Themes: Community

In Denmark I live in a cul de sac where the age of the 20 or so residents ranges from nine weeks (we have two babies in the street) to ninety years (we have two nonagenarians!). When people are on holiday, we watch each other's houses, water each other's plants, empty each other's mailboxes. Twice a year, Easter and late summer, we get together for street parties. When my wife and I had to go away recently for a few days and leave our teenage son on his own, we knew that if anything happened he could knock on any of the neighbour's doors for help and he'd get it.
If you're reading this and thinking, 'would never happen here', then try organising a street party and see what happens, then decide.
We are herd animals. We thrive in hives. We flock together in families, in football clubs, on media we call social for exactly that reason. Why?
A clear reason is the age-old adage that we stand stronger together. Like arctic penguins huddled against a killer storm, we can be picked off if we stand alone, but we can get through almost anything together.
In Taking Tom Murray Home, a family is thrown off its farm, and the community rallies around them. It doesn't always take a tragedy for this sense of community to emerge, but tragedies bring the herd together like nothing else: bushfires, floods, storms, funerals.
And the way we do it in Australia is just so very Australian. It's done quietly. Without fanfare. It's almost assumed. We pitch in. We dig deep. We turn up. We don't expect praise. We just get it done because we always have, and that's who we are. If you think I'm romanticising, and the world just isn't like that anymore, I can point you to a hundred different proofs that it is, but I really like this one: look at how our different religious communities back each other up when one of them is attacked: christians defending muslims, muslims backing jews, jews supporting muslims. See the example in the link.
Another, more personal example, will always stick in my mind. As a journalist covering the Ash Wednesday bushfires I wrote a story called 'the heroes of Yarrabee road'. It was about a couple of guys who braved flame and fire to help evacuate people who had been trapped on Yarabee road in the Adelaide Hills by the speed of the blaze, and completely trashed the classic Holden ute they were restoring, getting their neighbours to safety when they could have just made a run for it themselves. 
But they wouldn't let me use their real names, and they never got a medal, because in typical Australian fashion they said, 'anyone would have done the same.'
Tom Murray's widow could have driven her horse and carriage and coffin to Melbourne on her own and might have had the same impact. But I couldn't for a minute imagine a scenario where she would have decided to do that, and others would not have joined in. Most of the people who join her in the novel are older (you might have noticed that), partly because they have the time, but also because they've lived through enough to know that alone with your kids with a coffin on a highway is not a place you want to be.  Surrounded by friends, neighbours and fellow travellers is.
I know this is no radical new thought, but to me it's one of the best parts of human nature (or animal nature?) and something I definitely wanted to play on in Taking Tom Murray Home.