When was the last time anyone went days being out of phone and internet range? A day even. I did, last week. Nearly five glorious days of it. This isn’t a redemptive tale of a recovering phone addict (although it absolutely could be). No, this is a story of what struck me when I emerged back into the real world, like a wobbly newborn brumby coming out of the scrub.
While I was gloriously incommunicado riding horses in the Snowy Mountains, Princess Diana’s second son and his actress wife briefly interrupted their anguished quest for privacy by airing their grubby laundry and laying bare their injured egos before the world’s media.
It struck me how this couple, privileged, tin-eared and much aggrieved, presented as somewhat of a metaphor for many in their generation and those following. A cohort who’ve been coddled, placated and told that hurt feelings and differing views are the same as physical violence. Who carry a palpable disdain for values and ethics that gave them everything, including the right to wallow in self-pity. Who seemingly know the value of, and the worth of, nothing.
Plenty have dissected this interview, and that is not what I’m here for. I want to talk about what it represents more broadly. I want to talk about how, after a week in the company of some frankly outstanding young people who unwittingly carried the kind of values anyone would be proud of, it struck me that there just might be a cure for at least some of our sociocultural malaise.
Put simply, it’s the bush. Our own back yard. Let me explain.
Two young men work for the company I went riding with. They’re 18 and 19. Exceptional. Mature beyond their years. Responsible. Bloody hard working. Engaging and interested in the world around them. Future-focused. Grateful — and on this point, that’s not just a throwaway line. Their language, their conversation, was littered with expressions of thankfulness.
They are highly capable horsemen. Trust me when you’re nearly three hours by horseback over rugged country to the nearest camp (let alone town) you want to know you’re in the safest of hands.
The responsibility they carried was immense, especially in this day and age of litigation. Especially when you’re responsible for city folk like me. I know a bit about both of their stories, and without sharing personal info, neither come from money nor grew up in the gingerbread house. Life has been tough and loving in equal measure. Life has given them rock-solid values, and on spending so much time with them I began to understand why some of Australia’s most prestigious schools send their students bush for a year.
Why, despite all their money, their privilege, their incredible inner-city and blue-chip suburban real estate, they send teenagers to the bush in the hope they’ll learn something they know can’t be learned anywhere else. To places like Timbertop in rural Victoria. They’re looking for the kind of emotional resilience and personal strength that can come only from the kind of challenges they won’t get at home playing Fortnite or ordering from Uber Eats. Don’t get me wrong, I know that the kids who get sent to these rural campuses aren’t slumming it in a swag and cooking their brekky on a fire, but what it says to me is that educators know there’s something unique about the kind of values that can’t be learned anywhere else. The permanency of the kind of values that rural Australia is famous for. That all Australians should covet.
In Australia, we celebrate the bush when it suits us. We still love The Man From Snowy River. We celebrated when Andrew Forrest brought the iconic RM Williams brand back into Australian hands. We’ll all belt out Waltzing Matilda when we’ve had one too many at the cricket.
As a nation, we hold up the bush and its unique values when it’s convenient, but concurrently allow them to be derided in the melee of 2021 political discourse, usually by inner-city activists who rarely leave the CBD. One of the impacts of COVID-19 has been a regional population boom, as hordes of folk shun the city and wise up to what life in regional Australia has to offer.
I left the week away thinking, why aren’t all teenagers sent to the bush for at least six months of a school year, or at least given the option to do so? What could that look like? Imagine the impact socially, educationally.
Yes, times change. But values don’t. And it blows my mind that we are prepared to coddle a generation, tell them that feelings are fact, and yet too often point the finger at regional Australia for being undercooked and behind the times.
Sure, there are plenty of things you can’t get in the bush that are at our fingertips in the city, but solid values aren’t one of them.
Gemma Tognini is executive director of GT Communications.
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