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Okay, I apologise.
It’s only Australians of a certain vintage who will recognise the title (and they will be singing the incredibly catchy theme tune second time around by now).
Two brothers and their wives set off in the 1970s and 1980s to capture the incredible landscape, flora and fauna of this wonderful land on film. Armed with only low-res cameras, two Land Rovers and a smattering of billy lids (that’s ‘kids’ for the non-Australians and other aliens amongst you), they created their own place in Aussie TV folklore.
If you are British, imagine life in the 70s/80s without Coro, or Brookie. If you are North American similarly imagine no Starsky & Hutch or John William Carson or “It’s a beautiful day in my neighborhood“…
Get the picture? Indelible. Life affirming. As the equally iconic George Negus says,
The Leyland brothers - soil-breaking tellie that showed us parts of this place few of us had ever really seen before
Anyway, I mention all that as an introduction into my excuse for a lack of posts recently.
I have been travelling the heights and depths of South Australia for a really lovely client and so have had very little (i.e. no) internet access.
Which is why the following two stories so touched and inspired to create a post at 1.30am on my return.
Firstly, I read Trevor Cook’s post pointing to an academic saying that Australia ‘really doesn’t get it’ about the internet — not just Web2.0/Social Media, but the internet as a social and technological revolution. Couldn’t agree more.
Then I read where Sir Tim Berners-Lee is concerned that it’s not just Australians who don’t ‘get it’, but the world at large. So true.
Which is where my trans-South Aussie jaunt comes in — finding internet access in other than large metropolitan areas was nigh on impossible. I might have found some dialup access, should I have risked knocking on a few residential front doors, but none of the places I stayed at offered anything remotely like anything internet-flavoured.
For a country that keeps inventing new and cool stuff, it’s a long way to the shop if you want to take part in the 21st century conversation. Which is very, very sad and will only serve to keep rural Australia a backwater and digital ‘have-not’, risking making the rural communities irrelevant in the years to come when most commodities will come from less-expensive overseas labour markets.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Great post Lee - I love the Lleyland Brothers reference (though they were a bit before my vintage - I remember a terrible theme park they started with a big plastic Uluru…).
All I can say is - Yes, Yes, Yes!
Aussie internet access outside the big centres is deplorable. Country folk around the nation are behind where any developed country should be at with broadband.
They’re being locked out of web 2.0 as a result.
I’ve got a lot of mates in the country - courtesy of an agricultural High School and rural University education.
None of them can listen to my podcast. By the time it was downloaded they could feed the chooks, check the dam, shut all the gates and have a yarn at their locoal.
Checking out Second Life would be impossible, and even waiting for a normal web page to download is tedious.
There is a digital divide in this nation - and that’s why I find an argument for allowing greater MSM concentration because of the diversity available on the net laughable.
It’s an issue that should be on the agenda, but sadly isn’t. Where is the National Party on this? They probably don’t realise the internet exists…