For the last couple of days, I have been helping friends move house. We have been travelling backwards and forwards with truckloads of all sorts of pot plants, furniture and miscellaneous farm equipment. We were doing long, hot days with lots of lifting, shoving and pushing, but I was enjoying every minute of it as I always enjoy spending time with friends. I started to think about how your friendships create the strands that are used to build the social fabric of our communities.
How many of our community groups and events are based around friendship and fellowship? For many years, I have been actively involved in the Mitchell show and it takes a good solid week out of my time to prepare, run and clean up after. They are long, tiring days and I don’t receive a cent for my trouble. It’s not unique to me or to the show; it’s like so many other people who do so much for so many other community groups and events. We do it because it brings us joy, we laugh and joke with our friends and at the end we all enjoy the event and the time spent together.
You could have the most tip-top community facilities, activities and services, but without a cohesive community spirit, you will still find your community dysfunctional. One of the often mentioned issues in some of the Central Queensland mining towns is that of the lack of community spirit leads to any number of social issues such as alcoholism, drugs and many social crimes.
We need to remember this when we are planning our communities and planning for future development. The MOST important thing is to maintain a high level of community spirit. What is the point of building well designed communities, replete with all the required services and facilities, if you have no social fabric. How hard would it be to live in a town when no-one else wants to be part of it?
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