There is a story behind every front door, through every window and on the face of every person on the street – if you take the time to notice.
That is something renowned Australian author and psychologist Hugh Mackay considers in much of his social research on what binds or breaks us.
“The state of the nation starts in the streets where we all live, where we choose to connect with neighbours or not, or where we look out for each other or we don’t,” he told AAP.
“The life of the local neighbourhood, the street where you live, is where we shape the kind of society we’re going to become.”
Poet Henry Lawson was thinking much the same way in 1888.
As he sat on the platform of Sydney’s Petersham station on a rainy night, he came up with the beginnings of a verse about the passing faces of the city’s downtrodden.
In Faces in the Street, Lawson wrote of watching labourers and the unemployed walk by his window “drifting past to the beat of weary feet”.
More than a century on, the works of the two beloved Australian writers will come together when Dr Mackay is a special guest at the Henry Lawson Festival in Grenfell, central-west NSW, over the June long weekend.
The goldfields town in which Lawson was born has held a festival in his name for decades and will be celebrating the theme of Faces in the Street this year.
After the region’s long slog through drought, floods and pandemic-induced isolation, Grenfell is putting a new twist on the poem.
“It’s really about what community means,” festival committee president Belinda Power said.
“You realise how important it is to be together, support each other, say hello, smile, or catch up with the people who have left and come back.”
The program features national art, photography and poetry prizes, as well as fireside poetry readings, Cobb and Co rides and woodchopping.
Former mayor Terry Carroll, one of the festival’s early organisers, moved to Grenfell with his wife Deidre nearly 60 years ago, planning a 12-month stint to help relatives set up a pub.
They stayed for the town’s kindness and cohesion.
“In lots of pubs, you see people looking at you as if to say, ‘What the hell are you doing here in my pub?’,” Mr Carroll said.
“But I always made a point that if anyone I didn’t know came in, I’d say ‘How ya goin’, what brings you to Grenfell?’
“They always seemed to appreciate the friendliness of the people.”
Dr Mackay, who wrote of how hard times can be our making in The Kindness Revolution, will give a talk at the local high school on the value of human connection in a changing and unpredictable world.
“If we want our species to survive, the critical quality we need to nurture in ourselves and each other is kindness, compassion, mutual respect, and building social harmony not destroying it,” he said.
Australian Associated Press