I live.

The unprecedented situation, at least since the 1919 Spanish Flu, has further emphasised this strange divide.

As said before we have this international divide and we see the same here in Australia.

People flock to the big cities and are reluctant to live in “the bush” yet here we have, by any fair or reasonable measure, fared far better than our coastal or metropolitan friends.

Now I am not comparing Narrabri to a Calcutta slum, but I don’t think I am going too far to suggest that Narrabri and other western areas are seen as unattractive compared to larger or coastal centres.

And just like India, we have some very important and positive things that may not be obvious, but are no less important for all that.

We here in Narrabri know that the attractions of the larger centres are nowhere near what so many wrongly believe.

Just maybe COVID-19 will mean that more agree with us!

Bill Doyle, The Courier’s occasional guest columnist.

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