Goondiwindi. Saturday, 6.20pm
Do these people realise what’s going on?
They seem normal enough. There’s a mother with her two kids at the table next to me. With them is an older woman, whom I take to be the mother of the mother – they share a penchant for thin, arched eyebrows. The mother’s mother’s are more startling because her eyebrows are dark brown while her hair is as white as the cotton bolls that, along with fast-food litter, line the roads around here. The children have eyebrows I guess, but they’re hidden behind iPads.
I have driven south from Carnarvon Gorge to this town on the Queensland/New South Wales border. The road was good but the land is sick. My time at Carnarvon Gorge, where farmers and miners have not made their mark, has reminded me that brown rivers and scorched earth is not the way it needs to be.
At another table sit two younger men with an older bloke. They wear blue shirts with logos. One bloke has a laptop computer, which he refers to as he talks crop yield and spary drift to the others. They ignore the screen on the wall where the rugby league is playing.
I’ll have a red wine, I decide, while I’m waiting for dinner. I’ve been drinking beer for a week now. Beer goes with camping – we’ve been camping for ages – but tonight we’re not camping. Tonight, we intrepid adventurers (three adults and two children) have decided that, one day from home, we’re going to sleep in a hotel in Goondiwindi. So, no setting up camp, no making fire, no cooking dinner, no drinking beer – but rather, we’re enjoying the simple country-pub comforts of bangers and mash, a glass of red, football on the big screen, horse racing on another screen, Keno on another, the trots on another…
Three young men with beanies bring their beers to a table under the screen.
‘C’mon Manly!’ says one.
A young woman, hair bunched on top of her head, brings their meals. The blokes flirt, she smiles, places the meals on their table, and returns to the kitchen. The men turn back to the footy.
Do these people realise what’s going on?
I have just driven through their homeland. It’s buggered. Rooted. The creeks are erosion gullies funnelling mud. The land is furrowed, scraped, poisoned and desiccated by corporate farmers with no dirt under their nails, just a keyboard at their fingertips. Since my last visit here, cotton industrialists have cleared and laser-levelled the land until mirages confirm it really is a desert – precious aquifers drained for a wet crop grown in a dry land for a quick buck.
After millennia of sophisticated land management, is this how it ends? Do the people in this dining room realise that their future has been decided in boardrooms of cities they will never visit?
Of course they do. But, apparently, these people have no connection to the land; they are connected only to their screens. Instead of outrage, there is docile compliance. They, like the forests and creeks around them, are collateral damage in the blind pursuit of profit. To object is a social sin. Capitalism brooks no opposition.
Maybe these people believe Jesus or Elon Musk will save them; that they can ditch this place when it is wrung dry, and they’ll be delivered to Heaven or Mars.
Maybe, they think they can live without land or water as long as there’s wi-fi.
Maybe it’s just too frightening to think about.
Manly scores a try, and a cheer goes up from the beanie lads. Eyebrow Mama looks up from her phone and arches even more her arched eyebrows. The kids shimmer in screen light.
The waitress brings me wine.
‘Enjoy,’ she says.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
