Building community spirit one step and one book at a time

What would a pungent bulb-eating mansplainer know about living well?

IT’S five years since former prime minister Tony Abbott ate a raw onion, brown skin and all, while campaigning for re-election in the state’s north.

Now that Great Patriot Abbott no longer has skin in the game, it’s clear that #oniongate is his greatest legacy. The memes still crack me up.

But wait! Stop the boats! I’ve remembered another highlight of the Abbott years. The Tango Avenue street-library video.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” the former PM says, standing beside a suburban book-lending box during his unsuccessful campaign to hold onto his Sydney seat last year.

“You read a book, you put it in here and you take a book out.”

Thanks for explaining that, Tony, I needed the refresher.

I laughed out loud when I came across a meme of the same box with a huge brown onion superimposed over it and Abbott saying “I’ve never seen anything like this before”.

Last Saturday, I was walking to the local shop – maybe to buy onions, maybe not (I need to keep some things private, people) ¬ when I stopped to browse at a street library.

Community artist Sheree Martin at a community street library in West Hobart.
Picture: FIONA HARDING

I found a book by Rebecca Solnit, the feminist writer whose 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me spawned the term mansplaining.

I love that word. I’ll tell you why another day. I need to cut to the chase – something mansplainers find it hard to do – because this is not to be a polemic on male condescension.

It is to be a reflection on walking as a way of connecting with people.

I feel as if I’m in Zombieville in the ’hood when I pass someone walking towards me wearing headphones and/or failing to make eye contact.

It seems as rude to block or fail to issue salutations on your local streets as it is to bring a mobile phone to a dinner table – and a lot weirder.

A pandemic of loneliness is upon western society. Even if we are not personally feeling alone in ways we do not wish to, it is life-affirming to acknowledge others we meet along our path, especially when foot traffic is minimal.

When people look at the ground or the vague mid-distance, as they so often do when they are plugged in, they miss a fleeting moment of connection.

It is the subtlest exchange, yet an accumulation of such moments enhances our sense of wellbeing and belonging. Do we even exist unseen?

Plenty of people wax lyrical about walking in nature, but a walk to the shop can be just as enriching and mood-altering because of the community connections it reinforces.

When a baby smiles at me from a pram or pack, I wouldn’t be dead for quids.

When an elderly person gives me the time of day, I feel a rush of care for them and a surge of love for my own elders.

Seeing a familiar smiling face deepens my sense of home.

Seven years ago I saw the most divine little dog on a walk and I asked the owners where I could get one – and the rest is history. Yes, that was me with my toy poodle fossicking in the people’s library this time last week.

Where I live, a walk to the shop is also a walk in nature. Many of the gardens are well-loved and tended.

A baby’s smile can put a spring in your step as surely as a flush of Badgers Wood Weeping Cherry Blossom. Picture: STUART MILLIGAN

At this time of year, their flourishing beauty and scent puts a spring in my step. Much of what I read about walking refers to an inward journey. Typically, it’s by a writer who has had an early session at their desk before heading out to wrestle with undeveloped ideas - or to give themselves a mental break from the page.

Less is written about the outward focus walking enables. Walking is exercise, therapy, ritual, meditation, pilgrimage, protest, escape and more, but it’s also a way of reweaving the social fabric where it may have begun to fray.

I have mentioned maintenance before in this column. Gardening is a metaphor for it, but it’s nurturing of connections not plants on my mind.

In Tasmania, our social fabric remains strong at this uncertain time.

Our cities are small, we live on an island and so far we have escaped the brunt of COVID-19. These are inherent advantages at a time when so many people elsewhere feel disconnected from themselves, others, society and core values.

Every time we smile, nod or sing out good morning on a neighbourhood walk, we are doing some of that essential maintenance.

I never thought I’d say this, but Tony Abbott was right about one thing. Community street libraries, he said in the Tango Ave video, are a great example of building social capital.

I almost forgot to say, that Rebecca Solnit paperback in the box was Wanderlust, a book about walking and its shifting cultural significance.

Serendipity is just a stroll away.
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