IT hasn’t been such a bad year.
Apologies if you have to mop your cornflakes up off the breakfast bar after reading that.
I do know we’ve faced a year of great challenges after a year of great challenges that followed yet another year of great challenges, and that we’re all sick and tired of great challenges.
And I know that the rivers are in flood and will stay that way for a while. I know the city riverfront stinks almost as bad as it will look when the water finally goes down. I know many farmers have lost income through inundation and that many homes have been soaked. I know that recovery will take many months and cost many millions of dollars.
I also know that the COVID-19 pandemic is not over. I know that businesses are nowhere near recovering from the economic ructions the health crisis brought with it and that it’s still hard to get staff. I know that the tourism industry is on its knees. I know that our outdated and under-resourced hospital continues to struggle and that the Victorian government will not build us a new one, and that the seemingly endless GP shortage means many of will have to wait weeks to see a doctor when we need one.
But I still say it hasn’t been such a bad year.
It’s actually been my first full calendar year back in my home town after spending most of my working life in a capital city, and of course as a journalist and photographer with Sunraysia Daily I’ve been a close observer of the ups and downs of life here, covering those floods and that health crisis and those economic woes in my news stories. But there’s been lots of other stories, too.
There was last Easter, for instance. The streets were full of people and fun again after COVID cancellations and didn’t it feel great?
And then we had a full season of footy and netball, sports that remain a social glue in the bush, culminating in a magnificent grand final spectacle at the Mildura Sporting Precinct which, despite its unimaginative name and quite a few teething troubles, is a good facility that will only build its worth as a community asset.
Speaking of the MSP, we had the Kings of Leon concert there. HOW. GOOD. WAS. THAT? If you’d suggested to me as a teenager that we one day might get 10,000 people to a rock concert in Mildura, I would have scoffed. That would have been half the city’s population, and as if a band big enough to pull a crowd like that would come here, anyway.
By the way, that population of about 35,000 in the city is now pushing towards double what it was when I was a kid. The census figures came out this year, too, and showed just how fast we are growing. Did you know that the population of Red Cliffs now tops 6000 and that quiet little Merbein, where I grew up not far from a sign that read ‘Pop. 1800’ for decades, is now home to more than 5000 people?
I mean, it’s obvious people are choosing to live here, choosing to raise their families here and grow their careers and businesses here.
That shouldn’t be a surprise to us, though, should it?
We know this is a great place to live and work and raise kids. We know the air is clean and the sun is warm. We know our rivers are among the greatest natural beauties our nation has to offer (even when they’re a bit overweight, as they are right now).
But we sometimes forget that stuff and get down on ourselves a bit too much, I think. We complain about the disadvantages of our remoteness, the cost of fuel, utilities and other necessities, and of course the long waits to see our doctors. We complain about the council, especially if someone mentions red bins, and we voted out a pretty successful independent state MP because of perceptions, accurate or otherwise, that she was aligned to the dreaded Dan Andrews, who we complain about A LOT.
Some or all of those gripes and whinges might be fair enough and there’s no pretending that life in Mildura is perfect, nor that we will be free of more great challenges in the future. As we get set to flick 2022 into the (red?) bin, though, I think it’s worth remembering that we’ve pushed through the tough times, as we always have, and that we’ll keep doing that in 2023 if we have to.
I’ll probably be writing stories about such things but I know that, again, there’ll be good-news stories, too, and plenty of them. There always is.
Happy new year, Sunraysia. Let’s make it a good one.
